28-Day Drawing Challenge: Anatomy for Illustration and Comics

1. Introduction: One of the things that I love drawing most is people, but anatomy is one of those subjects that is really complicated. This class is about taking all of that complicated stuff and breaking it down to the basics. I'm not even going to use complicated muscle terminology you're not already familiar with, like shoulder and quadrant. I think is quadrant on top or underneath? See, I don't even know, and you don't have to. Hi everyone. I'm Jazza, I'm a YouTuber, content creator, author, animator, illustrator, and decimator of cool classes on Skillshare. This class is for beginning and intermediate artists looking to solidify their understanding in how to depict human anatomy. Now while on Barton, no means an expert. You don't have to be to have a solid foundational understanding of this stuff. I'm going to take you through my three-step process of drawing human anatomy. Starting with the blocking process, then how we shape the anatomy and the structure, and then finally, defining or choosing what is visible out of the structures that you've built. I'm going to be approaching different core groups of muscles by limb and section. But you'll also notice I'm dividing by form and function. I'm so very wordy and it might sound complicated, but trust me, it's my goal to make all of this as simple and enjoyable to learn as possible. I would highly encourage you to share your progress and your projects with the class. I'm very excited for this one, and I know you're going to love it. I'll see you soon. 2. Materials & References: Really told me about getting started is a bit of a conversation about materials which we'll get to. But first and foremost, references. You're drawing the human body or at least the muscle structures and the barns and proportions underneath what will become your illustrations of the human body. What you don't want or need is over complicated charts with muscle names, with every tendon visible. What do we got here? We've got the pectoralis major vastus medialis. You don't need that. You don't need to know how to draw the vastus medialis. Well no, that's not true. You need to know how to draw it, but you don't need to know what it's called or the name of what it's connected to. There's no need to get bogged down in the complexity. Let's start with simplicity. This is the reference. I think he is actually pretty good. You'll notice it has about the same level of detail, but because it's a 3D model and its shown on different angles. It's much easier to understand, especially as you show the different angles and you can zoom into the different sections to spot and identify the core muscle groups. But it's also as complicated as you need to go. At the end of the day it's also just as important to understand what it ends up looking like. I highly recommend finding great references in human photography. I mentioned this because through this class I'm going to be referring to an anatomy photo reference pack that I made a few years ago with these photos of a few models, male and female, that show fairly physically fit people in a fairly generic body type and size. Unless you're going into extremes in comic book styles like drawing the Hulk characters. You're not going to need to show more than you actually see on the human body. Keep an eye out for some great simple anatomy references of actual people, be they generic or more specifically for anatomy reference, and then use references in real life. Some of you will have taken or heard of life drawing classes. This is a great way to see real people in person or you can do virtual live drawing classes, which is all about drawing the human form, learning that shape, learning anatomy. Last but not least, you best references is sometimes yourself. You have body. When we go into talking about function of muscles, you actually have those muscles. If you're holding something and you want to know what the shapes will look like. You can feel where the muscles are stretched and more relaxed, and where they're constricted and doing the work to create that function. That's pretty much where we need a cover when it comes to references. When it comes to materials, you really don't need a lot to get started and to follow along with this class, a pencil and eraser is fine. You'll notice actually, I do a lot of my blocking with a colored pencil, just a light blue. I do this because it helps me to visually understand the difference between my blocking and then the anatomy shaping I do on top with the pencil. I'm also hoping that's helpful to you to see the differences between those. Then after I do my line work with something a little darker to show the interconnected muscle structures. I maybe using some colored pencils just to create a visual distinction between the muscle groups. There's no rhyme or reason as to which color goes where. It's just a choice I make to help you understand the difference between where the shoulder is, where the bicep is, the tricep is, and so on. Last but not least, you'll notice I'll start every lesson with my digital drawing display tablet. Now that is because I want to start off with the blocking process by breaking it down from anatomy references. You don't need a digital tablet to follow along with this class, it's really just a tool to help me most clearly, using references, show you how to bring it back to a simple place that we can start on paper with. Gather your references, your pencils, and paper and whatever other materials you want to work with, be they digital or traditional and I'll see you in the next lesson where I'll demonstrate the three-step process of how to block, shape, and define anatomy. 3. Drawing Process Overview: In my class, I'm going to teach you a three-step process that you can follow to make drawing anatomy a lot more simple, starting off with a blocking method of really simplifying the basic silhouettes and the shapes of the human body into poses. Then shaping, how you can build and shape the anatomy, muscle structures, and connected groups on top of that blocking. Then finally, how you can choose the level of definition or basically how much of that muscle structure shows through if you're drawing the skin on top of the muscle as it were. I'm going to be approaching different core groups of muscles by limb and section. But you'll also notice, I'm dividing by form and function. Form being the physical makeup. The structure, how they connect and function, how they work because at the end of the day, muscles are mechanical instruments. They have a function and that function has a visual effect on how you're going to convey anatomy. I'm going to demonstrate the three-step process to drawing anatomy starting with blocking. Blocking is much more about the core bone structure and more importantly, the proportions. Let's say I'm going to draw a person and their upper body. I draw the head structure by simplifying the shapes that end up becoming the complex shapes. This is where gesture drawing can come in useful. But basically, we're making fairly dramatic choices very quickly, but really loosely and really lightly so we can change them, and rearrange them to create a foundation to put our anatomy onto. Notice, I'm leaning on specific shapes for specific areas. As we go through the different areas of the body; the arms, the legs, the torso, front, and back, I'm going to show you what shapes I use and why I came to those conclusions. But I thought I'd just demonstrate putting a few of them together right here here now. But this is the first part of that process, the blocking part. You'll notice then, as I've put in the basic blocking, I can start to make some changes. I can see where the silhouette is not very interesting, maybe be decide where the proportions or the silhouette isn't as strong or as accurate as I would like. It's in this process that we start being a little bit picky, but in a really relaxed way because if we get picky later after we've added detail or complexity, we're going to be really hesitant to make any changes. The blocking part is crucial to drawing anatomy on top of it, because if your proportions are bad or your pose is not very dynamic, or it looks a bit awkward, it doesn't matter how accurate your anatomy is, it's going to look terrible. One of the most important things to really practice and get good at, isn't the anatomy itself, the muscle structures, it's the proportions, the pose, and the silhouette. Once I've got the basics there and the proportions are something I'm pretty happy with, that's when I like to switch to my pencil and start shaping the anatomy on top. Now, I think of this process a little bit like putting meat on the bones. I've drawn the bones and the base foundation. Now, I thicken out areas as I add the anatomy, the muscles on top. Now, it's worth keeping in mind that if I were drawing this illustration to be a final piece, I actually would not draw all of the muscles and interconnected areas. I would only draw what I need and what I know is going to be the final definition. But that is a skill that comes with practice. Actually, one of the best ways to learn how to do something well is to learn the extreme first, so you can dial it back a bit. We're going to go extreme. We're going to draw all of the areas of muscle groups. I'm just going to demonstrate that here for now. This is the part when people try and learn it, they can tend to get most intimidated or confused. But once you know it and feel pretty comfortable with it, it's actually the fun part. It's the part that gives the most life and shape, and dynamism to your pieces. Now, you'll notice I'm still fairly loose through this process because it's more when I add the definition in its final form that I make very specific choices. Then that is to me what the end of that second shaping step looks like. Now, this is a very extreme version of that because I've put in a lot more detail than I would need to. Now, the third and final step is definition, where we make the choices to what shows in the final presentation. But this is a step I'm pretty much going to skip through all of the lessons where I go through the form and the function. Reason being is, without the foundational understanding, you're not really going to have the confidence to make those choices yourself yet. There it is. Those three steps; blocking, shaping, and definition. Think of it as a sandwich. We start with a simple blocking. We add complexity and decide how the muscles are all shaped, and interconnected. Then, we simplify again by choosing what is defined, what shows to the viewer of your creation. Sometimes, we're going to go extreme in our definition and make it much more physically fit and muscular. Sometimes we're just going to go a little more realistic. At the end of the day, not a lot of us have bodies like that. But it's really cool to know how to do that, how to go extreme so we can do the basics really well. 4. Basic Blocking Techniques: To give you a little bit of a helping guide, I wanted to show you how to do what I call reverse blocking, where you can use a reference to figure out how those blocks piece together, so you can start using those blocks without references or without tracing. Imagine this was the end goal you wanted to reach, drawing a dude holding an ax. Blocking is the act of breaking up these areas into just the parts that create the most impact in the silhouette. The shoulders and the torso in this instance are the most obvious ones. In later lessons, we'll go through in more detail as to the shapes I use, but I encourage you to figure out what works best for you. From my experience and observation, most people will use some blocking or construction method, but everyone's is slightly different and that's okay. They're all a result of our own observation and the way our brain understands and compartmentalizes and breaks down the complex into the simple. Sometimes I like to indicate where the spine might go, so I've indicated curvature back here, and then with that core shaping in place, I start to add a little more distinction and that's where I would add that midriff area, maybe even draw a line indicating where the center dividing line of the chest and abdomen are. As from here that I would start adding the anatomy. That's reverse blocking. How do you then block? Well, here is one of our photo references of this girl. The photos with the intention for her to look wounded cause she's grabbing her side. But let's say I like this reference, but I want her to look a little less wounded and a little more strategic. In this instance, I've got the head shape here. Again, I'm keeping this pretty loose eyeline and direction line. Having the reference is really useful because you can see where areas overlap and how it distorts the shape based on the angle that the person's on. For example, here I can see that the arm pretty much goes straight up. The hand curves forward like that and then we have our sword straight down like that. If you're drawing a reference side by side like this, it can be helpful to just draw some lines across so you can get your proportions nice and accurate. Don't feel like you have to though because I personally tend to feel like that can make your drawings look a bit flatter. Pull some of the life out of it because you're so focused on copying. This is an example of having the basics there, but l want to switch it up a bit. In two ways, this arm looks a little bit invisible and this leg looks also quite stuck behind the leg in front of it. I want to spread those legs a bit, so I have a little bit more of a clear distinction between the two shapes. Rather than grasping the front of her torso, I'm just going to relax her front arm on her leg so that her hand is resting on top of her knee. There you go. Just like that, I've blocked from the start, but with a reference, a tweaked version of the pose that I'm going for. Then we have my finished blocking. It's really, as you can see, pretty scribbly, fairly loose and that's okay. That's the purpose of it, is to create a silhouette foundation, an indication of proportion and pose so you can put your anatomy on top. Give it a go yourself. Draw two to three blocked poses, with or without references is entirely up to you. But feel your way through it and identify the shapes that you're starting to use and what your style of blocking is because the better you can block, the better you understand human proportions and the limitations of movement. I hope this lesson has been really helpful for you. Make sure to stay tuned for the next, where we are going to be starting with the form of the arm. I'll see you later. 