Anatomy of The Male Figure - Front View

1. Introduction: Hey, hey, doing. It's Clayton here from how to draw comics.net, the how to draw comics Academy. In this lesson, we are going to be taking a look at how to draw the male figure complete with the full muscle structure, the pecs, the abdominal muscles, and the legs and the arms and all the muscles that consist within those limbs from the front view. So you're going to get the full low down of exactly how the anatomy of the human body fits together and why it's so important that we learn how to draw it accurately. Without further ado, let's jump straight into it. 2. Measuring The Proportions: Okay, so here we are in Clip Studio Paint. I've got my pencil ready to rock and roll, the Mark Bron legendary line art brush. And I want a brand new layer. We're going to lay down a single line. Now, if you want to use a ruler for this, use a ruler. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cheat here a little bit, and I'm going to just click once at the top, where I want the line to begin, and then I'm going to hold down shift on my keyboard to draw a straight line, perfectly straight lane line all the way down to the bottom of the canvas, where I want it to end. Now, that's very faint there. Let me make it a little thicker so that you can see it better. All right. That's great. Now, this line is going to represent the full height of our figure. And it's also going to establish where the middle of the figure will be, which is important here for the front view of the male figure because we want to preserve symmetry. In other words, we want to know where the middle of our figure is so that we can mirror one side of it over to the other. Okay. This height line is also going to allow us to be able to establish the head units of measurement that can be used to measure out well, the head units of measurement that can be used to determine the proportions of the front view of the male figure here. In order to find those proportions, we're going to divide the length of this line up into eighths. The easiest way to do that is to figure out where the middle is going to be. So in order to find the middle, I'm just going to create an x that runs from the bottom to the top here on either side of the line real quick. I'll do that on a different layer. So I'm going to go down here, I'm going to place an X. So I'm going to have one diagonal line. Running up from the bottom to the top, and I'm going to criss cross it with another. And where those lines intersect, that's going to be the middle. So that's going to be the middle of our measurement stick there. Now, once I've got that cross placed down and I know where the middle of the measurement stick is going to reside, I'm just going to turn that cross off. Okay, great. So this is the middle here. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to create another cross. I'll make a new layer here. What this cross is going to do is it's going to run up from the middle of the height line to the top of it. We want to try to start these on each side of the line at the same distance. And then those lines intersect, we're going to place another little d. That's going to represent the middle of the top segment. Okay. So we can do the same thing for the bottom segment. I'm going to go down here. We're going to run a diagonal line from the middle point down to the bottom. The same thing here. Now, this is just a very drawn out way of establishing our proportions, figuring out where they're going to sit. Of course, you don't have to go to this much trouble every single time. You can just eyeball it after a while, once you know what your proportions are and you become familiar with them. As you become familiar with them, that's when you can start to make the right guestimations. Okay, so we've got that cross placed in. We're going to add in another little dash. Then we can get rid of these crosses. Okay, great. So we don't want to lose sight of where the middle of our measuring stick there is. So I'm just going to embolden it a little bit. And once that's done, I'm going to divide each one of these segments into halves. So I'm going to divide this one up here, and now I am i ballan. We could draw xs for each one of these, but I don't want to spend too much time just on the proportions here. So we've got enough information there to figure out where to divide these segments and have those divisions be fairly accurate. It might not be perfect, but they'll be fairly accurate. Okay. Now once they are all divided, what do we have? We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight head units. Eight head units is the average height of most comic book figures. That's the standard that's been used for a very long while. Now, every artist has their own proportional measuring system that they like to use. Most use eight, to use nine, some use six. It really doesn't matter, and it's up to you at the end of the day and whether or not it produces the look for the characters that you're drawing that you like most. 3. Constructing The Mannequin Model: Okay. Now that we've got the measuring stick down, we're going to go ahead and we'll convert it. Well, we'll just lower the opacity of it a little bit. Okay, so we're making it slightly more C through, and I'm doing that over here on my layer in the opacity slider. I'm going to take it down to about 50. What that's going to allow me to do is just to be able to see more clearly what I'm drawing over the top of it, which is going to be my figure. Okay. Now we know how large the head is going to be. We're going to start drawing out the front view of the male figure, and what that's going to look like at this stage is the Menican model. That's the form that it's going to be in, which is pretty much the most basic form that you could possibly draw the human body in. Now, there's a number of ways we could draw up the head here. We could draw it as just a simple oval for now, or we can take it a little bit further than that. We can go ahead and start out with a circle for the cranium. Like so, and just very lightly sketch that in there. So we're keeping things pretty neat. Then we've got the middle division of the head