Drawing Different Body Types: Character Design For Personal Projects

1. Intro: Hi and welcome character designer. It's time to bring diversity and depth to your character roster. Characters come in all shapes and sizes. What truly makes them stand out? Maybe it's a hero's towering statue, a side kicks compact build, or even a villains imposing presence. And this class we'll cover all the essential techniques for drawing different body types and proportions in character design. We'll explore a variety of body shapes, dive into the nuances of height differences, and even mix and match different proportions to create unique characters. By the end of this class, you'll have the skills to create a diverse cast of characters that truly represent the world around us. We'll kick off with a fun assignment to get your creative juice flow. Then move on to exploring different body types and shapes. And finally, put your new skills to the test by transforming one of your characters. Throughout the course, I'll be doing live demos to show you each step of the process, and you'll get references and resources to help you improve faster. Plus, I'll be here every step of the way to guide you. So are you ready to add new dimensions to your character designs? Join now, and I'll see you in the next video. 2. First Quick Assignment!: Hello, and welcome. Before we start learning, I want to give you a very quick and simple assignment. Since we'll be exploring different body types in the next few videos, I'd like for you to grab your character or draw a new one if you prefer. That's the character you'll be using for the next videos. Alternatively, you can download the karate made and we'll be using through this class. I'll leave it for you, so download it and use it to explore and draw different body types. All right, this is it for now. Take your time, and I'll see you in the next video. 3. Different Bodies - Different Shapes!: Hello, and welcome back. When learning how to draw any new subject, I think it's always important to break it into the most simple shapes possible. If you look at the body, you'll see that you can divide it into different shapes. So it's easier to find its proportions and to draw it. However, depending on the type of body you're drawing, the shapes might vary quite a bit. It's always good to have a good variety of curves and straight lines when drawing the human body. But, for example, thin bodies have fewer curves, and we tend to use more rectangular and triangular shapes. For hobby bodies, it's the opposite. Rounder shapes work really well. It doesn't need to be made out entirely of circles. A rectangle can have round corners, and you can do the same with other shapes. You don't need to limit yourself to regular and basic shapes. Been shapes or lemon wedges are great to build certain parts of the body, especially the arms and legs. Make up your own shapes. It's important to remember that there are no wrong ways to do this. As long as it works for you, then it's the right way. The shapes I used to draw the body might not be the same for you. So even though I show you a way of doing this, I invite you to explore different shapes, so it makes more sense for you while drawing. When it comes to drawing and art in general, experimentation is key. So don't shy away from it. All right, this is it for now. Follow me to the next video where we'll talk a bit about references and resources for you to use. 4. References & Resources: Hello, and welcome back. In this video, we're going to very quickly talk about references. When learning how to draw anything, it's good to look for references first. This will help you have a better visual of the subject and train your memory. But it will also help you in your practice. For example, something you can do with these references is to draw on top of them. This is an exercise I like to recommend whenever learning to draw something new, find a good or several good reference photos and save them. Then lower their opacity. With that done, you can either print these photos or open them in your favorite drawing software. Now go over each photo and draw the shapes you see in them. Break the body into simple and basic shapes as we talked about previously. By doing this, you start getting a better feeling of the form and proportions of the body. You're also developing muscle memory. Explore different shapes, not only depending on the body type we're drawing, but also try different things and decide what feels better to draw. This is an excellent way to start learning how to draw the body. The next step of this exercise is usually to draw those shapes and practice them. But we'll get there. For now, the important thing is to find good reference photos. One place you can do this is by searching Pinterest. Another option is to go on free stock photo websites such as N Splash and Pexels. Finally, you can look up different reference photo models who take pictures so artists can use them as reference. A few of those are a dark stock, the post archives, and Joke pub stock. Throughout the class, we'll be drawing different types of bodies. And for each one, I'll also give you a template with the basic shapes and proportions. So you can download those as you learn and use them while practicing. This is all for now. I'll see you in the next video where we'll learn the proportions to draw a short character. So read your pencil and I'll see you soon. 5. Drawing Short Characters: All right, so welcome back. We're now going to start to draw. And the first one we're going to tackle right now concerns height, and we're going to be drawing or exploring how to draw a shorter character. So usually an average height of an adult person, let's say, is around seven to eight heads. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. To draw a shorter person, we have to draw fewer heads. So this is a way of doing it using the head as a measurement, which is the one I like to use. I think it's the easiest. You just draw the head and then multiply it until you have the desired height for your characters. So for a shorter character, you want to go below seven. For example, something between five or six could be a good height. I have this template available for you to download, if you want to use it as a reference, don't forget to download this one, and now I have here my character and decide the proportions. Now we're going to draw it. So I can explain to you as well how to do this and not just an image. So I'm going to go over here, create a new layer. And the first thing we want to do is to draw the head, six heads, I'm going to change here things a little. I have here this bit of an ellipse. But for my character who uses rounder shapes, I'm going to try to draw more of a circle, not a perfect circle, obviously, but something close to it. All right. So now I have the head. So as you can see, it doesn't really matter the size of the circle of the head you're doing. Everything else will then go accordingly to the size of the head you've done. So I have here the head. Now I'm going to multiply it a few times. So let me move it here below. To heads, merge them. Now I want to and bring it down. So there we go. I have all the heads, six heads for a shorter character. Now let me let me just merge all of these together. And now at the top, I'm going to start drawing my character. I have here by the side more or less where I want everything. So as you can see, the first head is for the head. Then we have not really half of it. Usually for an average height, you will go for half of the head and you would have the neck. Here we just have a tiny little bit of it. For the shoulder line and the neck where the neck encounters the shoulder line, more than one head and a half for the torso and the waist area, and the last three heads are for the legs. I'm going to be drawing these shapes and then I'm going to draw my character accordingly. So I'll have here another layer on top. I add bit of transparency to the heads below, and now I can draw on top once again. So shoulders or less here, bit higher up perhaps. Remember that this phase is just a sketch. So it is fine to look messy. Don't be afraid for your sketches to look messy. It's perfectly fine. Also, these are the kind of shapes I like to use, but you can find other shapes. That feel more comfortable to you. There are no strict rules when doing this. We all have different ways of doing things, so find out the shapes that make the most sense to you. That's the most important. So as you can see, I'm just building up the skeleton of my character, the legs. And here we have the feet. I like to add a little bit of curvature to my legs, the bottom half of the legs, so I don't forget about it as I draw. All right, so now I think I can draw my character. Let me move it a bit to the side so we can see her clearly. Alright, so again, some transpiracy, a new layer on top, and now I'm going to draw my character. Still a sketch, so it doesn't need to be perfect. We're just figuring things out. Okay, we have here. The hair, of course, her proportions right now are going to be a little bit different from what I have originally because I am using different proportions. We will get something different as we go along. We're going to be drawing a tall character, we're going to be drawing very thin character, a heavier character, so things will change a bit as we go for her legs. I'm keeping the same kind of shapes I used for my character before. So I'm not really using those realistic shapes, right? I want to keep my character pretty recognizable, but not for the clothing. Have a long t shirt and her leggings. I want to change the arms a little bit. I don't like the way they look like this, making something similar to what I have. Now I think I can draw her. Might need to fix things here a bit. No. And now that I figured out all the proportions and throw my character accordingly, all I have to do is go in and draw all the line art and perhaps even color it. So when I want to do that, I will go right ahead, lower the opacity of my sketch, and then create a new layer on top. I'm using a vector layer here. Clip Studio Paint has what is called vector layers, and what that means is that anything I'm drawing inside this layer is a vector, is a line made out of several points. And when you're drawing in vector, you can edit your lines as much as you want, like resize them and making them bigger or smaller and you won't lose any quality to them. I do enjoy using the vector layers for this, for the inart. Other drawing software have something similar. It's not necessary. Use the kind of layer and organization you like best. See, I'm going to start drawing. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here to keep things symmetrical, I think I'm even going to draw one side of my character and then duplicate it and mirror it. This is one way to make your work go faster. But if you're learning and you're still getting the hangout of drawing, I do recommend for you to draw everything, right? It's much better for you to get some practice. Also, I'm not spending a whole lot of time here, mostly because I don't think this is not the most important part, the line art. I'm just cleaning up my drawing, right? So I don't want you to be ing time or wasting time with this part. What I want you to gather from this lesson is the proportions, how to draw those proportions, how you want them. If you want to draw shorter characters, you know, you can do so by using the head as a measurement. Average height characters or adults, in this case, are about seven to eight heads tall, and if you want to draw a shorter character, then you want to go lower than that. All right, so once it is done, now I'm going to duplicate this, transform it, and then flip it horizontally. And finally, I'll move it to the other side. This way, things are a bit faster and you don't have to be looking at me doing this over and over again. Of course, I still need to fix some things. That's pretty normal. Let's merge this together first, and I'll fix things. I don't like how the eyes and the nos turn out, so I'm going to redo them. This way, they look but I think this can be a very fun exercise for you to explore your characters. Yeah, maybe you decided on some proportions for them. But as you experiment with these kind of things, you might change your mind. It's possible. Now all I'm missing is the glasses. The glasses are very important. Now duplicate them, flip them, and move them to the other side in the sheets. I'm going to very quickly add some colors to her. Going to fast forward this because you don't need to be watching all of it. All right. So it's not perfect. Obviously, I'm doing this very quickly. So I'm not really concentrating on having this perfect. All I want you to gather from here is the proportions. So here is the version of my carat with very normal proportions. Like as you can see, my carat is very short. My carat usually will be very short and with very round and cartoonish proportions. And here would be more regular proportions, but in a shorter height. So that's how it looks. In the next, we're going to explore tall proportions in the next video. Follow me to the next video where we'll be exploring tall characters. 