5. Arm: Form: People, it's time to bring out the weapons. I mean, these drawing utensils. I'm working on these. In this lesson, we're going to look at the form of the arm starting off with the blocking, which I'll do some reverse blocking by using this reference here of the arm isolated on different angles, and then isolating the muscle groups on that form, so you can know how to use those to shape the anatomy on your blocking. Let's start off with that reverse blocking. I usually have a ball joint or a circle or sphere that represents the shoulder. As you can see, it quite comfortably nestles in that area, and if you can imagine like a toy doll action figury thing that usually have that same ball socket joint where the shoulder connects to the torso. That's how that mechanism works. You have a ball joint and that's your shoulder. But by making it larger, like this, it just fills out the mass, so it's easier to block on top of. Then I think of the arms blocking as a tapered cylinder. A little wider at the top, narrowing down to the elbow, which again, I draw as a ball joint. But actually, the function of the elbow is not a ball joint. I draw it as a ball valve because it helps me wrap my head around the why these shapes nicely create gaps between each other or fit together. Then we have the forearm, same thing, but a little narrower and a touch longer, mainly because the shoulder itself takes up some of the height of the arm, so the forearm, visually, when you're drawing it, even though when you fold in, your wrist ends up at about the same place of your shoulder, your shoulder actually takes up a little more area because the forearm takes up that whole length here. Again, same shape, slightly tapered cylinder shape from this elbow joint down to the wrist. We'll go to blocking in place. Let's start looking at how the muscles shape on top, specifically the muscle structures. We're going to look at what they look like and how they interconnect. We're going to go in groups one by one, starting off with the shoulder. I'm going to hide my references for a second, first draw, what I see is the shape of the shoulder from references that I've studied. I think of it as a little bit of a funny shaped love heart, and it's actually divided into lots of little groups, three main areas. At the top here where the love heart is killed in, that wraps around what is a shoulder muscle that's connected to the back muscle. This front point here, I think of as a dividing area that divides the bicep and tricep, which we'll get to in a moment. Then between here and on the side facing the front of the chest comes out of, and it's tucked into. It is a little bit of a tricky thing when it comes to anatomy because aside from landing the shapes of the sections, you do really need to know how they connect to each other, which is why I started off at the shoulder, it's one of the most connected areas here. To help you understand a little bit more, this is a bit of a 3D render of the shoulder and as you can see, that's that back muscle that I was referring to that tucks into that love heart because the shoulder is held up, you can't see it on this angle. But what you can see is how it has parts of muscle groups tucked into it like there and like under the chest and the bicep, but it tucks into other muscle groups like between the bicep and tricep. This image is just a cool representation of how muscles work. They're very interconnected. Now let's apply that to our blocking. The shoulder wrapped over, and this is from the rear view, then we have a side on view, so if you imagine the chest is here and the back is here, and the abdomen body, that's what this view looks like. Where that shape of the shoulder, that love heart shape, looks a little bit like this. Now we have a frontal view, and last but not least, this is an inside view, but you can see that this would be the chest and how the shoulder wraps around the other side of the bicep. The bicep is a muscle that connects from that inside of the shoulder in a fairly rounded way to the front of the inside of the elbow, really is just connected to the first half of the shoulder on this side, as you can see, not visible from behind, so we don't need to draw it from there, but it really is a very simple shape. Then starting back at this side, now that the biceps are not visible from this angle, we're going to go to the tricep, which is a bit of a different shape. It's another one of these love heart shapes, but this time, it's upside down. The end result I tend to think of as a horseshoe, not because it looks like a horseshoe, but it's just that shape, the upside down U-shape, barely visible from the side, and it's hugs around the arm. From the side then the rear, you can see one of those edges. But from behind, you can see that whole U-shape. That's the upper arm. The lower arm is a little interesting because there's lots and lots of little muscles, and it can get very confusing, very quickly. I like to keep things really simple and focus on two muscle groups. The first begins between the bicep and tricep at the top here where they ended. Think of it as above the upper arm, a tucked in there, and then it wraps around and over, and think of it as a bit of a long, slightly pointed shape that ends up aiming towards the thumb. Now, in that, the most visible forearm muscles starts between the bicep and tricep. We know that if we need the forearm to flex, that's going to be one of the first places that pops out here, for example, and then it comes in and wraps around towards the thumb, and then likewise from behind, from the inside of the bicep and tricep, but not as prominent. We have a similar muscle group that wraps around towards the pinkie. We've done that with our digital reference and reverse blocking, let's do it on paper, so you can see how to do it from scratch for yourself. Let's do this on three angles. I'm going to draw a circle in the middle here, which is going to be my shoulder, and as I've demonstrated, we're going to do this cylindrical shape to represent the upper arm, a circle, and then another type of cylinder for the fore. Perfect. Now, I'm actually just going to draw a few lines across at each of these main areas, and I'm going to copy the same blocking starting off with the shoulder, but I'm going to do a few different angles. If we think of this as the side of the body with the chest facing this way, let's think of this as with the chest facing towards us, upper hand tapered into their, ball joint for the shoulder, and then forearm until we reach the hand, and last but not least, this will be more of a rear view, where this is the shoulder and the arm. But connected to what would be the back. That's it. That's my blocking dunk, easy. Now let's get to the fun bit. We're going to start shaping the anatomy on top, starting with the shoulder. I'm thinking about as that soft, goopy, kidneyish love shape. I know that is a really helpful description. Now, a ball joint is usually quite harsh and form, and I like to usually just soften it and make a bit more of an organic approach here. But the house, because I can see this is where the neck part of the shoulder comes in and interconnect, so I can wrap my love heart around that. If in doubt sometimes I'll just sort how the three parts the shoulder might divide. It also helps me to even indicate where the other muscles will connect to, the chest, just a little line coming from out there. Now, a little bit more of a clearer view of the shoulder. We've got our love heart shape. The middle area, obviously ending up into that neck part of the shoulder, and then these front three divisions. May also have interconnect back to that middle section, the dip in the lub heart. Then from the rear, we have where the shoulder and the back interconnect. But it's a very similar look to how it connects to the front. Now I've drawn that as very distinct muscle group or shape. I'm going to make that even more distinct by coloring it lightly with this blue color. That'll make sense in a minute. But one of the reasons for this, aside from creating clarity at the end which you'll see is also to help you forget about this shape a little bit as I start drawing new shapes for the other muscle groups, starting with the bicep. Let's go to the front representations of the arm, biceps beginning up here, tucked between the shoulder and the chest and wrapped around a fairly spherical shape pulled in towards that middle of the front elbow, the in-bow. That bit. This is what you'd signed up for. This is the level of technicality you're going to get. Anyway, that's the front view of the bicep. From the side here, it's important to note that while we have that front shape and the bicep bows add a little bit. The bicep doesn't go to the middle of the arm and meet with the tricep. There are muscles in the middle here, I like to draw it in a way that leaves a bit of a gap. I'm not going to draw it in the other view because it's not really visible from the front. Let's color in our biceps here. Pretty straightforward when you think of it as a shape that simple. Next onto the tricep. Now remember, we have that horseshoe-ish feel. The thing to remember is the bottom of the horseshoe is very tippet and much thinner than the top, which actually bulks out a bit. So I usually especially on this side view, pop the tricep up a bit, where it bulks out at the top of the horseshoe. But I don't see the other side of the horseshoe, because it's wrapped around the back of the arm. It's going to be much clearer in this view from reverse, when we can see how our little horseshoe shape wraps around the arm, and is thicker and bulkier at the top, but interconnects up under that shoulder. Now I can see here that my arm is bent in this way, and it's already starting to look a little odd to me that the tricep is angled in like this. When really because of that angle, it would actually be a little further out. As you go, it's important just keep in mind the overall look and the position of those muscles. Just pushing it around this way, that to me looks much more accurate as to how that muscle would react with the arm bent inwards like this. Then going back to the front view, the tricep would be visible but barely, it would be a little bit of a bump here, just because of that larger mass up here. You're going to say that poking out there. Which would be even clearer when I just add this color? Again, looking at the whole view here, I can see the proportions and I feel like the bicep might be barely visible from this rear view. But still visible enough mainly because there's more mass on the lower end of the bicep where there isn't as much on the tricep even though we're looking from behind. I would just indicate that on this inside area. Next forearm, starting off with that bigger forearm muscle which interconnects between the bicep and tricep, and wraps around, now I know my thumb is going to be here. It wraps around a little bit towards the thumb. It curls around like that. Last but not least, we're going to do this inside forearm muscle. Now none of these views have a great view of him, but it's also a fairly obscure muscle group styling up at the inside of the bicep and tricep and curling around a little bit to where the pinky is. It's almost like a helix the way they work around the forearm. You'll see glimpses of it on the lower part of the forearm over here, and at the top on the inside over here. There it is, the very simplified form of the muscle groups of the arm. Now you'll notice there are gaps. Why are there gaps? Because there are muscles in there but you don't really need to draw because when you've got these larger areas of muscle groups drawn in and you draw lines alluding to them, the details fill themselves. In-fact, I'm just going to outline all of this. You can see with the lines in there, and if the colors weren't there, it actually fills in its own detail. There it is, the form of the arm. who would have thought it could become so simplified. Now knowing that, we can apply that shaping on top of any blocking in any pose. I want you to give this go for yourself. Try drawing a really natural and relaxed arm pose in some really straightforward angles, just to mainly practice the basic blocking proportions. But more importantly in this case, the muscle structures and muscle groups, how those are proportioned and interconnect. You can start to understand, how that can be drawn on different angles. In the next lesson, we're going to focus on the function of the arm. 6. Arm: Function: Let's get functional. I'm sorry, this is terrible learning. We've had a look at the form of the arm. Now it's time to make that a little more practically applicable and understand how the arm works. I'll start off with the shoulder. As I mentioned earlier, the shoulder is a bull joint when it comes to the arm and how it connects to the torso. This central area here, does most of the work when lifting the arm up sideways in this direction. The hardest you can make your shoulder muscle overall work is by having it hold a bag or a bucket of water exactly out like this. With that said, remember, it's divided into three core groups. This front third of the shoulder muscle works more when the arm is going up, but also forwards. Likewise, the back of the shoulder does the same in reverse. In fact, try this right now. Hold your arm up to the side and then move back. With your other hand, if you reach behind and just firmly grab your shoulder, it will feel really firm. The front, be a lot softer. Then if you move all the way forward, you can feel it constricting and getting tied off of the back stretches and gets a bit loose. The whole shoulder is still doing a lot of the work, but it's distributing the work between these three core sections of that muscle. Now, why am I mentioning this when we're trying to talk about drawing muscle group? Because it's really important to understand how they function because their form changes based on the function. Next we have the bicep and tricep, and these go together because they work in opposites. Think of it like a seesaw. When one is down, the other is up. That is because, where the shoulder is a ball joint, the elbow is just a single axis movement. It doesn't matter where your wrist or shoulder is, the elbow is only going to move one way, up and down, thanks to the bicep and tricep. That's all this baby. Your bicep pulls your arm up in this direction. But let's say we have the exact reverse motion. Rather than pulling something up, we're pushing something down. You can do the same exercise like we did with the shoulder. You can grab your right arm and pull up a bag, and you'll feel your bicep. But in reverse, if you push on a table in front of you, the tricep is what is doing most of the work. If you're pushing yourself up out of your seat, it is the triceps that are pushing. The bicep pulls up, the tricep does all the work to do the exact opposite, to pull the forearms down or push things away. Our fore muscles are much more intricate and that's because at the end of the day, they are what are connecting to your tendons and give you the delicacy in hand functions that enable you to draw great pictures. But also means that the muscles themselves don't stand out a huge amount, with the exception for this one here, which is where I mainly focus on flexing when I'm drawing a very hardworking arm, particularly in a constricted position where the hand is holding something. Practice squeezing your wrist, just squeezing and letting go. You can feel that larger muscle group in here, constrict and relax. This is the holding muscle. When you're holding something really heavy or lifting that dumbbell, the biceps doing a lot of work but so is this front forearm muscle which is enabling you to really have that grip. If you're drawing a character doing a bicep curl, make the bicep do its work, but also remember that this muscle is actually going to have quite a lot of constriction intention, so show you that in your illustration as well. Let's put it into practice and this is where it gets really fun. Again, we're starting with basic blocking, but this time we're going to focus on blocking two very specific functions. Let's draw one of this bicep curls. From the shoulder, blocking in the upper arm, bending back this way so we can create room for the forearm, which is in this instance, going to be curled up with a fist closed and slightly tilted up. With our blocking in place, and that really is as simple as blocking needs to be, we can stop blocking. Even though we're focusing on the bicep and this forearm muscle, I'm always going to do the framing muscle first, which is that shoulder muscle, really important muscle to focus on. Now I'm going to draw the bicep, but this time, it's just bulked out a little bit more, just takes up a little bit more mass. But the bicep curl isn't just about making the bicep bigger. It's actually about stretching the tricep. This wrap-around muscle is much more pulled out so that the arm can contract in this way. Then our interconnected forearm muscle is going to be popping out in front of the bicep and doing quite a bit of work. It's actually bulked out to be it. Remember, it connects to the thumb and we're looking at it from this side. The thumb is around the front here, so we want that to come around here. Then there will be maybe a slight glimpse of this rear forearm muscle, which will also be doing a little bit of work because of the gripping action of the hand. Here we have, with a little bit of line work to just make it super clear for you, the bicep curl pose. Now, to make it even clearer for you, especially in the context of the other few references we're going to draw here, I'm going to color in with green and red; red to indicate constriction and tightening working, and when mass expands, and green to show where it's stretched and much more elongated. Obviously, starting