established there. So that's running down the top from the top of the cranium to the bottom. Then we just place in another horizontal guideline that's going to run across it. That's going to ultimately establish the brow line. Then we'll chop the sides of that sphere off. Then finally, establish where the bottom of the chin is going to be. Now we know that the bottom of the chin is going to be about here. Then we simply place in the jaw line. And what that's going to give us is a pretty solid head shape. A pretty solid head shape indeed. We just erase away these little off cuts at the sides of the head. We don't need those no more. If we want to, we can even place on some ears. I'm going to also divide the distance between the brow here and the bottom of the chin in half. That's going to give us the placement of the nose. Now, we're not going to take the head too much further than that. We're going to leave it as ears and move on to the rest of the body. Next, we're going to place in the neck. If I was going to tell you where to place the shoulder line, I'd say, divide this neck head unit up into thirds and the shoulder line is going to sit on about that first third. It's just going to place it there, like so. Now everybody's different. Every single human has their own unique quirk. So as far as where everything sits, there's going to be nuances. And there's not any hard and fast rule as to how far down you need to place that collar bone. I just break it up into thirds with that second head unit because I feel like it helps make it easier for me to remember, but you got to do what works well for you and what feels right. So next up, I'm going to do something interesting here just for future reference later. I'm actually going to determine where the shoulders are by outlining them as I pull them out of the collar bone or the collarbone guideline that are placed in there. And that's just going to help me to think about how wide the body is going to be here. I'm going to just very lightly sketch it in like so. And now I know where the shoulders are. Now that I know where the shoulders are slow down, Clay. I can more confidently determine how wide the chest is going to be. So now I'm going to place in a very simplified form for the Mican model chest. And the Micandeles is going to drop down and land just above the three head unit marks. That's going to be about here. I'm going to take it down. Like so. You can see that I'm keeping this manican model fairly light. That's because keep in mind, we're going to be drawing the muscle structure of the male body over the top of it. We're just taking this step by step. And remember that we're trying to keep things even on either side. I want to keep things symmetrical. In other words, we want to try our best to keep it the same. Now, this shape that I'm placing down onto the page, it represents the chest cavity, it represents the rib cage. Once we've taken it down to this point just above the three head mark, we're going to arch it up. Now, how far we arch it up, it's up to you. It really doesn't matter. I'm going to take mine up to about here. And I guess that's where the Sandum would land. Which is the front of the rib cage. Now that we've got the rib cage established, I'm going to place in a cross contour, that's going to curve in a slightly upward direction just around the middle there. Why is it curving slightly upward direction? Because from the side view, if you were able to see the side view of the male figure here, then you would see that the chest actually is tilted backward. You know, this is the head here. It's tilted upward, faces in an upward direction, which actually opposes the tilt of the pelvis. Believe it or not. Okay, so we've got the chest laid down in there. Next up, we're going to draw in the pelvis. Okay? And in order to draw in the pelvis, I'm just going to drop down the mid section toward the pelvis. And that'll help me to determine the width of the pelvis. Now what I'm going to do is draw in the bottom of the pelvis. Now, where does the bottom of the pelvis sit? Well, on a male, it sits just below just below the forehead mark. Because we've got to leave a little bit of room down there in the base of the crutch area for the men. Then we're going to draw in the sides. And then simply take this diagonal line up from the base of the pelvis into the bottom of the sides of those walls there. And then finally, we're going to segment it off at the belt line. This is a very neatly drawn Menken model. I usually keep them much rougher than this. But we want to make sure that we do things right here. And then we're going to cut in some leg holes. Those leg holes are going to look like this, start from the bottom, and then just curve it up to the top and out to the sides. And as with the chest, we can place in a downward this time, curving cross con line. And we'll solidify the mid section of the body that joins the chest and the pelvis together. Okay, so now we've got the main torso drawn in there. We can also lay in the neck. The neck is just going to have a cylindrical trunk with some muscles running out from the sides of it. That's the kind of shape that we want to capture for that area. Okay, great. Next, we'll go ahead and place in the legs. Now, the legs. How do they work? Well, we're going to start out with the upper leg. And we're going to run that down to the knees here. And the knees are going to sit on the sixth head mark. So the knees are going to sit right here. Right on top of it. So now we're getting a good idea as to what the proportions of the base Minican model figure are. And it's important that we keep those in mind because if the Minican model is out of proportion, what do you think that's going to mean for the muscles that sit on top of it later on? That's right. It'll mean that the anatomy of the figure as we lay it in on top of the proportioned Minican model will also not be in proportion. The Menican model, as simple as it looks, should never be underestimated. It holds within it a lot of vital considerations that are either going to make or break the drawing later on. It's important to spend a little bit of time here with the Manican model, getting