6. Drawing Tall Characters: Hello and welcome back. So as I said, now we're going to explore tall proportions. So I have here another template. Again, you can download this template I have right here, so it can help you in your own drawings, don't forget to download it and use it as a reference. An average height and average adult height is usually if you're using the head as a measurement, is usually seven to eight heads tall for a shorter heights, as we've done in the previous video, we would go with fewer heads. So in this case, about six heads, but you can go below that, especially if you're drawing a child. For the taller height, however, we're going in the opposite way. We'll want to draw more heads. For my reference, I made the taller character about eight heads high. The thing you will notice most are the legs. The legs occupy a whole lot of the body. That's fun. I think that can be a fun thing when creating a character. And what we're going to do right now is do the same thing we did previously, and we're going to start by drawing the heads, right? You can draw the head in any format or even size you want. I'm using these guidelines. But for example, if you draw a bigger head, then the guidelines will have more space between them, right? So only the size of the head will matter. Draw one head and then just repeat it along your drawing, duplicate it. So as you can see this time around, I did the head a little bit different, so the guidelines don't match exactly the previous guidelines I had, which is fine. We have the measurement which is the head, and that's all that matters right now. Let's merge all of these together. So the head is the head, right. Let's add here guidelines. We can add some ears, for example. Then the shoulder line is about halfway down the second head, so run here, and the torso is going to go up half of the next head. Then we got our waist here, and it occupies most of this area. I'm just following here my hefrans and now we go down for the legs and the shoulders go more or less halfway through this head right here. So let's do this knees here, and then the rest of the legs and our feet. Now, all we are missing is the arms. Again, I'm going to be doing the same thing and open the arms a little bit. But we do know that the elbow goes here. Elbow elbow, and then we go here and have our hands and hands, right? This is more or less it. Let me just redo it. Okay, elbow, elbow, hands, and hand. Okay. Now it's a bit more accordingly what I've done previously. Now as you can see, this is not perfect compared to this one. Of course, I was very careful with this one, so you can have a good template to look at and mine right now is just a sketch. I'm not looking to be perfect. I just want to have a base skeleton here. Let's call it skeleton. I know where everything goes. Now once again, I'm going to go ahead. And draw my sketch with my characters features. Of course, I'm using besides the height, I'm using very regular proportions here. So she does not look exactly. She looks a bit different from her original proportions. I have a much more cartoonish style going around there, okay? I'm being very quick with this, I don't need it to be perfect, I'll make the lines later on. This is just a sketch right now. But as you can see, even though it's the same characters before, her proportions do change a bit. She even looks a bit more adult in here. I'd say, very messy sketch. That's fine. Sketches are supposed to be messy. It's time to draw the line art, and I'm going to do the same thing I did before just to save time. Again, if you're still a beginner and are still getting used to drawing, I do recommend you draw every part of your drawing so you get some practice in and get used to drawing lines, to drawing everything and getting used to the drawing software or any other medium you're using. Then when you're already quite experienced and need to save time while working, you can do the same kind of thing. I shallow. So as you can see, there's a lot of legs here when drawing a taket. And of course, this is also something you can change according to the character you're drawing and what you want for them. Maybe your character is more torso than legs, and that's perfectly fine. These are all things that are worth exploring. I think it can be very fun to explore them. All right. So duplicate this, flip it, move it to the other side, and now fix everything that it's fixing and finish the drawing. Now we're going to talk about this a bit more in a later video, but all of these proportions that I'm showing you right now, they can be exaggerated. If you're drawing a cartoon character, don't be afraid of exaggerating things. It can be very fun to do. All right. Now it's time to color drawing very quickly. So I'm just going to grab the paint bucket and start look at the size difference from my original character, just picking colors and adding those colors to my new drawing. Thankfully, I don't have a lot of colors on my character. I like to keep things simple, the Corgi illustration. And bring it here so I don't have to be drawing it. Again, it's very weird to see my characters so tall. I think I never draw tall characters, so it's a bit weird to see a very tall character, but fun. Always fun to try new things. There we go, my very, very tall avatar. This is it. Use the template as a reference to draw your character. It's always useful to have it by your side and look at it. You can even use the same head size as I use in the template for practice. This way, you'll be drawing exactly what you see then as you get more used to those shapes and proportions, you can do your own thing and be more free with those shapes. This is it right now. We've seen two different heights, and next we're going to explore body shapes and body sizes. I'll see you in the next video. 