off with the red where really constricted here in the bicep. Especially compared to the tricep, you can see that the mass has expanded. It's not as symmetrical as it was, especially because the tricep is stretched over a far longer area than it usually is. We have our grip muscles. Now, in this instance, it is this front section of muscle connected between the bicep and tricep, and down to the thumb, that's doing a lot of this gripping and holding work. You'll notice if you grip or hold something, tighten and loosen your hand, the other side it's actually working as well. This isn't the same seesaw as the bicep and tricep. If you're gripping or tightly holding something, your entire forearm is working on that. Now, I'm going to add something a little tricky to this dynamic and that would be a rope. Let's imagine that this arm is pulling something back. Not only is our bicep constricted, our forearm holding and gripping tightly, but our shoulder is pulling something back. Now as we'll cover in light of ears, it is the back that's going to do a lot of that work, but it's important to know that this rear shoulder section is working all the way down to where the front is comparatively more relaxed. The shoulder is similarly that seesaw effect. Let's do the opposite. Let's draw the arm with, again, some basic blocking. We'll do the shoulder here. But this time, we're going to be pushing forwards, the short type of cylinder along the type of less thick cylinder. Let's pretend there's a pole that this arm is holding and is trying to shift forward, maybe pushing a handle. With our blocking done, we can move on to starting to work the muscle structure. Now let's imagine we're viewing the arm from the same position. To get that grip, the arm actually twists around a little bit and the tricep starts to look a little bit more like it's on top, especially from the side. What I mean by that is the shoulder is going to start to wrap around like this and then this tricep muscle is going to be quite constricted up at the top here and bulk out a little bit. Now, remember that horseshoe shape and that division in the middle and tapering out at the bottom? That goes down until we made it the elbow. Let's add a few skin folds just because that usually happen when you are always ironed out and straight. We still have the bicep muscle visible, but as is in an opposite example, it's much more stretched out and elongated. Then likewise, we're still gripping something and doing a bit of work with the forearm, but because of the extension, the muscle isn't bulked out as much. It's stretched out along that length. But let's make it as clear as possible for you here by showing what's constricted and what stretched. That is the opposite arm function in motion to our first function. The arm pull in, the arm push out. That is what it looks like under the surface and what the muscles are doing. But more importantly, it's how the shapes changed based on that function. Last but not least, I want to look at the shoulder directly, specifically because if we do have blocking with our shoulder relaxed here with the arm in this position and I'm going to just allude the chest and the rest of the torso here, the shoulder takes on a bit of a different shape when it's fully contracted and doing its work to really lift. I've got just two blocking sketches. One of the arm in a more relaxed pose and then in this one, lifting up quite high. Let's draw the shoulder in a really relaxed state. With this back shoulder muscle, interconnect around to our shoulder love heart shape, which in this case is really stretched. It's really open and out. There's not a lot of work that it's doing, so it doesn't need a contract, it can just relax and spread itself out with a little bit of definition in my line work to make it super clear for you. The muscle still there, but because it's doing no work, it can just completely relax. Now, in the instance where we want to write the shoulder, the mass of the shoulder really starts to build up. A common mistake people make is that they just draw the arm going out from its normal direction. But really what happens is the muscle around the back and neck here contracts and the shoulder really bulks up around that. It pulls the chest up with it. While the love heart shape is still there, it's really contracted and then the chest, and back are really stretched to support that. Now, this doesn't look like a lot at the moment because it's a bit scribbly, but I'm going to just separate these a little bit, starting with the really bunched up shoulder. It's divided in the middle by the fairly contracted neck, shoulder, back, muscle. This thing here. I told you I'm not technical. It's a really scrunched up, but the chest is pulled very wide as is the back. You'll actually notice that when you draw the shoulder up like this or when you see a reference that has it like this, the back is often visible behind the body because it too like the chest, is really stretched out to support that bulk shape. In our left example, super stretched out, really relaxed, and doing no work at all. In this example, it really starts to constrict up here. Our love heart shape, the shoulder starts to really look quite plump because it's doing a lot of work, but so is the muscle that's folded into that shoulder muscle to do that lifting. That is a crash course on the functions of the muscle groups of the arm. I hope that makes it really clear for you how these muscle groups change and deform a little bit as they expand and contract, and do what they meant to do. I'd encourage you to give a go of putting all of this together for yourself, at least with the arm. Try some blocking and try some function with the arm. Try some pulling or biceps, maybe a shoulder press. Remember to share your progress with the class in the project section. I can't wait to see how you go depicting the arm and practicing that. But that is it for the arm because we're going to move on now to the bottom half of the body, specifically the bottom with the legs. But the bottom is part of it. Grow up and mature here. 7. Leg: Form: It's time to move on to the legs now, another very important area of anatomy to understand. Like lots of areas of anatomy as you can see, it can start to look very intertwiny and complicated. If you look at a reference or an anatomy chart for the legs, you might not know where to start with your illustration. We're going to look at the muscle structure of the leg and show you how to simplify it, starting off with the upper part of the leg, moving down to the lower part. Starting off with the blocking, I'll start off the legs with the blocking for my pelvis, which I often draw as like a boxy underpants shape. The legs have a symmetrical flow to the arm. Now that you understand how the form and function of arms works, you can imagine the blocking as the same thing. The top of this leg being the ball joint tapering down in this cylindrical shape, all the way down to the knee. Exactly the same as the arm, the knee doesn't have a ball joint. It has one axis that it moves on. I'll draw a little circle because it's mildly helpful for me to spread the mass out and picture the Silhouette. The lower leg like, the forearm is more tepid and a little longer than the cylinder of the top leg, mainly because of the mass of this ball joint. Just like with the blocking of the upper, where the shoulder ball joints and the upper arm shared that length, it means that the cylinder of the upper half of the leg is a bit shorter than the cylinder of the bottom half. The other thing that's worth pointing out, which is slightly different from the fore is that the lower leg goes out before it comes in. It's usually flat at the front and bokeh at the back. In a front view, we have this slightly tepid outer part of the cylinder before it comes in towards the ankle. On a side-on view, that mass bulking out is from behind, which is why it looks wider at the front, but that's actually the back that is adding that mass there. Then from the rear, it's pretty much the same as from the front. We've got our cylinders up both, and our calf shape which goes out before it goes in. I had this step it up a notch. We're good at blocking done. Let's put some muscles on the bones. Like I showed you with the leg references, it can be hard to know where to start. I tend to start up towards the groin if we're facing the front of the toe usually because depending on the pose, that is where most of the flow and most of the muscle motion is going to be coming from. Specifically thinking about this midriff point, if you feel your pelvis, you feel that bone that sticks out there, that's poking out of the front of the pelvis here. Imagine a line that stretches out from there to the inside of the leg. Inside that and an interconnecting to the groin is a whole bunch of interconnected funky little muscles that we never really have to define. It is from this line, this point that we're going to start to really focus on shaping the leg muscles. From the front, there are three muscles shapes on the top of the leg, the quad. Yeah, that's right. They're all a little interconnected, but they all create that muscle group of the front of the leg, starting with this big one that's curves in like this, that tie it up to the top and tie it in and tucked in at the bottom and largest in the middle, lower into the middle here. On the outside of the leg furthest away from the middle of the body, we have a muscle that wraps around and comes from that which sits above the knee. Then slightly married but much lower. We've got a muscle group that comes in and hugs around the side of the kneecap. These three muscles are always important to understand how they work together because they make up one largest singular shape. They're always grouped, but it's really important to know where they're positioned. I also find it most helpful to point out that this middle one is always going to be the one that pops out the most. As you can see on this side view, we've got that muscle poking out. Then the interconnected muscles connected but not very visible. Then of course we can't see this muscle group from the back. Speaking of the back, we've got the backside here, which like the shoulder wraps around and connects to one larger muscle group at the back of the leg like this. From a rearview, it's a fairly large area, so we tuck into the back of the knee, and then from that rearview, we can't really see much of the front muscle groups, but there's three core sections. The front group of three muscles here, the butt muscle or the glutes, and then this rear hamstring muscle. Then we get the lower legs, we've got the calf muscles. We're going to start on the side view here. This bokeh out there, but they taper off quite a bit, almost nonexistence at least visually because they might connect to tendons at the back of the leg, which is why it's thickest at the top, but I usually taper out to nothing. At the back here, much like the triceps, it's divided into two halves, that rock around the lower leg. If you have to find calf muscles and your drawing out from the front, the lines that you'll see along the leg hair are actually just the visible calf muscle poking out the sides from the back. As far as the front of the legs is not much in the way of muscle except you may, if they're muscular or fit, indicate a muscle group here on the front wrapping around from the outside of the knee here to the inside, down towards the big toe. But let's move on to giving this guide for ourselves. We're going to do the blocking of the leg on three angles and put some anatomy on it. Start off with our ball joint, which I often draw on top of that dull shape groin. Then we have the upper leg, now, the tapering of the upper leg, we start quite thick at the top and type a quite a bit in towards the knee, another joint there, then we have the lower leg, we're going out first and then in but keeping in mind that this is much longer and ends up much narrower. Little bit of room for movement here, we can shift out proportions until we're happy. That to me is a pretty decent front-on view of the blocking of the leg. I'm going to do the same in reverse over here. This is going to be the rearview opposite the front view. Now on my blocking in this instance, I'll actually just keep that circle there because here I'll rub the groin around that ball joint but here, the ball joint will end up being a good indicator of where the butt goes. Now we have divide it here for the leg and start to do the blocking of the lower leg, the calf. The blocking for the front and the back, as you can see, it's pretty much identical. Let's do the side. I'm going to do my ball joint this time of the blocking out like this, but the butt is going to poke out a little bit more at the back. The leg is going to be a little relaxed, not fully straighten, just so we can get a nice clear representation of the whole setup. Do some lines in the middle just to make sure everything's lined up here. You'll notice obviously the knees quite in the middle, but the blocking of the upper leg is a little shorter than the blocking of the lower leg. Again, because this ball joint area takes up a bit of space. There's my blocking, done, nice and easy. Now that we know how to do it, it's pretty straightforward. The anatomy on top now that I've shown how it's divided is actually pretty straightforward too. It comes with practice, but let's start off with the front of the leg. Remember we have that line from that middle front of that born on the hip there. I use that as my starting point to start to create this leg shape. The inside of the leg wraps around just a little bit lower or at the point of the knee. Whereas on the other side, I bring my teardrop around and it's a little bit higher. Then I got into the quads, which pokes out the most, which we can just draw as this type it in the area at the top, and then the other two side muscles tucking up under it. Often we'll have a little bit of mass here on the side that is just the glute poking out and saying hello, just because it's a large muscle group and it will be visible from the front, even just a little bit at the silhouette on the solid. But that's really it when you break it down to what is most fundamental when drawing anatomy, these core shapes are actually what you're going to be focusing on. I'm not going to draw that from behind because it's not really visible from behind except an indicator on the sides. What we are seeing from behind is the behind. We're drawing the glutes, which as a muscle tuck down to the side mainly because it connects to the hamstring, but really the most of it is here in this area. Then we have the hamstring, lusted long, straight down the middle, and connecting behind the knee. The glutes come up in a little flat on the side. It's hard to see because we're looking at it from behind. I'm going to switch over here to the side view and show you that the glutes, although they stick out here and talk around on that side of the hamstring, actually come up and wrap around. But on the side, the butt muscle ends there. We can see the hamstring, and then we can allude to the quads. Again, for extra clarity, let's color these in. There we have the top of the leg pretty clearly divided. I hope that makes a lot of sense to you, especially if you've struggled to understand the shapes and positioning of the leg anatomy, the lower leg is even easier. I nearly always start with the calf just because it's the most obvious muscle on the leg, and because I know it's drawn in two halves and tapers out top and bottom on either side, you can think of it as two T-shapes upside down. Keeping a bit of a gap in the middle here for where the back of the knees and on the front for where the knee is, but on the front view, it's not really going to be very visible. They just going to poke out the side and we can just allude to that front slightly diagonal direction, leg muscle there. From the outside view here, that muscle is going to poke out a little bit more because it wraps around the front of the knee, but again, pretty subtle. Let's break it up into colors. I think the last thing I want to mention when it comes to the legs is you'll notice in our references, there's lots of tendons, there's lots of