it right, making sure that it's ship shape before we take the drawing further. You can think of the process of developing a drawing as working it up in stages. And with each stage, we make sure that we get that particular part of the process correct, as accurate as we possibly can before we move on because we know that all the later stages are going to depend on the previous stages. So the success of your drawing in the end is going to hinge on this Manican model. And I'm just adding in some very, very loose indications of anatomy there. I'm already starting. Can't help myself. Once I've done that, we can make our way down into the shin or the lower leg area of the figure. We're going to use these very basic shapes. These are stylized representations of the shape that we're going to be using for the leg. They do have a cylinder core to them. But you can see that I've made a few little modifications to capture the general, I guess, anatomy that resides within this area on a simple level, even before we start to add in those muscles. And these shapes are something that you're going to want to practice as well. You want to get good at drawing them. Okay. Now we're going to draw in the feet. Keep those simple. We've got the toes there. We've got the main body of the foot that runs up into the ankles. It's a simple foot. It's nothing fancy. In fact, what we're drawing here, It's not fancy whatsoever. It's an anatomy diagram. It's supposed to serve the purpose to learn. So don't think that it's got to be immaculate work of art or anything like that. It's really something that's going to teach you where the muscles go throughout the human body. What scale they're going to be at, how they connect together. Muscles are important to learn, not just for the visual aesthetics of your characters. Because of course, when it comes to drawing comic books, that's one of the main draw cards, we want to draw these cool muscle bound superheroes. Either that or we want to draw sexy hot babes. I mean, I know as shallow as that sounds. Look, hey, that's what oftentimes I get asked to teach people how to draw. It's not my choice. I enjoy it, of course, but it's interesting, you know, the motivations of comic ocards sometimes. And, you know, sometimes people want to learn how to draw a very handsome, muscular male superhero character. So it swings both ways. But anatomy, no matter what kind of character you want to draw, is going to be a big part of it. And beyond the visual aesthetics, however, what's going to be important about learning anatomy is when you know good anatomy, then you can ensure that your character works functionally, if you put your character into some kind of crazy pose, and you're not sure if it's quite working, you'll know fairly quickly when you start to add in the anatomy, whether or not things are string in together properly because the anatomy is really what allows us to piece together the human body. I mean, it's what powers the human body. It's what allows it to move into different positions in the first place. And so that's what I've found at least is that even problem solving oppose, when I'm having trouble with it, if I start to lay the anatomy on top, all of a sudden, I'm able to make sense of the situation a little bit easier. You'll notice that I'm starting to carve out the shape. Of the lower legs here, and I'm just raising those calves. The reason I'm taking so much time here with the shape of the manic and model legs is because guess what? A lot of anatomy. What gives it its look, its appearance is going to be just from the outer contours alone. That's right. If you think about even the toughest strongest body builders, if you go to the gym and you look at the people working out there, one of the things that you're going to notice is that Unless they're very, very low fat. Unless they're like 7% body fat or whatever. You're not going to see a whole lot of definition. You're not going to see the individual muscle groups defined individually. You're going to see mostly the outer shape that those muscles come together to create. And so that's really what we've got here. You can see here that muscle and anatomy, is being implied just with the outer contours of these shapes that I've used for the lower and the upper legs. But we've figured out how the lower body is going to look here, how it's going to be posed with the manca model. So now we're going to make our way up back to the top of the chest and build out the arms. Okay. So in order to do this, this is very interesting, what we're going to do is we're actually going to start placing in the side of the pe because the PCs and the shoulders are fairly closely tied together. Now, where are the pecks going to come down to? Well, when we're thinking about the proportions of the human body, the nipples are going to sit on the two head mark, okay? So the two head mark is about here, which means the nipples are going to sit out there. So we're going to place down an angular line that runs in this trajectory. We're going to place it down onto the chest like so. In fact, we'll bring it in about there, I think, should do it. And we'll do that on either side. I'm going to bring it down like so. As we lay in this angular line, we might feel that, you know what? The shoulders of our male character here could probably be a little broader. That's what I'm feeling, anyway. Now, once we've done that, we're going to lead a new line up from where this one stopped off at the shoulders, and we're going to angle it up toward the collarbone. I'm going to draw it out like that. Remember that we want to try to keep this symmetrical so this pe form that we're starting to build out, As we bring our focus in on the shoulders, it needs to have the same amount of space on the on the left hand side of the body as it does on the right hand side. So next up, we're going to pull out these shoulders a little bit further, and I think they're actually looking fairly okay. We may not need to broaden them too much more. We just need to maybe tweak the shape a little bit. Okay. And then create a quick. It's like upside down tick we've created that leads the line in a downward direction. And Then we'll change