Why Simplifying Your Figures Makes Drawing So Much Easier

If you’ve ever tried to draw figures from imagination you know how deceptive it is. You see artists like Kim Jung Gi making it look effortless… Then you pick up your pen and your brain immediately hits the emergency brakes.

Why does this happen?
Why can others draw from imagination while most of us freeze?

It’s not talent.
It’s not even anatomy.
It’s how you approach learning to draw.

Most beginners take a result-driven approach.
You focus on what the drawing should look like - muscles, folds, cool poses, fancy lines.
You copy KJG or animations on Instagram, post it, get a few likes, feel good for a minute…
But when you try inventing something yourself, everything collapses.

The alternative is a process-driven approach.
And this is where simplifying comes in.

What is simplifying?

Simplifying means stripping something down to one idea so your brain can actually understand it.

Take this drawing by Kim Jung Gi. It looks simple, right? But inside it he’s juggling:

• form

• gesture

• perspective

• anatomy

• clothing

• storytelling

• composition

Most beginners try to copy all of these at once. And when we draw something from imagination,
we expect to use these skills like the people who spent years mastering them.

No wonder you freeze - your brain is overloaded.

How Simplifying Helps

By simplifying the body into basic forms — boxes and cylinders — you create a mannequin.
You turn a complex figure into something clear and buildable.

The mannequin shows you the underlying structure: how the torso tilts, how the limbs angle, how the gesture flows.

It looks like this:

It’s like stepping inside the artist’s head.
You’re learning how they think, not just what they draw.

And once you can pose the mannequin in different angles, you’re already halfway to drawing figures from imagination.

That is the entire point of a process-driven approach.

Why simplifying actually works

Let me be honest - I’ve done more master copies than I can count.
And I know that dopamine rush when your drawing looks good.

But every time I tried drawing something from imagination, my brain went:
“Nope. Too much. Shutting down.”

Then I discovered Tom Fox.
He did something similar to Kim Jung Gi… just simpler.

Made by Tom Fox

I reached out and asked what he did.
He said, “Just draw tons of mannequins.”

So I did - and made stuff like this:

This taught me something important:
When I stopped chasing nice results and started deconstructing drawings, everything changed.

How your brain learns (why simplification is non-negotiable)

Your brain is an incredible learning machine.
It’s kept us alive for thousands of years — without it we’d still be running toward fires instead of away from them.

But even the best learning machine has rules.

Your brain can only learn new information if two things happen:

1. Low cognitive load

A 2010 study by Nelson Cowan found that our working memory can only hold 3–5 chunks of information at once.

To put that in perspective:
a human figure in a dynamic pose has hundreds of forms, angles and relationships - easily over a thousand “chunks.”

So of course your brain slams the brakes.

Simplifying reduces the chunks, which makes it easier for your brain to digest and store the information.

2. Clear pattern recognition

Your brain learns by spotting patterns and repeating them.
Simple shapes - boxes, cylinders, spheres - are much easier for your brain to rotate, match, manipulate and reuse than anatomy.

If you want your brain to turn outside information (reference) into inside knowledge (memory), you have to lower the complexity long enough for learning to happen.

No one learns by juggling ten things at once.
Not me, not you, not even the artists you admire.

How to simplify

Instead of overloading your brain, make learning easy by focusing on one thing at a time.

There are two main ways to do this:

1. Study a fundamental

Spend a few days focusing on one fundamental - for example, perspective.
Draw grids. Fill them with boxes. Repeat.

It’s boring, yes…
But you will get better at placing things in space.
That skill transfers instantly into drawing from imagination.

Most online art courses are built this way:
zoom in on one fundamental → practice → improve → apply.

2. Slowly increase the complexity of your figure

This is my favourite method and it ties directly to simplifying the human body into a mannequin.

You start with a simple figure - even a 2D stick figure - and apply one fundamental (like gesture) until you can draw it from imagination.

When that gets easier, you increase the complexity or add another fundamental, like perspective or form.

You’re layering fundamentals one by one, letting your brain understand them on a simple figure before moving on to harder ones.

With time, you can increase the complexity even more.
It’s the method I use in my course DFFI – Drawing Figures From Imagination.

Underneath you’ll see a couple of figures you can use for this method:

Then take any reference you like and translate the pose into one of these figures. Once you feel comfortable drawing it, start inventing poses using the same figure.

When that becomes easy, you can move to a more complex figure - or even add anatomy.

Wrapping up - simple first, complex later

If you struggle to draw from imagination, you’re not lacking talent.
You’re just giving your brain too much too soon.

Simplify.
Focus on the process.
Build your figures like little construction toys.
Let your brain learn instead of panic.

Once the foundation clicks, everything becomes easier —
pose design, anatomy, clothing, storytelling…

It all starts to slot into place.

This is how I learned.
This is how my students learn.
And this is how you can learn too.