Look through a portfolio and count how many figures are facing away. In most cases the answer is very few, and the reason is straightforward: backs are less practised than fronts, and artists arrange poses to avoid what they cannot draw. That avoidance restricts staging in ways that accumulate across a project.
The back is also more learnable than it looks. It has a small number of landmarks and one moving system, and an afternoon spent on it produces a permanent improvement, which is unusually good value in figure drawing.
The basic landmarks
Working down: the seventh neck vertebra, which sticks out at the base of the neck; the two shoulder blades; the long groove of the spine, which is a groove rather than a ridge across the middle of the back; and the two dimples above the pelvis where the sacrum sits.
Those five landmarks locate everything else. Plotting them first, before any contour, gives the back a structure to hang on, which is the same constructive priority described in the piece on what improves figure drawing.
The shoulder blades move
The single most useful fact about the back is that the shoulder blades are not fixed. They slide across the ribcage, rotate, and tilt depending on where the arm is, and their position changes the entire surface. An arm raised overhead rotates the blade dramatically; an arm reaching forward slides it outward.
Drawing them in a fixed position regardless of arm placement is the commonest error, and it produces backs that look correct in one pose and wrong in every other. Learning the four or five main positions covers nearly everything that comes up.
The spine is a groove
In most bodies at rest the spine sits in a valley between the muscles either side, not as a raised line. Drawing it as a ridge produces a distinctly bony look that only appears in specific poses or builds, and it is one of those errors that reads as wrong without being identifiable.
How deep the groove is varies with posture and build, and it changes along its length, becoming shallower toward the neck. Watching how the shadow sits in it is the fastest way to understand it, which is where the terminator behaviour in the piece on skin becomes useful.
The back in intimate work
Turned-away figures are common in this material and they carry a particular quality: a back conceals expression, which places the emotional weight on posture instead. That can be exactly what a scene needs, and it can also remove the face at a moment when its presence mattered.
So the choice should be deliberate rather than driven by what is easier to draw. The framing considerations are the same as those in the piece on visible consent: a face turned away removes a channel, and the composition has to supply what it removed.
Light across a back
A back is a large, relatively simple surface with a few strong forms, which makes it one of the best places in the figure to show off lighting. A single raking light across it describes the blades, the groove and the ribcage in one stroke, and reads as accomplished for very little work.
It is also unforgiving, since a large simple surface has nowhere to hide a structural mistake. Getting the landmarks right first is what makes the lighting pay off rather than exposing an error.
Practising it specifically
Draw ten backs with the arms in different positions and the improvement is immediate, because the variable being learned is isolated. Most people can reach competence here far faster than with hands or feet, since there are fewer parts and they move as a system.
Adding backs to a regular practice rotation prevents the avoidance from re-establishing itself, which it otherwise does within a few months of not drawing them.
Learning the side you keep avoiding
Plot the five landmarks, learn the blade positions for the main arm placements, draw the spine as a groove, use raking light to describe it, and practise with the arms moving. An afternoon, and it opens up a whole category of staging that was previously off limits.
Characters here are fictional and unmistakably adult, as set out in the reader agreement.