the trajectory of this line and bring it down and finally link these two together. You see that. And what you end up with is almost like a hawks head. See that? We've got a hawks head here. It's good to create those little visual associations because it helps you to remember the shape of things. And we're going to do the same thing on this side. We're going to create another wk head. And we're going to make sure that we bring down this shoulder the same amount as we brought down the shoulder on the other side of the body. So, in other words, they need to be level with one another. We don't want one shoulder to be sitting lower than the other, especially in a front view setup such as this. So we want to try to get those right. Next up, we're going to place in the upper arm. So the upper arm is going to drop down, like so, from the base of the shoulders and also the armpit area that we've created. And we're going to bring that upper arm down to the three head mark. Now, the arms are going to be rotated outward here, which will set the elbow up a little higher than it would be if the arms were just straight down at the sides at rest. So remember, this is the three head mark here. Don't forget your head units. Remember what one you're at, can be a little confusing when you start to get this technical wood things. And then what we're going to do is we're going to have the triceps peaked in from behind just a little here. It's also partly the biceps that cause the arm to be shaped this way. And the reason as well that we're starting to talk about the muscle groups already, even though we're still on the Minica model is because look, the MinicA model is going to take on the shape that is created by the muscles as they're clustered together. So Yeah, that's the tricep creating and partially forming the shapes that we're using for the Menkan model. So next up, we're going to draw in the forearms, and you'll notice that I'm taking the forearm up actually into the upper arm. This is where I believe it's called the radio brachialis. I've just learned that name, the sound all fancy throughout this atomin demonstration. I just call it one of the primary far muscles actually runs up into the biceps into the regular brachialis, I guess, and then drops down. And it's going to drop down. I want you to look at the shape that I'm creating. It looks similar to the calves actually to the lower leg. And what that takes on is this chicken drumstick. Shape. Especially when you start to include the angles in there, takes on a chicken drumstick. Look at that. So that's really what we're drawing there for both the forearms and the lower legs. And I want you to notice that there is a long angle and a short angle on either side. So here's the short angle. And here's the long angle of this section, the forearm. And then we're going to taper it in. Now, where does the wrist begin? It begins at the forehead mark. But remember that we've taken the arms out, so they're rotated in an outward direction. So it's actually going to start a little higher here. Then, of course, we've got the hands. We are going to connect the hands on here. We're going to get too detailed on the hands. How far down do the hands come? I like to think that they come down to about the midway point of the upper leg. They actually come down quite far. So they'll be coming down to about here. Now, the palm of the hand is going to be about as big or as long rather as the fingers. And there's a number of choices you've got when it comes to drawing a hand. Either you can break it up like I'm doing, or you can sort of just create a bit of a shape that looks kind of like a hand, which is another option I also like to commonly play with. And I feel like sometimes it creates a more natural appearance for the hand in the end anyway. So that's what I'm going to do. I'll just lay that in a very basic, very rough looking shape there. This isn't really a hand demonstration, so that allows us to get away with kind of, you know, not worrying too much about it, not stressing over it. And that completes our first arm. Now, the brilliant thing about drawing up the front view of the male figure is that we're really repeating whatever we do on one side over to the other, which means we're getting some extra bang for our buck here. We're getting some practice points in. So now that we've already familiarized ourselves with the construction of the arm on this side of the body. We can go over here now, and you know what? I'm just going to round out that head real quick. Let's just round that out. Yeah, we're going to go over to the left hand side of the body now and we're going to start to draw out the arm for it. It's like to neaten things up and just tidy it. That's the perfectionist in me. Same deal as before, we're dropping down the upper arm. We want to angle it out at the same degree. Remember, symmetry, balance. This is key when you're doing up a diagrammatic representation of the male figure, such as this. You know what, capturing that symmetry may be the hardest thing that you have to deal with here. Because the rest is just a jigsaw puzzle. The human body is really a jigsaw puzzle, truly. You can have fun with it. You just need to know where all the different pieces go. That's the real challenge. Now I'm adding in a little bit more shape here to the bicep area. And I'm mimicking it over to the other side. Next, we'll draw in the forearm form. And the forearm form, if you want to nail it, remember. You can either think of it as a chicken leg like this. Or you can think of it as a tapered cylinder that has a short wedge and then a long wedge that runs down the outside of it. There's two ways of thinking about it. These are the ways that I like to think about it. So now we're still looking at and making sure that we're getting as close as possible, the angles of all of these different lines that make up the forearm and the upper arm. We can see that This one's angled out to a certain amount. So I want to do the same thing on this side of the body. And I know that the wrist is going to land about here. So, what do we want to do now? While I want to fix up the outside portion of the fore arm now? I bring