areas that don't have muscle groups, but they're going to be visible. They're going to have some surface level indicators there. A big one being here at the back of the legs where we've got the calf muscle, but this big white group here which is a tendon connecting to the back of the ankle. You'll notice I drew these two lines and that is to indicate the tendon. Sometimes this surface level indication of anatomy onto the surface that isn't muscles, and in the case of this outside at muscle, it might be as simple as a line down the middle there. Same here on the outside of the leg where it connects to the knee. There it is, the lower leg. Again, when you really break it down to the simple shapes and you understand where they're positioned and then light up how they function. More importantly, when you practice it, you can commit it to muscle memory because I'm enjoying muscles and my learning here. Anyway, I will highly recommend you practice this. If you're especially intimidated or confused by the legs, give it a go. Just draw mannequin legs, straight legs on different angles. The more you can practice on those different angles, even with slight differences in direction, the more your brain will understand how to communicate three-dimensional anatomy through a two-dimensional medium. I can't wait to see your projects and progress, but I also can't wait to see you in the next video where we're going to go deep into the functionality of the leg. 8. Leg: Function: You're back? Well, that's not a surprise because in the last video, I gave you a bit of a leg up. This lesson is about leg function, the positions of the muscles and their form also mirrors a little bit of the form of the arm. It's the same with the function, especially with the top half of the leg. Like the tricep in the upper arm, the quads do the pushing. Like the biceps in the upper arm, the hamstrings do the pulling, and like the shoulder does for the arm, the glutes or butt for the leg does the lifting or the pulling up. The shoulder lifts outwards, the butt lifts backwards. But one last little recap, and we've looked at the upper leg. Like the upper arm, the front and back of the leg are a seesaw pattern. When one is working in one direction and doing a lot of the work, the other one is doing less work and stretching. Well, this is where the comparison end, past the knee joint because the forearm is much more the gripping mechanism, where the leg is much more the push and pull for the foot. It actually has the same seesaw function as the top of the leg. When the foot is pushed down like this, and I imagine a lot of the force is coming out of the toes, the calf muscle is contracting up here and doing all the work where the front of the leg is much more relaxed and stretched out. Then in the opposite direction, we have the pulling up of the toes. This one is a really easy one to test on yourself. All you have to do is point your toes as high up as they can go, and you will feel that muscle work. You can feel it physically with your hand. In fact, if you squeeze the front of your leg and do that pointing of toe upwards, you'll feel that front muscle contract. When the target is pointed up, this front muscle is contracting, and the calf muscle is stretched. That's really all you need to know from the functional standpoint, from a theory perspective. Now, let's do it practically. Easily demonstrated with two simple poses, we're going to call these poses the squash and the stretch. One squashed almost like an accordion when everything is all bunched up. We have the back stretched, all scrunched down, and the torso reaching down. Let's do blocking for the butt there. Then we have the upper leg, the knee joint. Now, we have the lower leg. Again, thicker, a little higher up, but then tapering out. Everything is really bunched up. In this example, the toes are also going to be really pulled up. Now, because of the limitation is of the body, I know that in this pose, the toes cannot be flat to the ground without it being a little too much work for this front muscle that's probably going to hurt. Which is why we have the ball joint on our foot to enable us to soften the extremity of that. But this is my fully contracted pose for the leg. Let's do the opposite, fully expanded. We're going to start way up here because we're going to be up on our tippy-toes with the ball joint in front of the leg. Now, with my blocking, you'll notice that I actually have my cylinder of the upper leg start a little further forward in the side view because that gives a little room for the butt to poke out. We have our calf and our elongated lower leg muscle. Last but not least, we're going to stretch the toes all the way down, and we're going to be up. We're going to be balancing on the balls of the feet. But this time, rather than the foot being angled upwards relative to the lower leg, it's going to be pointing down relative to the lower leg. Both of these are really common functions. Their are positions that the body can get into, and that is going to be really helpful if you understand how the anatomy expands and contracts through the legs to enable you to draw this really accurately. Let's start by shaping the muscles on our squashed up pose. If you can imagine, this is an arm doing a bicep curl, and this inside section is the bicep. It's going to be the most contracted area doing most of the work in this pose. The glutes are actually going to be really stretched out. While it takes a lot of glute muscle to stand up into that pose, it's that muscle that does most of the work with the quads. When really bunched up and pulling in like this, it's actually the core, which we'll get to later, that's pulling the upper legs up. Then it's the bicep of the leg, the hamstring, that's pulling the lower leg up. The quads are really stretched out, so they're really not going to have a lot of definition here, but we're going to draw their core shapes anyway. Then because the toes are pointing up relative to the lower leg, most of the work here is going to be happening in this front muscle, but it's a small muscle relative to the lower leg. The calf is bigger, but it is stretched out in this pose. Let's add some line work. There is our scrunched up pose. Let's look at what is scrunched up and what is stretched out. We touched on this already, the hamstring, really pulling up that lower leg. This is our contracted muscle in this pose. I'm actually going to indicate the core here and a little bit of this upper area of the quads because that's what's doing also, a bunch of that work to lift the whole leg up in that scrunched up pose like that. But we have most of the quads, especially forward towards the knee, pretty stretched out as we do the calf muscles and the glutes. Last but not least, this lower front leg muscle doing a lot of work to bring these feet up and to support the body there. To make it even clearer, wherever everything is bunched up, particularly in here in the core, it's the above adjoining muscle group that's doing most of the work to lift it up. It is the most contracted to perform that function. Same here underneath the leg. To pull the lower leg up to the upper leg, it's the hamstring doing that work. Then, of course, the foot is being pulled up by this front lower leg muscle. Calling it the front lower leg muscle is fine. You don't need to know the name of it. There's a name to it, but whatever, we're drawing pictures. As long as it looks right. This is how that compact shape is pulled in with the muscles of the body. Then as a result and due to that seesaw effect, the opposing muscle is expanded and stretched out. In this case, the glutes, the front of the quads, and the calf muscle. Let's do the opposite function; isn't this fun. They're like machines. Now, we go to the opposite pose. As you can imagine, the expansion and contractions are going to sort in the opposite way. In this instance, the glute is doing a lot of pulling, especially if the upper body is leaning back and the leg is pulled back. The hamstring is really stretched out here, but the quad is really bunched up. It's quite noticeable just on this outside, so the one one the knee. Of course, without toes pushed down, the calf muscles are going to be really bunched up and contracted doing a lot of that lifting where this front leg muscle is going to be basically invisible. Let's add the lines. Now, with our anatomy shaped here, let's just make the function as clear as possible without colors starting off with the glutes, which are doing quite a lot of pushing here. The glutes function really kicks in with the pushing down of the feet or pulling back of the leg. In fact, let's test it. Just stand up straight. If you just lift your leg back, you'll feel exactly where that glute kicks in. It really is important to test it with your body and see what it feels like. Here, it is clear as day. When the toes or the front of the foot is stretched out, the calf or the back of that lower leg is contracted and pulled up. When the lower leg is pushed down and forwards, the back or the hamstrings are stretched out where the quads or the front of the legs, a pulled up and contracted. Of course, where the entire leg as a whole is stretched out and down like that or pushing away or of course backwards, the glute is going to firm him, and do a bit of that work for you. I feel like it's hard to make it clearer than this, the function of the leg. But also, you can see where the muscle expands, and where it contracts, and how it just reacts and shapes a little bit differently based on what is happening, and that is just as important to know as how the muscles connect. Because at the end of the day, muscles are a mechanism. When you know how it works, you know how to draw it, so give it a go, draw the leg performing these functions. In fact, I have to challenge you to draw the leg at a few steps between these functions. Perhaps even try drawing the leg squashed up like this, but maybe, with the toes pointing down or away from the leg. Give it a go, share your progress and your project with the class. Meet me in the next video where we're going to dive into the torso, specifically the front of the torso, male and female, the upper body. That's just the beginning of bringing it all together. 9. Torso: Form: Today we're going to be drawing the torso, the way of drawing the front of the torso, and we're also going to approach the torso in a male and female perspective. Now we're talking about generalities here. Of course, there are loads of different body types in all shapes and forms. We're just going very foundational just to really focus on muscle groups in anatomy. But when it comes to blocking, they both can start from the same blocks. The same foundations, but the blocks are the most useful part because that is where we're going to create the difference when it comes to proportion. If I bring down my reference here, I can show you pretty clearly that where the shoulders end on the male body and the hips, there's quite a bit of overhang between the width of the shoulders compared to the hips. Whereas with the female form here, it almost meets if not only barely overhangs. Now I use a very distinct shape block for the torso personally, that's because of how the ribs are constructed. Underneath the torso here, the ribs go a bit like this. I'm sure everyone who's watching this has seen a skeleton and knows what ribs roughly look like, something loosely like that. I like, in general, my blocking to somewhat reflect the anatomy underneath the muscles. I like to draw a torso block that alludes to the shape of the ribs. Not full height because I like a little bit more room for movement, but I have a dis-indentation in the middle here. If this is a shape that you're not comfortable drawing on different angles, you can draw a cube or a box or even a slightly rounded box. Give yourself a central indicator line maybe a position line for the bottom of the chest, and then you can show the sides of that box like so. There are many ways that you can draw the torso, this is the way I personally prefer to you but don't feel like you have to do the blocking my way. This is where I draw the pelvis as a bit of a block, I draw that box shape with a flat top which indicates the angle of the pelvis to me. Sometimes I have a line to indicate where the spine is and usually frankly if I'm drawing the blocking of the torso I like to block in at least the ball joints of the shoulders. Sometimes the ball joints or the construction of the legs and often the neck or at least the indicators of where the neck comes out of. Because as you might imagine, the torso is connected to everything else in the body pretty much. That's a fairly broad blocking on the left there. But if I'm tracing or reverse blocking on my female torso here, I can use the same shapes to give me a really clear foundation. The difference is going to be really apparent though when I hide my reference and you can see that the core structure is just fundamentally shaped and proportioned differently. Now when it comes to muscle groups and I'm going to zoom in here on the male torso. The chest muscles connect into the shoulders around where the armpit is. Remember that love heart shape in our shoulders, this is where knowing that comes in handy, because we can taper in the top of the chest in a way that compliments that love heart where they interconnect. That's our first muscle group. The chest, this larger massive muscle that spreads out from the armpit area with a gap in the middle. Next, we have the abdomen, and it's important to see that that six pack is above the belly there. Now in this example here you can see it all taper in like one big stripe like this. But in actuality, the why it visibly appears above the skin often ends up tapering out before it goes in. Mainly, because of the muscles around the sides of the abdomen and also because of the tendency that we all have to be a little more built up just above the belt line. I tend to personally prefer to create a shape more like an arrow shape. It might not be exactly reminiscent of the muscles under the surface, but I find it helps me be way more accurate in how I shape and pose the body. We've got the belly button area, a clear line down the middle dividing this, and a clear distinction between these eight muscles. These Bottom 2 technically tapering in towards the groin. Now this is an interesting section of muscles on the sides, the side of the abdomen here, they interlock in an interesting way. I always used to find this very confusing and I didn't know how to draw it but we can really simplify this and make sense of it. Every point that the abdomen has a line where it begins and ends. The next muscle group has an accompanying line that's in the middle between those, and then these interlock in a similar way they're opposing lines. I think to make it even clearer, I'll draw on the side here. If you imagine those are the abdomen lines, then we have the interconnecting next muscle group and then that further interconnects in that same pattern. Really they're interweaving and once you understand that, it makes it a lot more sense for how you can draw where on the surface of the skin you get these weird lumps, you can understand the interconnecting muscles underneath. The next thing I notice that I find really helpful is to think of this bottom area as a bit of an arc like so. Meeting up at the top underneath and between the two chests and the arching down on both sides. That gives you a bit of a direction for where these interlocking muscles made up on each side. That being the arch, we know that the muscle meets up in the middle between these abdomen areas. Now the point that we meet this arch, we know that we're going to spread out in the interlocked pattern. The last one of which being at the bottom here which connects to that arrow, and then we get our belt line and that's where of course we join the pelvis. Now, I'm aware that a lot of what I've said will be quite complicated. But I wanted to go through all of that mainly to highlight the connection points, so that now when we break it up into individual groupings, it's going to be a lot simpler for you. The first grouping being the chest. Next, we have the abdomen. This I'm also going to group all into one