7. Drawing Thin Characters: All right. Hello, and welcome back. So as I said, we're now we explored heights, right? We explore different heights, shorter and taller characters, and now we're going to explore different body sizes. We're going to see a thin body, a thinner body, and then a shabbier one. So for a thinner body, the shapes you're going to use. I like to use triangles, maybe some rectangles and shapes that might resemble something closer to a bit of a lemon wedge, especially for legs and arms. I'm going to go right ahead, create a new layer. And grab my pencil and I'm going to start drawing. So we have seven heads for a very regular, a very average height. There we go. All right. So now let's draw shapes. My character's head, in this case, might be a bit thinner than what I would usually draw. Then we can go to here and we have our shoulders then one triangle and then another triangle these triangles are for the torso and the waist areas. Okay. I'm going to do like I did previously, open arms, just so it's easier right now to see everything. The hands go a bit lower. Something looks weird. Let me fix my pencil once again. I have the basic shapes down. Let's now sketch our character. Again, it's going to be very different from what I have. And as I said before, I want her to have this time around, I want her to have a thinner face because it's what makes sense when you're changing your character and exploring different things with them, you'll notice that it's not only the body that changes, usually, the face, the eyes, as you draw them, you might feel like other things need to change. I think that's very interesting to explore all those things. Who's your character and how they would look in different proportions. What would change in them? This is a very good exercise for you to do. Now for the legs, I'm going to keep them in my character does have her body is made out of very basic shapes already, so that helps in making this whole process quick. So as you can see, very different right here, she is very short and chubbier and here, her t shirt is still a bit larger, but you can clearly see the difference in proportions here. Everything is about everything is thin. We're making everything smaller, and of course, this can be less or more exaggerated. Now this is done, I'm going once again to do my line art. I'm trying to do this very quickly here because you don't need to be watching me do a real line art. I would waste much more time, usually. But if you're doing this whole process of the sketches, the shapes first, and sketching, then the line art, do feel free to take as long as you need, okay? You don't need to rush any of this. I'm rushing it because I don't want you to waste time. I want you to have fun with your drawings. That's what I want. That's the most important thing, having fun with your drawings. Another thing you can do to accentuate thinness of someone how skinny they are is to how do I say this give their body less shapes. For example, usually, when drawing the legs, I would do add some curves here and there, right at that contrast contrast between one part of one leg and the other, same thing with the arms. But when drawing someone who's very skinny, as you can see, there's less contrast here. Instead of doing something like this, add a bit of fat in there, just go with skin instead of going straight and then curve, everything goes straight down. This is just something you could do. It's not strictly necessary. Again, it really depends on what you're doing for your characters or even your own tastes and preferences. I'm going to something like this, merge both of these together and then fix anything that needs fixing and finish the drawing. As you can see, everything else and even the hair is not as grand as I did previously. I'm making it a bit more close to the body to accentuate her thinness. I don't know, right now, I think she looks like a teenager, when teenagers just randomly go a few centimeters high, but everything else forgets about it and you're very lanky and weird for a bit there. That's what I'm going for. The glasses need to be giant. Those I keep them giant. I love drawing the giant glasses. All right now all I have to do once again is add the colors. Grab my pint pocket and start picking colors and adding them to the right places. Also, about the paint bucket. As you can see, I created a new layer below my lines. And what I do, so each color says within the lines is that I use the refer other layers option on Clip Studio. Other drawing software have the same kind of options. They might just present themselves differently, but do look them up. And what this does is just like the name says, I am drawing on a new layer, but Clip Studio will have my lines into account and keep the colors within those bounds. It's very useful and you can color your drawings very, very quickly that way, coping my Corgi illustration here and bring it to my t shirt. New t shirt in this case, and I think we are done. There we go. A very thin body. It's all about triangles, some rectangles. You can exaggerate this as much as you can, having maybe everything closer to the body. So this is it for a thin character, very different from what I have originally. And now take your time and whenever you're ready, follow me to the next video where we'll be drawing a hobby kind of body. So I will see you right there. 