it out there. And then I'll bring it down. Bring it down to this point, pull out a extrusion for the wrist. Now, we've given him a tanker forearm somehow on this side of his body. I actually don't know how that happened. So he's got one arm that's bigger than the other. There you go. Symmetry. It's a tough thing. That's why I actually do not enjoy drawing characters directly from the front or the side. For a number of reasons, it's not a very natural point of view. Very rarely, are you looking directly smack bang at a front view presentation of somebody like this in real life. It's not natural. It's a very blueprint representation of the human body. But that's what we need here in order to get our anatomy right. Okay. So next up, we're going to get those hands drawn in and try to get a bit of an outline down for the hand. That's all you really need to worry about here. I'm still keeping in mind, of course, that there is a palm, that there's fingers and that kind of thing. But once more, I'm not getting to flustered, not getting too worried about getting all the details of the hand looking correct. Not just yet anyway. No until we get under hand anatomy. Yeah, that'll be a fun topic. Okay, so we have got now the Minican model established on the page. And it's looking pretty solid. It's proportionally accurate, at least to the degree that we can get it here. And we've got some pretty good shape going on for the Minican model itself, which is going to make laying in the muscles way easier. 4. Drawing In The Muscles: Okay, so let's jump straight into this. This is going to be fairly straightforward. We're just going to tackle one muscle group after the other taking it step by step, and we'll start at the top with the face. Okay, so I'm going to draw in the eyes. Now, I'm just going to drop a little line down. A small distance from the brow line, and that's going to be our eye line. B eyes roughly sit at the halfway point between the top and the bottom of the head. So we're going to draw in some eyes there. And I'm drawing very small here. Just I vaguely represent where the eyes should go. Okay. We get a rough eyebrow shape drawn in on either side. Yes, even the face has to be symmetrical in the front view. And then we've got the nose, which is going to sit at this little point that we marked out earlier. Now we've got the mouth. Now, the mouth is going to be found in terms of its positioning by dividing up the distance between the bottom of the nose through to the chin into thirds. And on the first third, that's where we're going to find the mouth. That's going to be about that point there. We can, of course, go in and do a little bit of a racing here. Just extending the chin down a little bit more. And that'll give us a fairly good presentation for the head. Went through some basic facial features there for it too and figured out where they were going to be placed proportionally. Just something quick. We're really just doing an overview here of the male figure, and all the anatomy it consists of for this demonstration, but we will be getting deeper into each part in another lesson. Okay, let's talk about the neck. Now, the neck is going to have two bands of muscle that run down from the bottom of the ear and into the center of the collar bone. It's going to look a little bit like this. And we'll do the same thing on either side. So whatever we do on one side of the body, we're going to be doing on the opposite. Remember, we're getting extra bang for our buck here. And then from the neck muscles that we've just established, we're going to place in another little angular line that creates some short of a triangle shape up from the base of the collarbone, from the top of the collarbone and into the base of that neck muscle that we just laid in. Okay. Once that's done, we're going to now go ahead and we'll place in another muscle. And this muscle is going to run down from the sides of the neck into this section here. And in fact, there's a number of different muscles that are that are going to be placed down in those areas. So here's how that's going to work. We're going to place in a muscle here. All right. And another one here, And we get this sort of criss crossing of muscles somewhat that occurs in the neck region. Now, we're fairly zoomed out here. We're getting an overall look at the male figure. You know what? Let's zoom in a little bit. Just so that we can see what's going on a bit better. Okay, so for the neck, we're going to be chowing out. Let's see how this goes. We're going to have muscle that runs down here and up into the neck. It's going to look a bit like this. And then another muscle. So there's multiple muscles here. Like I said, they sort of criss cross over one another. But the main one that we want to get down is this band muscle that runs down from the bottom of ears into the collar bone. I call it the band muscle because it's a big band of muscle that runs down there. And then we've got the trapezius muscles. So we've got the minor muscles that sit around the trunk of the neck and pretty much conform to its cylindrical overall mass. And then we got the trapezius muscles that sit around it. So it's important to remember those primary forms. So again, we've got the trunk of the neck. Then we've got the trapezius muscles that sit around it like a hood. And then we got these band muscles that run down from the bottom of the ears. And that's really on a simplified level what you're dealing with when it comes to the anatomy of the male neck. So next, we're going to lay in the bottom of the pecs. Now, remember that the nipples are going to sit here, On the two head mark. It's going to draw one nipple there. And another nipple here. I'll do. This one again, just to make sure that it's symmetrical. You'll notice that I place the nipples out to the side a little bit more, they don't sit in front O the pes in the middle of them. They actually sit off to the sides. Now that we've got the nipples established, we'll place in the base of the pecks, and we're going to angle up the following line from the outer edge of the peck and into the middle. And we're going to angle it up again and create a nest division that separates