shape that's easier then to just draw in the silhouette and the sketching that we can then subdivide based on what later we figured out is the function of the muscle group. Last but not least, we have these more peripheral muscles on the side and all of these rules apply exactly the same for the female torso. There is, of course, key key aside from proportion and that is the breasts. I would recommend if you're drawing breasts to draw them on top of the blocking before you get to anatomy. Actually having this reference here with the bikini is really helpful, because it's a visual way to indicate how the mass of the breasts hang from the front of the torso and the body of the breast obviously reaching down here. Actually, I find it's quite helpful to always draw teardrop shapes as part of the blocking because, then it's easier to help them move and react based on how the pose moves. Then we just go to anatomy on top of that. The chest underneath acts just the same as the chest in our original blocking here, the anatomy of the abdomen is all the same. We've got the arrow, got the same divisions from the belly button. We've got these arches going out from the chest muscles with the zigzagging muscle patterns and we've got the chest interconnecting with the shoulder. Of course, we can visually define our muscle groups just like we do with the male torso on the left. The end result enabling you to understand not only how the anatomy is formed, but also how it changes and quite drastically, visually based on the proportions that you base it on. That's quite a lot of foundational work we've done to start off with. Let's just put it into practice on paper now. I'm going to do the same male and female torso, left and right. But this time I'm going to face them both slightly out on a three-quarter angle each. Let's start off with the blocking. I'll start off with my rib cage shape here. For the indentation in the middle, I like to allude to the inside, underneath a middle line. I'll draw the shoulders on either side. Allude to the spine and then indicate the top of the pelvis. This is a male torso, so I have the shoulder's going out a little bit wider than the hips. But I'm also angling and pivoting the pelvis forward a bit like it's leaning back in a show-off pose. I'm going to have the neck perking up here. Maybe even indicate the bottom under the jaw just to really make it look like a person and not a floating torso. That's the basic blocking before I start to feel like I need to add anatomy on top. Let's do that. We were adding muscles on top of the bone structure here and the chest is the biggest muscle group. Remember it wraps around that shape in the shoulder, that love heart shape. It's important to keep that in mind and I tend to like to just start drawing the anatomy of the arm just to really clearly make sure that I'm putting things in the right place. Then I can draw a center line all the way down into the groin and start to create my arrow shape. Keeping them on, I'm trying to go for a fairly organic-looking illustration here. I want nice curved lines and they'll be curved even more when I start to subdivide the muscle groups of this six-pack. Now, we're going to add the last muscle group on either side of our arrow here. I think to be as clear as possible, I'm going to do line work over what I've got so far, so we can really clearly distinguish between what we're adding next and what we've done. Just by adding those lines and colors, we can clearly see where we filled in now and it's starting to look like muscle mass clearly defined. But also where we need to do the rest and that is on either side. But first things first we have that arc for those interlocking muscles run along. Now, you don't necessarily have to draw that whole arc every time, I actually found it easy to find where that middle of the chest point is and drew a line down. It usually just heads in that same outwards direction. Start defining the silhouette from the back there and then you can pull that out to the side. Because at the bottom of this arc will be where the bottom interconnecting muscle has stretched out and then comes in again to that groin. Now frankly, whenever I draw these muscle groupings in illustrations, I just bring it because people aren't looking at the details that much. You really can just make sure you're just drawing some interlocking lines. As long as you get the shape and position right, people aren't going to count the amount. Now on the other side here, we have an area that pushes out on the silhouette, which is where the rib cage continues, then we're coming back in for the torso. We're really working on the silhouette before we start figuring out muscles because they were coming back out to the hips again. I just find it's important to work on the silhouette first because if you start trying to do interconnecting muscle groups, you'll mess up the silhouette and that's the most obvious mistake that you can make. With the silhouette there in place, you can just allude to those muscle groups and then with your line-work, just give it a little more form. Just some little bumps just to indicate that that muscle grouping is there, but you don't need to be extreme. These side muscles don't technically meet the middle of the abdomen. When dividing our muscle groups into colors, you can actually see how even though the chest, when it comes to the role of muscle tissues that we looked at in our early construction and our reference can be quite complicated. You can really simplify a lot of this complication into three core groups. The chest, the middle of the abdomen, or the arrow, and then the peripheral side muscles. Look at that, ain't that easy. Who would have thought? Let's do it again, this time with a female body. Now, remember, we're just having a different approach in construction here, so just a slightly more narrow rib cage and less prominent shoulders, but also wider hip bones. With the wider hips, the legs tend to be slightly more separated from the center. Then on top of my construction, I'm going to draw the construction for the breasts. Starting out with that eye drop shape, the breast hangs below the muscle tissue itself, but not by far. That's the co-construction you need. It's also helpful to start shaping out the silhouette, drawing that center line that goes down the abdomen and bringing that torso in particular because we're starting to have the shape that needs to turn into a little bit of an hourglass figure. At least comparative to the more generic male anatomy. Let's move on to our muscle groupings. Chest coming out from the armpit, not quite meeting in the middle and curving around our shoulder, love heart shape. We have the arrow of the abdomen following along down the middle. Not quite an arrow, but just spreading out a little bit towards the bottom and then closing in towards the groin. Then our side muscles with those lines coming out from the center of the chest. Then we can line up where these abdomen lines are and there's interlocking, interconnecting side muscles. That's the muscle blocking and shaping down really. Before I add any detail, I'm going to draw the silhouette or the shape of the breast on top here. I'm going to use my eraser just to erase behind, so you can clearly see that these are resting on top of the muscle structure. Speaking of which now that we get to adding definition on top, we can actually show that the chest muscle is actually visible for a little bit before the breast appears on top. There we have the foundation of a male and female torso represented with very viscerally clear anatomy connections. Give it a go yourself, practice your blocking specifically between the differences in proportion of male and female torsos. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Torso: Function: Welcome back to Torso Time. I'm your host, Jazza, and we are looking at the function of the front of the torso: the chest, the abdomen, and the side muscles. As we looked at with the arms and legs, muscles contract when they're working and performing a function, they expand, stretch out, or relax more when an opposing muscle group is functioning. This part will bring your arms and upper body down and forwards, where this lower area is in charge of lifting your legs and pelvis up. As you can imagine, with a gradient all the way along here, this big muscle group in the middle is a big axis of the crunch. That's why people do lots of sit-ups to get abs, and makes these groups of muscles stronger. That's why a bench press, pushing forwards, is all about building the chest. I think that's relatively clear as far as function goes. What about the outside areas here, these peripheral sideways ab muscles? In the same way that the central abdomen muscles pull you forward, sideways ones pull you sideways. There's a heavy bucket of water next to you and you lift it up, and you're lifting it up with this arm, it's going to be this section of muscles that's working that butt off, so you can hold that bucket of water up, and of course the shoulder and all the other muscles, they're all interconnected, but you get the point. Because you get the point, we are going to put it into practice and draw quite a few different functional versions of the torso. I'm going to draw two extremes, a very symmetrical fully pushed in and scrunched up torso, and the opposite, a fully stretched out, completely expanded, elongated front torso. Let's start off with the full scrunch. Blocking rib cage scrunched in and leaning forwards, bending over. To draw this properly, the arms need to be forward because the chest pulls the arms forward. But to clearly show the muscle structure, I'm just going to draw an empty area where the shoulders are meant to go. I'll draw this arm reaching out, but I can't draw this one without covering up all the work I'm trying to show you. Let's have the pelvis completely angled upwards, because we're in a crunch position as well. I'm starting to roughly block in the meat of the silhouette before I move on to the linework of the muscles. In this position, the chest is really contracted, really pulling the whole front arm forward, and poking out a bit. It's much more dense and doing a lot of work. The arrow of our torso, the abdomen, is going to be a lot shorter than in any other parties, because everything is all squished up, and our central line is very short comparative to it being stretched. Then a line that goes out from the center of the chest that turns into our side abdomen muscles, that still too out there. But we're going to actually see the back quite a bit more visibly, which we're going to touch on later, I'm just alluding to it now. But that actually is the construction of my torso muscles pretty much done. When I draw the linework, the chest is going to hang quite heavily over the lower part of the body. Now I can draw the dividing lines of the abdomen here. But it's going to look very different in reality because they have very much overlapping each other. They're scrunched up so tightly that they going to just look like lumps. Then we have these interlocking muscles here. Again, I like to keep it simple and just draw my interlocking, fanning out muscles allude to the back muscle there. These muscles here that interconnect to the side of the abdominal and the lower ends towards the groin a, re actually going to be flexed because they're pulling up the legs. To add full clarity, we're going to use our red and green to show the squash and stretch. That is a fully scrunched up torso. Let's draw the opposite. Same thing, let's start with that blocking. We have a rib cage, this time we're leaning back. The position indicator, I'm going to draw the spine. This time I'm going to draw the inside of the pelvis, because everything is angled so extremely that this is going to be like someone flying off into the distance, is going to have quite an aerial jumping look to it, because everything is going to be so stretched out and facing forwards. That's my blocking, as you can see, it's really rough. Blocking is rough, it's meant to be. We can start to refine as we shape, but I don't have a solid idea of the outlines of the silhouettes because I'm adding that now as I go. Solving for the chest, we have the central area here where it meets, but actually we're so pulled and stretched out, but there's very little overhang on top of the abdomen, if anything it's pulled right along the connective tissue, the point where the bottom of the chest is. The arrow of the torso is so much taller now, look how tall it's reaching and pointing. This is a really expanded and stretched-out torso. Then we have these middle pointing out sideways abdominal muscles. I'm going to keep calling him that, just try and stop me, you're not going to. Now let's allude to how this stretches into the arm muscle on the shoulder here. This is a really stretched-out torso. Let's start adding linework to show how it's going to be visible. Let's do the same thing. Let's highlight there, squash and stretch, and really it's going to look very green, because all of the squash is back here, everything is being pulled back from behind. There's very little work happening at the front of the body, because all of the chest and central abdomen muscles are being pulled and stretched to their fullest extent. Look how different the front of the torso looks from the left to the right. Let's put it into practice. Let's draw a more realistic, more organic pose, not as extreme as either of these, but using the mechanisms of the muscles to make it look organic. Let's start off with a rib cage. Let's have it on a bit of an upwards angle here, facing up because this arm is reaching up, maybe he's holding on to one of those hanging handles on a train. Maybe this arm is resting on a knee that's raised. Let's have the pelvis tilted slightly. Aiming up here because the cylinder of the knee, this is going to have some foreshortening because the leg is going to be about here. Then we have the blocking of the limbs in place. I'm not going to draw the details of the limbs, I'll allude to the silhouettes, but I wanted to focus on the muscle groups that we're identifying here and what work they're doing. I think it'll look more organic if he's sort over his shoulder. The head's on an angle here, we can see the neck, and this is where I can get a little bit picky. I think the biggest problem I actually am having is down here, with the leg and the arm. See how important the blocking is. If you get the blocking wrong, it doesn't matter how good the anatomy is. I think what's happening here is I need this leg to be raised, but the knee would actually be a little more in front of this groin area. I'm going to see the front of the leg there, the arms can arrest a little lower, and I can draw the construction or the blocking with the hand resting in the middle there. That's just a lot more organic than what I had before. Easy to fix, no pressure. Just feel your way through it, and if you see some problems, remove them, experiment. You have to be guilty about not getting it right the first time. Now let's start to draw our torso muscles. I'm going to begin by just alluding to the anatomy elsewhere on the body, so we don't have to think about that. Let's look at that function, starting off with the chest, we have something extreme happening on one side and not on the other. I'm going to start drawing on the not-so-extreme side, a fairly normal chest in a resting position, not really doing any work, connected to the middle here. But on the other side, really pulled up, and with the arm and elbow pulled forward. The chest is going to be contracted but also lifting because it connects with the shoulder. The chest isn't going to look like a bulky lower part of the body, it's going to start rising up because it's part of lifting the shoulder up here and how it connects to the shoulder. Then let's look at the abdomen, we're asymmetrical here, in that we're a little more scrunched on one side than the other. I can reflect that in the pose by showing the muscles a little more prominently and a little more scrunched together on one side. Then on the other side, far less detail and far more stretching in the anatomy. Then when we add our linework on top, we can start to really show that specifically in the areas that are doing the most work. The result is something asymmetrical, as far as what is doing work, is really consistent and also quite organic. One of the reasons it's so organic is that it's not extreme. It's hard to draw extreme poses, but also extreme poses are less common. While it isn't fun occasionally to test your boundaries and how far you can push your understanding of anatomy by pushing drawings of anatomy to the limits, it's far more realistic and way more satisfying to draw representations of anatomy like this, which are more natural, little less extreme in general, but also really organic and a little asymmetrical in their presentation. How cool is that? Once you understand what does what work, it's so much easier to understand how to draw that in your poses, and how to represent that through anatomy and illustrations. We're done with the torso, there's so many different combinations of ways that you can represent the torso, the chest, the abs, in different poses. You could twist the body, and you can really contort it and have some fun. Whatever level you're at, give it a go. Challenge yourself at the level you're most comfortable, and slowly you can push your own boundaries and come to a greater understanding of how to represent that anatomy, and share your progress with the class. I will see you in the next lesson where we move on to the other half of the torso, the form of the back. I'll see you there. 