Landmark identification
Seeing key anchor points on your subject so you can place, align, and measure everything else against them.
What it is
Landmarks are clear, repeatable points on your subject you can aim at: the corner of an eye, the tip of the nose, the widest point of a ribcage, the knob of a wrist bone. In a still life, it might be the highest point of a bottle, the corner where two boxes meet, or the point where an ellipse touches a table's edge.
Using landmarks means you don't just "sort of" place things — you decide which points matter, mark them lightly, then check everything else against them. To draw a head, first set the top of the skull, bottom of the chin, corners of the jaw, and tilt of the brow, then hang the smaller shapes off those anchors instead of guessing each feature in isolation.
In practice, you hop from landmark to landmark: the corner of the mouth lines up horizontally with the pupil, or the highest point of a shoulder sits halfway between two other marks. Your block-in becomes a network of linked points, not a pile of unrelated marks.
Why it matters
Without clear landmarks, your drawing drifts: features creep higher or lower, angles sag, and proportions only look right until you check them against the reference. You end up constantly erasing and nudging because nothing has a fixed relationship to anything else. Use landmarks and placement gets faster and more accurate — complex forms feel buildable, and even loose sketches hold up as you add detail.
You can check it when
- ✓You can point to specific, repeatable spots on your subject (like "outer brow corner" or "widest hip point") and place those first in your block-in.
- ✓You can explain any new point's location by how it lines up with existing landmarks (for example, "this sits directly under that" or "this angle points back to that corner").
- ✓Your drawings stay in proportion as you refine from simple to complex — major features don't drift because their landmarks were fixed from the start.
- ✓In timed studies, you can drop in a few key landmarks and your rough drawing already captures the subject's size, tilt, and placement on the page.