those ps. Then when we get to the top, we're going to separate the pecks again, creating the lower edge of the collar bone. Just bring it back into the shoulders. There's a little plane shift that occurs as well when it comes to the PCs. Not a little one, but a major plane shift that is so apparent. We're actually going to establish it here just on a simple level. We're going to draw it in a division that shows where the general shape of the ps going to transition to a different angle. That's why oftentimes you'll find that bottom area to be quite dark on the peck, especially the light direction is coming from above. So that's the PCs. And here's the thing. If you wanted to draw in the striations of the PCs, you could. So the the individual muscle groups within the pe We're not going to get too detailed on those just yet, but just for future reference. This is the general path that they take. Let me go another a few that run through the middle there. You can see these striations, what they call them, especially on really muscular body builders. But what I really want to draw your attention to is just the general shape of the PCs that we're drawing in here. Okay. Next up, we've got the shoulders. Now, the shoulders are comprised of three muscles when you're looking at them from the side. So this is a side view of the shoulders, and they're broken up into three major muscle groups that are all encompassed as the deltoids, right? So that's what the shoulder muscles are called the deltoids. So from the front, we're going to see one. Let's draw that in. Nice and lightly at first, get it established. Then go back over the top of it to define it. Then we're going to have the outer one. And we're not going to see the division behind that separates the back deltoid from the rest. Since we're looking at the body from the front here. Don't worry. We will be doing a lesson on how to draw the female figure from the front as well and get all of the muscle groups drawn out accurately. Now, here's a thing. We're really simplifying the muscles down here into the most general forms. There is a lot more detail and a lot more complexity that can go into them. Like, for example, these shoulders here that we're separating. Well, let's go ahead and actually make this a bit more detailed. So I'm just going to get my eraser here. And I want you to notice how the deltoids are actually they're almost following the fanned striations of the pecks as they're laid down. Let's see the sort of angle that they're on there. So I really want to try to capture that. And I want to be thinking about that as I lay them in. Okay, so that's the shoulders. And how they look from the front view. Next, we're going to jump back to the torso, and we're going to lay in the abdominal muscles before we continue on with the arms. So for the abdominal muscles, we have a little arch up the top here. Now, everyone's got different sorts of abs. They can come in all different shapes and sizes. The ones that I'm going to be showing you here are typically what you'd see from, like, Jim Lee or David Finch. So we start at the top here, I like to think of this as, I guess, one of the underside sections of the ribs. And I'm not entirely sure what they call this section. There is a name for it. I think from memory, it's called the Greek Arch, something like that. Some people have it and some people don't. The people who don't, you can see their abs actually going You can actually see their abs going all the way up into the bottom of the pecs, believe it or not, and it looks a bit like that. But that's not the style we're going with here. Which way is the right way, both are the right way. It just depends on the kind of anatomy that you want to give your character because in real life, humans can have both. Okay. So once we've got that Greek arch placed down onto the page. We can go ahead here and start to draw out the abs underneath it. I'm going to take out the side of the first set of abs from of the outer edge of the arch, and then into the middle. I want you to notice the shape of the bottom of the abs, how that looks, like a wavy con to it. It's not completely straight from one side to the other. I want you to try to capture the same shape for the abs that you draw in here. Hopefully, you're following along, step by step. That's the easiest way to tackle this lesson, I would say, follow along. Do the work, put pencil to paper, make it happen. Don't just watch. You're not going to learn through just watching. And now here's what's interesting. We're going to place down another rib that's going to ladder in just underneath that first set of abs on the outer edge. We're going to hook it up on either side. And from that point, we're going to draw in the second set of abs. The second set of abs are going to come down to about here. And this is about where the belly button will sit too at the three head mark. That's the second set of abs. Then we're going to do the same thing. We're going to create another rib hook on the side of those abs. And from that point, we're going to lay in the bottom set of abs. That bottom set of abs is actually a much longer set. So they're going to run all the way down into the belt line. I'm just going to take them down to about that point first. Before we move on and start to fill out this section of anatomy in the lower half of the body. Next, we've got I guess you would call this the serratus. I think that's what it's called. I could just call this the side torso muscles most of the time until I need to know the proper names, which yeah. I'm pretty sure there is the serratus. And then we're sort of creating this pattern now. This pattern ladder look. This is how it appears. You can almost think of it as a series of s that we're placing down on the page here. And they're going to tuck in up against the lateral muscles that we're going to see popping out to say hello from the back. Okay. And we're going to add a little bit more on here for those lateral muscles. So going to build them out like that and tuck them back into the sides of the body. That's what gives us that really obvious light bulb appearance for the male torso. Now, these lateral muscles, you can