11. Back: Form: Hey, your back. Let's draw backs. In this video, we're going to draw the form of the back muscle structures, so that you can learn to draw the back without any drawbacks. Starting off with our reverse blocking, I've got my reference here, I'm just going to bring that down and scribble on top. I'll start the same way I do with the chest, with some construction of my go-to torso shape. It's the same for me from reverse as it is from the front. Sometimes I have a central line to indicate a position and I usually of course allude to the shoulders, the neck, and then of course I have to indicate where the pelvis is. That for me is basic back construction. The back is more complicated when it comes to the muscle structure, or at least it feels complicated because it's less understood. Let's simplify it. Starting off with this upper area that goes up in and into the neck. Drawing a flat on the back and on the 3/4 side view. It's spreads out to these two side pointy bits. They tuck into the shoulder love hearts that we keep referring to. See, it's all interconnected. The upper back muscles connect into the top of the shoulders or the indentation in that shoulder love heart. Then after the shoulders they go down and connect closer to the middle of the back, that is the upper back muscle. Now much like the chest, you can say they don't connect directly into themselves or into its own muscle group, rather they divide. You could make that distinction but frankly, the muscles are so hard to show you when you're illustrating and in real life they're fairly obscure unless someone's really muscular. You can simplify this by, aside from knowing where these outer shapes are, knowing that this diamond shape just under the base of the neck at the back there that has no muscle on it. Really cool to know that one because then we just have this diamond in the middle there with no muscle, and we know that we're spreading out into that shoulder connecting point from the diamond, and then down into this connecting point on the lower back. You can see how it's subdivides into two directions. One going out to the shoulders, the other connecting to the back. But if we're being really simple, which we want to be, that is our upper back muscle shape. The next largest grouping that we're going to identify is this shape under here. As you can see with all the fibers underneath it all stretches up in towards under the armpit. But you can simply draw and indicate this muscle group by thinking of it as almost like it's cradling the shoulder blades, which is under these muscle groups. Back to our reference here. We've got a diamond area without any muscles, we've got the upper back that connects into the shoulders, wraps around that shoulder muscle, at least around the top edges, and connects down towards the middle. Then you've got this other large area of muscle spreading out from this middle point, wrapping around in towards underneath the arms, and stretching down towards the tail. In fact, I actually think of this muscle group as looking a little bit like a manta ray. Sometimes it helps to have little shapes to remember what something looks like. Then we do have another smaller group of muscle that fans out from underneath here. That's our initial learning out of the way, let's practice it into practice with some pencil and paper. Starting with our torso, my go-to rib cage shape, some ball joint circles for the arms come out. In fact, let's try the back off properly here, I'm going to raise these arms a little bit so you can just see how the back muscles widen just tad as the arms are spread out a little bit. Especially because the back muscles connect to underneath the arms. We go to the pelvis, put some rough blocking in their, rough blocking for the neck. Let's start putting in some muscles starting off with this upper back. Remember we have the diamond shape, I find it quite helpful to draw half the diamond on the neck and half the diamond on this upper back area. It's like a dividing line. Then we have the muscles come up and conjoin, and connect to the back of the head. But add a little bit of mass on top here to where it connects into the top of the shoulder. I can draw that shoulder in there, and as I draw that shoulder wrapping around behind, I'm actually drawing the border of the upper back. That wraps back around the shoulder bit before it comes in and connects down at the bottom and middle. That is our upper back. Then we have this large lower back muscle. The manta ray coming down and into the tail bone area. How simple was that? It was these nestling lines under the shoulder blade area and then these curved lines that come in towards where the butt starts. Then last but not least, we have the lowest areas of the abdominal muscles starting and wrapping around from behind the back here. Then we get into the glutes and you can see how it's connected to the legs. Just like how the front of the torso is the connecting point for the rest of the body, so is the back. Let's maximize that clarity here with some line work. I would recommend dividing the back into these four core muscle areas, the upper back, the lower back, and then more peripheral or support muscle groups. How cool is that? It can be really simple. I used to be so intimidated by drawing backs. If I'm honest, sometimes I still am. But if I anchor myself to a few key things like the areas where there are no muscle, the inconnecting shapes of the back to the shoulders and the glutes. Then those four distinct groups of muscles, the two major ones and then those two peripheral ones. Putting those things into practice can actually make the back a really simple thing to draw and make you look really impressive when you actually know how to do it. Share your progress in the project section, and join me in the next video when I go through the function of the back. 12. Back: Function: Welcome back to the back. I won't burden you with as many back puns as I served the last video with. Wouldn't make that mistake again, otherwise you'd never come back. I'm sorry. We've looked at the form of the back, now we're looking at a function. Just like the front of the body, the back has a reverse function. Whenever your arms go back or your shoulders go back, whenever you chest tilts up and your pelvis forward, that is your back contracting and pulling it into that shape. Your back is doing all that work. I actually have in my photo reference and pulse pack for anatomy, form and function of all the different oscillated areas of the body. It's a great example of the back in particular because you can see how much squash and stretch there actually can be in the back. Specifically, the visibility of the muscle groups of the back, as you can see are very visible if someone is muscular with a low body fat content in the areas of the most bulky back muscles, but when stretched out, nearly invisible. These are two polar opposite back poses; fully contracted and stretched back and fully reaching forward. Let's start off by drawing the muscle groups and it's going to be easiest to do on the left here. We can see that diamond shape that has no muscle. We can see the upper back and how it connects into the shoulder muscles here, but actually how already short it is because it's really scrunched up. We can see the shoulder muscle interconnecting here, that love heart shape. The shoulders are quiet scrunched up too because everything is pulling up and look how contracted this middle upper back section is. It's a sliver of what the form of the back showed, which is really interesting, it shows how differently the muscles are going to look and be positioned based on the function. Then we have the second major area of back muscles wrapping in and up into underneath the armpits and coming in and around towards the tail bone. There is a subdivision that's much clearer in this tens position where you can see it fans out in that direction. Then these dividing lines in here, the secondary muscle groups are doing a lot more work and they are a lot bigger. It is worthwhile noting the direction of muscle groups, so you can draw that dividing line and have them expand and working when the body is in this shape. Then of course we have the other secondary muscle group coming out in this direction wrapping around to the front of the abdomen. I mean, look at stream that is, it's really cool to see an even more extreme when you go right next to the back here, we can't really see the triangle because he's reaching so far forward, but you can see how far stretched out that upper back is. Then even down here you can see it connect. That is the upper back. Look at the difference there at how far stretched out. Same here we have this under section. It stretches out in quite a wide way and then we have this further divided area, subdividing, wrapped around at the shoulder muscles which are super stretched forward now. Really interesting I think to see such a distinct difference when the back is fully performing its function and then fully relaxed and stretched out. To make this even clearer, I'm going to add a little bit of color. Now I think it could be any clearer than that how extreme the back can be when it's really working. It is one of the most misunderstood muscle areas of the entire body because we just tend to leave it on the backbone. I'm going to draw three backs. The first two are going to be a fully scrunched up and then fully stretched out just like we did with the front of the torso. Then I'm going to finish off with something a little more dynamic and asymmetrical. First our stretch, draw our ribcage, we're on a really extreme angle here. We're showing the entire underside of this ribcage blocking, but also the entire inside of the pelvis because the pelvis is stretched and angled so far forward that we have a lot of stretch room for our back here. I'm also going to draw the shoulders, but they're going to be hard to see. They're going to be less visible because the chest is pulled them so far forward. Same with the head, it's going to be quite low because the head and neck is stretched down. In the blocking for scrunched up back, we're going to do the opposite of course. Start with the head, go into the neck and start blocking in the back or the ribs, this time angled on an extreme upwards angle, might even show the top of the shoulders and have the arms come back like this simply because I want it to really show you that I'm pulling the arms back or the back is pulling the arms back. Then on this angle, the pelvis is going to be angled quite extremely the other way and the legs coming back. They're my blocking, that's how I block out both of those extremities. It all makes sense in my head. I know it looks quite scribbly, but it'll make sense more now, when I start to show you the anatomy on top. Let's start off with the little diamond of missing muscle and really stretch out our upper back to wrap around our shoulders and really spread wide. Then we've got the lower back caving down again, spread quite wide, meeting up down the middle here. For further clarity, I'm just going to do the long work of these sections now because you can do the next bit with these locked in place, these are the most obvious and important muscle groups of the back to get right first. The secondary back muscles are going to flow and appear much easier with these in place. I've drawn the two larger areas of back muscles. Then we have the secondary areas, which again we have that dividing line as it stretched out. Everything is so stretched out, it's really not that important to get too detailed. Look at that, that looks like as good as a back drawn, they're the same. Next, let's draw the contracting back muscles. That diamond shape is going to be a little lower because everything's all scrunched up, but it's also going to be a little smaller. The neck muscles coming down, connecting to the shoulders are going to be quite, scrunched up. As we saw, this middle area of the upper back really pulls in there as the lumps of the muscles overlap each other. I'm going to do the line work of these before I do the secondary muscles again, just for as much clarity as possible. When really contracting like this, you can just get quite lumpy. You don't have to be super neat and organized about how everything is all contracted. It's all really squished. It's a really tight and condensed. The triceps are going to overlay onto the back here just because they're being pulled back so far. Everything is really smushed up. We're going to see a little bit of squashing as the arms are pulled over and in front of the back a little bit. There are the two main areas of the back done. Now I can just allude to the other two secondary groupings, just with a few lines. Then draw in the silhouette. Last but not least, I can show you quite clearly where all this work is happening with my red color. That is a very contracted back as opposed to an extremely expanded and stretched out back. Now let's do something somewhere in the middle. I'm going to do a pose stretching over and forwards in this direction. The torso is scrunched up. I'm going to have this arm reaching up and forward like so and I'm going to have the back arm, a construction of the shoulder there, pulled back. That's my blocking in place and let's start to put the back muscles in. Starting off with our little diamond triangle of no muscle connecting to the neck, scrunched up on this side. As the arm and shoulder are lifted up the shoulder is also going to be quite tense and scrunched up, angled forward as is reaching forward. Even though they were scrunched up at the top here, it's going to be a little more stretched on the upper back, then on the other side where the arm is pulled up and back directly, it's going to start looking a little asymmetrical. We're more stretched in the upper back on the left side compared to the right side. Then we do the lower back muscles stretching out and connecting down to the tail bone. Again, for clarity, I'm going to do some line work now in the state that I've got the back in before I add any more details or secondary muscles. I'm just going to show you by how I'm drawing these lines that I'm creating the lumps based on the stretch and contortion. With a really extreme pose, we've got a real zigzagging of compression and stretching in the muscles, but a result that actually creates a really organic look and shows the muscles contracting and distorting around the function of the muscles. Exactly why we've gone through all of these core groups of muscles through form first, but then function second, equally as important as the form because without the function there's no reason for the muscles. I'm really hoping that this and the previous lesson has helped you understand how to be confident drawing backs. Especially after this one, to be confident, knowing how it works, the reasons for the muscles positioning, their connecting points, and how it looks in different functional poses. Give it a go, start with the blocking of some more trickier poses and arms and legs in different directions, scrunches in different places with the back. Add your anatomy on top and give yourself some practice familiarizing yourself with the back in different functional poses. But that's it for this lesson. It's actually all that remained for all of the lessons covering the core muscle groupings. But now comes the best bit. In the next few lessons we're going to go through those three initial steps that I outlined, the blocking and the shaping that we've done a load off and then finally the defining all the choices of how to show that on the surface through several expressive poses to a final conclusion. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. 13. Blocking Full-Body Poses: It's time to go crazy with everything we've learned and do the best bit, the funnest bit, put it all together. Make up poses and figure out how do you convey anatomy and muscle structures on poses that you can invent. I'm going to draw four poses that will end up in four linework illustrations at the end of the next four videos. Starting off with, I think a bit of a bodybuilder pose. We've been doing this basically drawing bodybuilders. Might as well start where we've been leaning on, so start off with my torso, my rib cage shape, blocking in the shoulders. When I'm blocking a whole body part, I'd like to start really broadly and try and get as much of the pose roughing in as possible for us to start defining and making little tweaks and changes to the proportions. I want to get a flow of motion, I want the pelvis angled forwards like this. Draw those underpants, blocking with some circles for the legs you're going to start out of. I wanted to try and do a proper bodybuilder pose where rather than just having arms on the waist, they're flexing, they are pulling in and pressing and compressing to show their musculature in the chest and the triceps. So the elbow is more forwards in this more bodybuilderesque pose than a normal relaxed pose. We got our core blocking in, now I'm moving on to our cylindrical arm blocking. You'll notice me catch disproportionate areas pretty quickly. I think especially because I've got a practiced style. If that's not working then I'll just erase and start again. It's really important when you're in this blocking phase to just be really rapid and if you catch it, just change it. No pressure, just nothing set in stone. This is the time to make quick decision changes. I'm going to do the hip thing, so I'm going to have this front leg little bend forward. I want him to look a bit like Mr. Universe and this other leg straightened and back. You'll notice my blocking and especially because I'm a little more experienced when it comes to drawing anatomy. We'll often start to allude to the shape of the muscles and I'm going to end up defining more later but I'm also just beginning to rough that in the silhouette just because I have an idea of where I want things to go. We're going for that real poster of Mr. Universe look because we're being extreme. I'm pretty happy with that core blocking. I think, the head maybe looks a little big. If I make the head a little smaller, logic says that it'll make the rest of the body look bigger and we're trying to go ridiculous, so let's go ridiculous. That's one pose out of four done. Next, let's stick with bodybuilders. This time, let's draw a female bodybuilder, maybe be in the middle of a lift. So as I did before, I'm going to start off with my torso, my rib cage shape. But because I have a specific connection point on lifting something, there's a bar, there is feet on the ground, I'm actually going to draw a bit of a stick figure first before I get too stuck into the blocking. So I want the legs to be parted like this, a really strong grounded stance on the arms to be brought right down from the shoulders, since the weight is going to be directly held up. All of the weight needs to be carried in a straight line. Again, I'm wanting to be my own reference here. If I'm holding something, my pelvis is pushed forward and my shoulders are pulled down. The abdomen is also thrust forwards and the chest is out. So she's going to be looking down, her shoulders are going to be pulled quite drastically down. Her hips are going to be tilted up. Remember our proportions, the hips are going to be about as wide as the shoulders. Then we can start to add some more physical blocking. So as cylinders of arms, my arms are a little wider than I've drawn here, so I'm just going to undo it. No biggie. Way more important to me that I draw something that's going to look natural and organic and I can test that with my own body. Arms are out here simply because they want to rest beside the legs rather than in front of the legs because they're pulling back by the hips. I think this change is going to create a much stronger pose overall. I'm hoping to see how fluid you can be in this initial blocking process. Not happy, change it. Now's the time. This time I'm going to draw a male, maybe leaning on a bench with his hips twisted, starting for the blocking in the torso. I'm going to go for a bit of an extreme shoulder chain, his left shoulder is quite high. He's going to be leaning on it. So I want the support to be really clear. I've got a straight arm shape and blocking of the upper arm and then into the lower arm, all in part of that straight arm shape. Then the hand is going to be pushed backwards because it's just resting on that. His other shoulder can just be relaxed and by his side. Speaking of his side, I have his spine sort of killed under here and his pelvis angled slightly upwards. Let's have this front leg leaning out, we'll have the edge of the table that he's leaning on. His rear leg here is just standing up straight and his front leg is relaxed. This is a good example of having two anchor points. We've got one going straight down through the arm and then another one straight down through the opposite leg. That lets us be really relaxed with the blocking of our opposing arm and leg. Then we can just allude to the silhouette on top of that. Now let's draw a female. We're going to start off with the torso, slight angle, a little more forward facing. Sometimes I like to show the opposite shoulder hip effect. This time it's going to be hand on the hip. So this hip is raised with this leg being the anchor, so I'm going to draw straight line down. I can use the shoulders to figure out how wide the hips might need to be and then do the blocking of the leg following that line down. Now this leg can be much more relaxed. I'll have it starting in and then just fanning out. The shoulder is going to be doing a little bit of work to raise the arm, but then the rest of the arm can be quite relaxed. Now in the case of the female body builder that I drew, I did a lot of the focus on the arm and the muscles first. But usually I would actually do the blocking of the breasts before I start working on the muscles. Usually I do this by drawing two circles and then creating the white pattern that would emerge from the white bearing of the skin and then connecting that to where the muscles might go. I'm pretty happy with that, except I feel like this elbow should probably pop out a little bit more. I feel like the arm needs to the raised higher and the hand visible on top of the hip there. That I can move on to the shaping of the anatomy on top. 14. Shaping Full-Body Anatomy: Now it's time to do some shaping on top. When it comes to putting meat on the bones, if we're going extreme, let's go extreme. Starting off with our arms, which was the first thing we covered. This love hot shoulder shape, wrapping around between the bicep and tricep. Now, this is slightly twisted pose because the tricep is coming forward here. We've got the elbow around the front here. I'm going to have the tricep start to wrap around to the side there and the bicep pull around in towards the armpit. We have this forearm muscle coming in from between the bicep and tricep and wrapping around towards the thumb. Sorry, it is worth me pointing out that I'm literally using myself as a reference. That's what it looks like. Drawing, I want to know what muscle goes where. I know that muscle connects to the thumb, so it's going to stay visible at the front. I'm literally checking myself. Then I've actually got to go the other way because, see, I checked thinking I was doing that, but I'm doing that, and that forearm muscle wraps a lot further around doing it that way. Now that I've checked, I can fix that, wrap that muscle all the way around because that's going to go all the way around to the thumb, whereas this muscle is going to start to pop out in front as it connects to the pinky. This shoulder and the chest are going to be really flexing here. Sorry, I'm going to start to bring out the chest, it's pushing the arm forward, so we're going to want to show you that in the way the muscle fibers are compressed and working. You'll notice some starting with the front-most area of anatomy and working my way through sequentially, moving into the area of the abdomen, creating the divisions of the six-pack, drawing those lines out from the chest, and dividing it into those muscle groups. Let's finish the upper body, going across to the other arm here. Again, I'm going front to back. It's not in order of limbs. This tricep is going to be showing out on top as this bicep is curled up on here. Again, checking it wrapping around quite a lot here. It's a very twisted pose, but I think the point of a pose like this in bodybuilding is to have as many muscles doing as much work as possible. I feel like that arm is a little larger, so I'm actually just going to lift it. I don't need to redo my blocking. I'm pretty happy with where it was, so I'm just literally redrawing all of that just a little bit higher. I'm just a bit more confident with that positioning now. Now, we get into the legs, starting off with this line that comes out from the edge of the hip there, and then into this group of three muscles which can be quite convenient to draw, all in the one shape and branching out as you go. The outside of the leg is higher, the inside tips lower, and beside the knee. Then we mirror across on this site, and this time because the knee is straight, the cord here is going to really stick out. The other thing that's looking a little odd to me is the upper arm on this side. Now, that I can see it all together, it looks a little too long while this looks a little too short. I can literally, again, just undo that area, bring the algebraic construction up, and just reshape my muscles around these slightly different proportions. That looks much more natural to me. Now, you can actually see where I've already started to create some expansion of done thicker shoulder or upper back muscles here. As part of my blocking, that's not the ribcage or anything, that's just me knowing where the muscles are going to go. Sorry, sometimes the step blend into each other as you become more experienced, but now is where I really create the distinction between these muscle groups. Now, what's doing the work? Not the shoulders, believe it or not. I mean, at the end of the day, the whole body will be activated and working very hard, but the shoulders are quite stretched out, so with the biceps. The triceps, on the other hand, are going to be quite firm. You'll see them poking out at the back there. Now, the other thing I'm keeping in mind, which I'll point out to you, is with some lifting parts is sometimes the hands are inversed. Holding the ball, one hand is in, one hand is out. I'm doing that in this case because that's going to have an effect on how the muscles position. This arm is positioned in a way that the thumb is on the inside, and all of the muscles I've drawn so far a supporting that. The forearm muscles wraps around towards the thumb, the bicep is slightly facing in, so we can see the tricep, it's wrapping around this way. Whereas on the other side, the inverse is happening. Because the thumb is facing out, the bicep is going to show out further on this side. We're not really going to see the tricep. I might draw the hand first so we can reference where the forearm muscles end up. We know that the muscle between the bicep and tricep ends up at around the thumb. That's pretty much going to be invisible. Whereas on the other side, this one's going to be showing a little bit more, and then we have a couple of tendons in here at the wrist that are going to poke out of it. Two arms in a very similar position, but just by twisting the wrist there, you can see that it actually shows quite a different presentation for both arms. Now, the next thing I'm going to draw is the chest, not the chest muscles specifically, but the breast because they're going to be protruding based on the pose and the fact that the chest is pushing out. I'm going to draw the chest underneath, I've going back to my blocking pencil, and then I'm just going to block out and shake the breast on top. The breast will be leaning out towards the edges there as the chest is opened up. I'm going to draw my arrow stretched out at the lower end with slightly more contracted higher abdomen muscles. Now, going back to my shaping pencil, the chest muscles are going to be doing quite a bit of work here holding this, so I will actually show you them flexing on top and connecting to the shoulders. Speaking of shoulders where they connect up here to the back muscles of the upper back muscles, that is doing a lot of work. That, as you can see, is really bulked out as the shoulders are really pulled down with a white of this bar that's being held. Remember, because of the shape of the pelvis thrusting forward, the glutes are actually going to be visible behind here, but otherwise, most of the work is being done in the upper body and the legs are just being held in a really strong stable position to support that lift. Most of the work in the legs is going to be done in the glutes and then the quads. We show that on the front, with those really strongly condensed and contracted quad muscles, and we'll finish this sketch off with a bar, which of course is going to really make sure we know what's happening here. Starting again with that prominent shoulder, and we're going to have a really pushed-up tricep in this one and the bicep muscles stretched out because the arm is straight. That inside bicep, tricep muscle, not too much definition there, but I'm going to add a little bit more prominence here on the other side of those muscles doing a bit of work. That's that front arm done, pretty happy with that. It's quite an extreme pose, so we've got a compliment that and show that we intend it by having the chest muscle being pulled up and connecting with the shoulder and then this other chest muscle being quite relaxed. Then we have the torso anatomy, that arrow shape, this time tilting forward as the pelvis is pushing forward, but actually not a lot of contracting happening in the upper body or at least in the torso. Then I'm going to do the opposite. Let's bring this shoulder down and really relax this upper arm and this forearm. Everything on his right arm is just flopped, he is just relaxed there. On this side, the leg is a little more contracted because it's bearing white but it's less visible because this leg is in front. The hamstring will be slightly tense just to lift up that lower leg. Just like the abdomen up here and maybe this muscle here will be slightly tends to lift up the leg here. But actually, overall, not too much happening contraction or expansion-wise in the legs. Starting with this front arm. Now, when you're drawing software anatomy and you know you're not going to be really extreme with the musculature, you can really just loosely allude to anatomy. All I need to show with the bicep and tricep is I've just pushed out a little bit, especially because it doesn't look like she's doing a lot of work, let's face it. This is where, honestly, I know I need to show you the muscle groups and stuff, but I have shown you all of that, and it's not really going to show in practice here. We've done the extreme version. I guess for practice sake, we might as well just rough them in, but they're not going to be there in the final drawing. We've got two more relaxed poses still with a fairly extreme definition outlined, but I'm going to do those later with a softer definition in the outlines. But in the meantime, why don't you give it a guide to draw some extreme poses yourself. Sometimes extreme in terms of athleticism, or just some more ambitious angles and contortion. Starting off with the blocking, really get that pose and sit it where comfortable and then shape your anatomy on top of that and practice how the muscles wrapped around that construction. But that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to jump into some extreme definition. 