8. Drawing Chubby Characters: Hello and welcome V. Here we are for almost the last step of our class and we're going to explore the last type of body, which is going to be shabby proportions. Once again, just like with the thinner type of body, you can exaggerate this as much or as less as you want. But generally speaking, when drawing a shabbier character, you want to draw round shapes, as I said before, so circles, oval shapes, lemon wedge shapes like this. There's a lot of contrast of curves in here, right? Like in the thinner body, I would say to keep the body a bit more shapeless because usually if you're skinner and have less fat, then your body doesn't make as much shapes or as much curves in there. This is your template, download it, use it as a reference. Now we're going to draw. Again, I'm going to use my character. I'm going to draw my character and my character is already a bit shabby, but very short, very cartoonish. We're going to readapt my character to more average height, but with shabbier shapes. Let's start by drawing our heads, right. One, two, six, seven. All right. And now to draw our shapes. So we have our head. Then about almost halfway through the second head, we have our shoulder line, and we can draw some oval shapes right here or like a round triangle right a bit there we go. And then the other one for the other side of the body. For example, if I want for the waist to be broader than the shoulder line, I will want to broaden this shape a bit. There we go. Now for now for the legs, we keep things very simple and then finally the arms. Now I can draw my character in more detail. We can draw their face a bit rounder this time. The neck can be also thicker. Everything accompanies your character's body type. It's not just their body shapes, everything else as well. Like the hands can be a bit shorter and we can draw the fingers a bit bigger as well or a bit chubbier as well. Something like this could work. This is it. These are my shapes. I'm adapting her legs as well. My character usually doesn't have a lot of form on her arms and her legs. But for the purpose of this class, I think it deserves to be a bit more adapted. We have everything we need right now. Let's draw our line art. So I did that curve a bit too pointy for what I wanted, so I redid it. Just like before, I'm also adapting other body parts like making the feet rounder and more compact, let's say. So the whole body looks different and accompanies the hobby idea. Again, you can exaggerate all of these features more or less. I like to go with something in between, but also let myself explore something different. Like I said, my character is already a bit chubbier, so I'm taking this opportunity to do something different to explore different shapes and different styles even. It's very important to explore different things. It's time to color everything, but something here can continue with the coloring. Now let's grab my Corgi illustration and now we bring it to this. It's a bit smaller in this case, but I'm going to leave it like this. So there we go. We have here how I would go about drawing show your character. So rounder shapes, lots of curves there. Have fun with it, experiment with different things. This is it for now. Follow me to the next video where we're going to talk about mix and matching different body types and your assignment as well. I will see you right there. 9. Mix & Match Different Bodies And Proportions: Hello, and welcome back. We've gone through a lot of drawing and learning. We saw how to draw people with different heights, but different weights as well. Of course, every single one of these can be more or less exaggerated. It's all up to you and the type of character you're drawing. You have a base of how to do things. So all you have to do from now on is adapt it into different types of bodies. Not only that, but you can mix and match different aspects. Short and thin bodies, short and chewy, tall and thin, or tall and shabby, but you can even do more than that. If you're into character design, drawing expressive and unique characters is very important, and most of the time that can be done through exaggeration. So for example, a character can have very thin and short legs, accompanied by a round belly. There are many options, and as I said before, it's important to explore different things. You can always base your drawings from real life, but even then people are so diverse and different from each other. Don't be afraid to try different things even if they sound absurd. Times what you try might not work, but others, it might surprise you and you end up creating something quite interesting. It's okay to do bad drawings. You're experimenting and exploring. So let yourself be creative and try different things. Above all, have fun with your art and drawings. Okay, this is it for now. Follow me to the next video so we can talk about your assignment. 10. Practice Time! Assignment 2: Hello, and welcome back. It's time for your assignment. We learned how to draw different body types, so you can create more interesting characters. So now it's time to draw something based on what you learned. Grab the character from the beginning. Again, it can be one you drew, or you can unload the character I left for you. Now, all you have to do is adapt that character. Two different body type than what I have right now, similar to what I did throughout the previous videos. Once you're done, don't forget to post your character. I always love to see your work and can give you any feedback or answer any questions you might have. Also, if you draw other sketches through the class, feel free to share those as well. All right, thank you for watching. Have fun with your assignment, and I'll see you in the next video. 11. Conclusion - Before You Go!: Hi, again, artist. Congratulations on finishing this class. I hope you had an amazing time and learned a tone about drawing different body types and proportions. Also, thank you so much for joining. It's been a pleasure guiding you through each step of this diverse character design journey, and I'm excited to see how your character roster has expanded. If you enjoy this class and found it valuable, I would greatly appreciate it if you could leave a review. Your feedback helps me improve and helps other students find the right courses for their character design needs until next time, happy character designing and as always, keep on drawing.