really only see from the back what they really look like, but you are going to get an indication of them from the sides. Okay. Now, what next? Well, then we've got the obliques. Can the obliques run down from, I guess, the serratus and into the top of the pelvis at that belt line? I go to do the same thing on either side here. And then we've just got the hip area. And this hip area doesn't have a whole lot of muscle action going on. Well, I guess this is where you start to get the leg muscles happen in those areas. So we're going to just before we move down further, we're going to jump back up to the arms here and fill out the muscles in those sections. So we've got the biceps, which we get a really good look at from the front. Because we've already, for the most part, placed in and outlined their shape. Well, there's not a whole lot of work to do here. We just got to place the divisions in that separate the muscle groups inside the arm. And then we can call it a day. This are really just retracing our steps there. And then we've got the four arms here. Now, the four arms, this is where we're going to get to see a little bit more action happening. We're going to get this radio brachialis. I hope I'm getting that name, right. And we're going to bring that down to here. And there's also another major for arm muscle on the opposite side, which we've already basically placed down in there. We're going to jump over to the opposite side to the right hand side of the body now. I'm going to do the exact same thing. We've got the radiobrach drops down from the main brachialis in the upper arm. And then into the wrist. And we've got a bunch of muscles in there. For now, all we can see is really going to be a little division that runs down from the middle of that radio brachialis into the bottom of the wrist. And then finally, we've obviously got the trips from behind, but they're already outlined. They're already down. So there's not a whole lot more we have to do with them. Arms are pretty easy. Okay. So, what about the legs then? Well, the legs, this is where we're going to have to do a little bit more work. So everybody finds legs difficult to draw, but here's how we're going to tackle them. We start off where the obliques are. Okay? So I'm going to draw a little dot here at the bottom of the oblique. The reason I'm doing that is because there's a long band like muscle that runs down from about this point into the legs. It's going to follow this curvaceous Trajectory down and around the quads, which you can see me outlining there. So that's the line that we're placing down now. We're going to do it on both sides. So again, we'll run it down from this point and down and out and then tuck it back into the knee. Mike so. And there's a little bit of tweaking that I probably need to do there. Just going to sculpt it out a little, reshape it somewhat. And then on the outer leg, we're going to get the other quad. Okay? So we're working on the quad muscles here that sit at the top or around the front of upper leg. And we're really trying to capture the correct shape for them at this point. They sit around the top of the knees. One sits lower than the other. The inner cod is going to sit lower than the outer cod. Then we're going to bring that one back up to about here, and then we're going to stop. We're going to do the same thing on the opposite side. Remember this outer cod is going to sit higher. I'm going to hook it up. And then from that point, we're going to jump up to the top of the leg, so the very tippy top, and we're going to draw in another shape. And this is going to be the top cord. At least I refer to it as the top cord. I'm sure they all have proper names, but I refer to it as the top cord. And you can see that I'm giving these muscles a little bit of shape. They're not just boring looking shapes either. They're actually there to help to stylize the muscles. And every person, every single artist is going to have their own way of stylizing the muscles that reside throughout the human body. You're going to come up with your own. This is just an interpretation. This is the way I interpret the muscles of the human body. You might go ahead later on and you might look at an actual photo reference of I don't know, a realistic breakdown of the human body. You might be like, Wow. What the heck was Clayton talking about? These muscles don't look anything like actual muscles do, you'd probably be right because I'm stylizing the heck out of this anatomy because I've found a look that I enjoy for my characters that may not necessarily be 100% accurate. Or real, but that create an impact on the page. That's usually what I'm looking for. So What I'm doing here is I'm showing you where the main muscle groups will reside. But eventually, you will want to go off and look at actual photo references and figure out ways of stylizing the muscle groups for yourself. Now, you can totally go with my style if you like to look of it and it does the job that you want it to do. Of course. You know, you look at Joe Mad style. There's another artist, Jonathan Rect a really incredible artist. You look at J Scott Campbell, all of them have different ways of representing the human body. And they do detour far away from how muscles actually look. Okay. So we have the leg muscles drawn in there, great at the top. These are the quads. And then what we're going to do is place in the inner thigh. We're going to get that nicely outlined there. Then we'll finish establishing this dividing line that separates the ads from the inner thigh. And then finally, we're going to place in the bottom of this lower set of abs. It's going to look a little bit like that. That's sort of how we deal with that little area of the male body. Now, what comes next? Well, next, we're going to have another band of muscle that runs down the side of the leg, the outer edges. I have a look here, actually. So, yeah, we've got this other band of muscle that's going to run down the sides. And we're going to see a little hint of the side leg muscles as well. But really, not a whole lot. Right. What matters is that you're capturing the shape, the correct shape of everything rather than the individual