15. Adding Extreme Definition: Let's get defined to the extreme. Starting off with the male pose. Now when I talk about extreme definition, I'm talking about the defined areas of where the muscle is clear and shown but through the context of being under skin. Even bodybuilders have body fat and not all of the lines of all the interconnecting muscles are going to show. The clearest ones are, I start using my pen I can really obviously show you the most clear points of overlapping, specifically where the muscles overlapping each other in really extreme ways and the mass is really built up. We can go through the whole pose and start off with that. Consider that's the chunky parts of the definition. As you can see here with the arm, the bicep tucked behind the shoulder which is pulled forwards and visually on top of the bicep. Then this forearm muscle which is wrapped around and in front of. It is because it's a very unusual and extreme pose that the bicep is twisted in towards the body. That's what you might consider as the bulk shaping. But then we can get to, especially in these extreme situations, creating some lines to indicate some of the muscle grouping. Remember how the shoulder muscle is divided into three, with a bodybuilder you'll probably want to outline or at least allude to that distinction, those separated muscle groups and that love heart shape we keep referring to. Also do this thing now and then where rather than just drawing a line, because too many lines are appealing. Sometimes I just draw a couple of little small lines like little textured lines. For skin that helps to create the look of maybe where a vein might be passing through that connection point or just texture of a skin, it doesn't have to mean anything specific it just looks cool. Then for some specific sections, let's say the bicep here, you might have some lines that stretch out like that. Maybe some in the shoulder to really show the muscle working really tight and contorted. Particularly here as we go into the chest, it's a great example of how all of that chest muscles interconnects under the armpit area. You can show that off in our bodybuilder for having that really tensed out and bulk out here. Even here where it connects to the chest. It's where the muscle either connects to other muscles and interlocks or to connecting tissue, doing a lot of work and being really stretched to an extreme degree. Now we have the blocking of the abs here, but it's all just fairly flat but because it's so scrunched now where am I adding the line work and adding our definition, we can add shape to it, really bulk it out and squish it together. We need to leave some room for skin. Not a lot because bodybuilders don't have a lot of fat under their skin, but you might want to just add some folds where you think the skin might be particularly stretched or might be doubled over. You still want it to look somewhat naturalistic. Again, as we get to the legs here, we can use line and line white and silhouette to really push those muscles that are doing the most work. With this leg that are straight, these quads are really pushed out here and so is the other side of the outside of the leg. I can just really make that show the inside. So it's very taut and tight and muscular because he's a bodybuilder but he's much more stretched. On this other leg, it's not going to be doing as much work because much of the work will be happening in the abs here to lift up the knee and underneath the hamstring to lift up the lower leg. Still worth with a bodybuilder at least showing those muscle groups doing their work. Then we have an extremely high point to find male anatomy pose. Using some of those techniques and decision-making tips, you can make the muscle groups stand out but also look really interconnected and show the muscles working really hard by sharing those fibers, stretching or really compressed and create a pose that looks strong and an anatomy that looks really dense. Let's do the same with our female bodybuilder. I'm going to start with the long work in the chest here because it's standing out and pushing forward in this really strong stance. I'm going to tweak the silhouette as I go a little bit. If I'm not happy with it, that's the power that line where it gives you and coming back with fresh eyes just to pull the shoulders lower, just because of how much white I wanted to look like this bar has. Then, again, because of how this arm is twisted, I can have the triceps really park out here. This forearm muscle wrap around. Quite clearly and quickly, I've got some defined muscle groupings and anatomy showing with this female liftoff. See the same with the other arm but this time the bicep is going to be showing a little further out because the arm twisted the other way. Triceps hinting out underneath, but the muscle groups in the forearm is going to be far less twisted than on the other side because the thumb is facing outwards like this. Remember when something is being very aggressively gripped, the forearms are working extremely hard. I've shown out there. I want to show the chest working hard too, by just pushing up here on this chest muscles, you can see the top of the chest working and showing through even behind the breasts. The abdominal muscles at the top are going to be extra scrunched up, but we're going to just relax and stretch out a bit as we get to the lower ab muscles. Let's face it, there's so much work happening it's important to show someone working really hard. There's going to be a lot of veins in the neck, there's going to be a lot of tensing and stretching so we've got to really show you that work there. Through the forearms, through the neck, through the upper shoulders. Now we get to the hips and the legs. We have a bar there behind. I'm just going to draw the bar as straight as I can without a ruler, which it turns out, isn't extremely straight but let's just keep going. Then behind that I can start working on the legs. Now the hardest working muscles in here are going to be the side muscles as part of quads. Second-most these middle quad muscles, and then third and a little more stretched out mainly as you can see because the leg is lifted up this way. These side quad muscles are doing a bit of that lifting which stretches out the other side of the quads. Now in this case, it's tense and as tight as it can possibly be. I'm going to try and show you more of these lower leg muscles. We have the front lower leg muscle coming in from the outside of the knee, tensed and stretching all the way along down there, but also usually there's tendons and some of the bone and poking out through to create some more of those lines. Then we have the calf muscles really tense and tight and then showing through from behind here. However, all this is an extremely strong bodybuilder pose. I can feel the wide of that bar pulling down and she's anchoring her body in a straight position. Especially because I have shown the shoulder muscles tensed and stretched. The upper back folding over, really contracted up here and the gripping muscles of the forearms and then anchoring on the sides of the legs out here and really showing a lot of that tension. We can add a few more of these lines indicating those muscle fibers and some of those connection points by completing a little random. Because there's lots of lines under there so we're just deciding to show a few. Finish up by shading out various underpants to have the anatomy really stand out. There we have it, some extremely defined and hyper muscled male and female anatomy. After all the lessons that we've gone through, I hope you can see how these have come together from those simple stages to showing how the interconnected muscles come together. Then with these tips in this lesson as to how to really show them at work and decide what to show, what to accentuate, but also what to leave out to really make your extreme anatomy pop. I am really happy with how this turned out, but they're also extreme examples. It's going to be far more useful to everyone watching this to be able to know how to make better more subtle choices for naturalistic anatomy and let's face it, more reliable anatomy for their illustration. In the next video we're going to do that. But you know what? It's a lot easier to do the more realistic stuff if you know how to confidently do the extreme stuff. I recommend practicing the extreme stuff first, male and female really test and push in, bulk out and stretch and contort and push your understanding of anatomy to your limits. I'll see you in the next video, where I finalize the two more relaxed poses with two more relaxed defined states of skin and anatomy on top. 16. Adding Realistic Definition: Our last practical drawing demonstration, we're going to go from the extreme to the much more normal. We've got the blocking and the shaping down of our anatomy and our poses here, and all the shapes and all the definition of the anatomy are there. This is far too much for it to be realistic. After we've defined it all, actually, one of the best things you can do is decide what to keep in there, to keep it really simple and keep it really realistic. Just like with our extreme definition, we start with a larger muscle areas. But where we have the muscles start to overlap and interconnect or even bulk hard a little bit. We just don't want to show you too much. Just a line or two. Sometimes some of these texture lines, but really focusing much more on the silhouette than the interconnected muscles. Think more about the outside, then all of these lines on the inside. Think about how the skin is going to fold at the elbow and how where the muscles are stretched out so as the skin and where the muscles are a little tight or more contorted like on this side of the forearm, we're probably going to have some little allusions to those muscles working. Maybe show you some of these transitional areas. We can draw some central lines, but they usually going to be really subtle and more about alluding to depth and texture than drawing distinct areas. Now the torso is going to be the area you're going to see most change from anatomy to realism, let's face it. Not many of our torsos look like Hollywood. I think it's important to be willing to show you that in the illustrations, not every character has to be the whole [inaudible] man. We can draw where the skin overlaps. When it comes to the chest here, for example, the center of the abdomen, I'm going to draw a line alluding to this division here, but really not a lot more than that. Maybe something on this side, just like a little shape or texture. But here as well, more towards our view. Let me sort of a few textures, even a few skin folds. Here under the chest, we might have the allusion to some of these muscle pairings but don't go crazy. That is heaps, trust me. The end of the day, people are a lot softer than they are roughened course and hot and taught and tight and muscular. This is the part where we can create that softness through creating some gentle lines that inter-lock. Thinking of it as like a glove over your hand. The skin wrapped around the muscle should be generally fairly soft and not show too much definition. I'm not happy with the length of this leg. I feel like it's too long, so I'm going to go in here and see it's never to late unless you put the line work down. Just bring that leg length back a little bit, that's much more natural looking. This is an example of where you really not going to show a lot of anatomy lines internally on the leg so it's more about the silhouette. We know that there's the cord here, so we're going to bump out the skin just a little. Look how subtle that bump is it's really subtle. The knee has much more definition than the leg muscles. I might have a little bit of texture here and just show a shape here. Little overlapping line but otherwise, you really don't need more than that. Less is absolutely more when it comes to being a bit more realistic. If I wanted something in the middle here, I would probably just do a few little texture lines like that. I'll color in man pants just to finalize this pace. There you go, this is an example of what anatomy can look like in a much more natural pose and position and presentation. The muscles are all there. They're all under the surface. These side abdominal muscles are all in the right place. Even the six pack is there. Everyone has the six pack its just usually a little bit buried. All the arm muscles, all the leg muscles, everything is there but it was late as a foundation to create a very organic surface that we wrapped a soft layer of skin around. Now let's do the same thing with our more relaxed female pose. Again, just going for a really soft look here. Wherever the muscles overlay or interconnect, focus much more on the silhouette, then on the lines in the middle of the arms or the muscles. Now this is still quite a muscular female form. I think I'm still trying to show a little bit of the anatomy. I think by virtue of shaping that still quite strongly on the foundation. The figure itself is still quite bulky or strong. Baking half that and still have a soft look for something that looks natural. Again with the leg, It's much more about the silhouette than anything in the middle. I don't want to add too much definition here. Maybe like a line to show where the front of the quads are defined between the back. But it's so much more about the silhouette than it is definition. Especially when it comes to looking natural. Here in the leg. Just a few little short lines, little indication of mass. Mainly some lines every now and then for texture or to create that visual separation. Here, the legs doing a little more work and we've drawn in the foundation some distinct lines for muscles. But in the line work on top, I'm just going to gently work around that. Draw the shape for my knee, push the silhouette where it needs to be pushed, but otherwise the inside keep it really soft, really gentle. Just in a few small places, a few line textures and there we have it. My finished male and female poses with much more naturalistic definition. Now don't get me wrong. They both still very athletic looking people, but as opposed to our previous examples of extremity, these are much more realistic when it comes to general, physically fit body types. 17. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you've reached the end of my class on illustrating anatomy. We've isolated each of the core groups of muscles from the limbs to both sides of the torso, in form and function, so you know how the muscles act and react and work together or against each other. Last but not least, using the three steps, blocking, shaping, and defining, we've created four poses using two extremities and definition, to show how practical all of this stuff that we've covered in the class can be used and a final product be created. I really hope you've enjoyed this process and I can tell you, I'm really satisfied. I have loved this process. It's really satisfying to challenge yourself and push yourself further. Remember, as you make your progress, whether it be all at once now while following the class, or maybe even coming back later, share it with the class. We can't wait to see. At the end of the day, we're all in the boat, trying to be good at the same stuff, and it's really fun to be able to inspire each other. I want to thank you so much for following along. It's been a delight to put together, and I really hope you've had a delight following along. Thanks for watching everyone. I'll see you later.