muscles that sit inside the contours. In fact, if you can nail the shape. A lot of the time if you get the interior muscles wrong, it doesn't really matter anyway because the shape still makes it look right. Next up, we're going to drop in the top. Oh, sorry, we're going to drop in the top of the knees, but we're also going to be at the same time establishing the bottom of those quads. So that's how they're going to look. And from there, we draw out the side of the knees. And you'll notice that they kind of look like skulls. Okay. So this is the top of the knee. This is the bottom of the knee. And can see how if we dropped in some eyes and a nose, that that would kind of like a skull there, right? You know, again, this is how you remember the human body. You create what do they call it like a mind castle, a memory castle with visual symbols that represent the anatomy. And that's how it becomes easy to remember. Going to do the same thing on the opposite side. Drawing in this skull shape, And then from there, go ahead and place in the section of the leg that runs down from the upper leg into the lower leg. All of these areas have scientific names, but you don't need to remember them. You just need to look at them and know where they go. Roughly what size they need to be at, what shape they need to be, and as long as you do that, you'll be set. Okay. So now we've got the calves that are going to peek in around the front, sitting around the shin. So again, I want to do that there. And all of these muscles on the lower leg, you're not going to really see a whole lot of defined cuts for them, except for maybe the calves and the chiles at the back of the leg. For the front, you will see some muscles there on the surface of the skin. I'm going to add in some more of those. Because they certainly reside there for sure. But you're just not going to see them defined on the surface of the skin very often. Let me draw that in again. Okay, so we got this muscle. Okay. Can be a little confusing to figure out what's going on in the lower portion of the legs sometime because in fact, you can see the same thing about the fore arms, in fact. There's a lot of different muscles going on in these regions. And because they are so shallow, you know, their forms aren't. You can definitely run into a bit of trouble there when it comes to figuring out where each one goes. Okay. And I know that there is one that kind of runs across the lower leg too. As you start to get to know the human body and you practice it and you figure out how to stylize it well. What you're going to find is that you bend the rules a little bit from time to time every now and then you'll stylize a muscle in such a way that really hits it out the ballpark of reality. And, you know, and that's okay, because if you present it well, then that doesn't matter. If you present it well, then you're really going beyond. And I think that's what you're supposed to do as an artist. You're supposed to really be presenting your interpretation of life. Now, for the feet, we're just going to leave them as well, I guess we could put in some toes, couldn't we. Let's not be lazy here. Let's go to place in some toes like that. And just like with the hands, though, I am going to keep the shapes here that I'm using for the feet fairly vague. Because Boy, boy, when it comes to drawing out feet, I could be here all day just perfecting them, trying to get them to look right. For this demonstration, at least, we just want to get something down that looks reasonably accurate. Ing like this. Okay, that'll do. Great. We've got the legs. We've got the arms down, and we've even got the head down, if you can believe that. Which means we've pretty much completed the front view of the male body. The last thing I'm going to do here is just add in a little bit more anatomy to the hands just to bring those through to a higher level of completion. Get those drawn in. Give them a few line weights. Okay. And of course, there's going to be characters out there that have a bit more bulk to them than this. There's going to be characters that don't. There's going to be characters that look way skinnier. There's regular characters. There's heroic characters. There's villainous characters. There's lots of different body types out there. There's mesomorphs, there's ectomorph, there's ectomorphs. Yeah. No, we can talk about all of those. But this is just the standard anatomy setup that you're going to see for most heroic characters. And that really completes the front view of the male figure and all the muscles that it entails, how they're structured, how they're scaled, and most importantly, their proportions. And the last thing I'm going to add in here. Yep, before we wrap it up is more defined outline for the ankle. Okay, that's it. I swear. That's the end of the lesson. 5. Conclusion: I want to thank you again so much for joining me in this lesson where we learned how to draw up the male figure in the front view and place all the anatomy in on top. We started with the Menkan model where we got the base structure down ensured that it was properly proportion that the symmetry was spot on or at least as spot on as we could make it before adding in the anatomy on top, the individual muscle groups that make up the human body. We went step by step through the entire process. What I want you to do going forward is to repeat the process. So many times that you become 100% familiar with it and that you know it up by heart because that's what learning anatomy is all about. That's how you get good is practice. There's no easy way to say it. I can't just show you this stuff once, and you're going to be able to remember it, and you're going to be able to execute it perfectly. Unfortunately, it's going to take a few goes around, just like with any other skill that you set out to learn. But isn't that a wonderful thing that you can just through repetition, master something? That's what you're going to be doing as you move forward and become master of comic book illustration in general because anatomy is a really big part of that. Until next time, keep on drawing, keep on practicing, and I'll catch you in the next session. Bye bye for now.