How to Draw Stylized Poses and Anatomy - Breaking Down the Basic Shapes

1. Introduction Video: Hello everyone. My name is Robert Marzullo and I'll be your instructor for this course, how to Draw Stylized poses and Anatomy. This course starts from the very beginning and we're going to start with basic Shapes. My goal here is to teach you how to simplify the complexity of the body was simplified. Shapes, forms, looking for rhythms, gesture, all sorts of things that will allow you to build this backup and then draw more dynamic interesting characters. This course also includes a lot of localized studies before we get to the bigger Full Figure drawings. So that way we can study things like the Torso, the shoulders, the individual parts that a lot of us have had trouble along the way learning, but makes it a lot easier to draw those Full dynamic figures. In this course, you're going to learn Stylized Anatomy for Comics. Dynamic poses, light and Shadow of the Figure, line, Weight, cross Hatching and Rendering, gesture and body language, as well as how to construct Male and Female Poses. Some other downloadable resources that you'll get with this course are step-by-step tutorials and high-quality poses for you to study and draw along with. Keep in mind that this entire course is in real time. That way, don't glance over anything and I show you exactly what it takes to create this type of work. And remember, you get lifetime access to this content and all future updates are free. So if you're ready to take yard to the next level, let's get started. Thank you very much for considering my course and I can't wait to see your work 2. Practicing with Basic Shapes: Welcome back. So what we're gonna do here is I wanted to get you warmed up with kind of learning to process Shapes. Lots and lots of different shapes. Everything is just a shape, a line form of volume. It's all explained it as I go, but, but really it's just getting in the habit of developing the shapes in a way that you can maneuver them. I want you to always think your drawing is like a ball of clay. Just so you could see what I'm working with. I'm going to use Procreate on the iPad Pro, but you're welcome to use whatever you want. This is not software specific. You can use paper. I just find it easier to be able to show people my process this way. So just so you understand the settings there they are. But again, doesn't really matter. You can use what you want. But what I want to show you, the main thing that we want to really address in this particular lesson is to get used to developing shapes. And so for instance, if I was to draw just a rectangle here, right? Pretty basic, right? I think most of us could pull that off, right? If you can't, you need to sit here and practice rectangles and every way, shape and form that you can think of them. At first you're going to start with the rectangles just facing you. And then you're going to eventually get to a point where you start thinking of perspective. And all you're doing is making the sides of that converge a little bit to an imaginary vanishing point. You could place that vanishing point and you could draw these out if you want. But really I find it to be helpful to warm up your imagination by doing just this simple exercise. Really stretch it. So really take it and see how far you can take some of these basic shapes in every conceivable way. So maybe even start with an angled version like this. Draw some lines that basically are converging relatively the same direction, right? So if they went far enough back to a point, a bit of vanishing point. And again, you can draw that if you want, but that's not really what I like about doing this. I think that by free handing it, you're forcing yourself to make some estimations. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, there's a time and place for ruling every line and drawing every vanishing point, all that good stuff. But in this case we're really just want to express a lot of different Basic Shapes and we're not being too awfully critical about anything. So again, try some different ones, maybe a square, maybe see the underneath, a bit more. Maybe draw through so that you get this kind of see through prism. Alright, so I'm as simple as that. You see, I'm not trying to refine it is I could see some real flaws in that little shape right there. If I wanted this to be a true cube, each one of these flat planes would need to be roughly the same. You see, they're not, they're skewed. But I'm not going to crack that. That's again, not the point. I'd rather login lots of mileage here, if you will, and keep drawing, keep expressing lots of things. Another good exercise when you do your circles and you connect them to make a cylinder, you can put like another one in the middle. Another thing you could do is draw, I kind of a floating rectangle and the middle of that. Let me do another one. Well, it was kinda messy to show you. You could go the other way as well and do that again. So let's take that and go like this. We're going to have it converge a little bit towards a receding point. That's what gives it the illusion of depth. And then we'll put this rectangle, let's say right here this time. So that goes over here. So we'll draw through. I didn't get the other side of our circle there will draw through. And so this needs to converge as well. He's a hit that little circle angle here should match the angle over here. You see even something as simple as that. There's a lot going on there. But that's why these types of exercises are so good for you. Because although they're super-simple, they teach us a lot. And all of this comes together into characters, buildings, cars, you name it. I mean, everything is comprised of Shapes. Now you say, you could look at this goal. How does that translate to a person will get into that more and more as we go. But essentially what happens is when you can take a box and you can maneuver it like this. You say, well, that's that's an up-shot to a head right there. We won't need to refine it to illustrate that. But then when you go to add the Torso, you're like, Wow, I want the Torso to be tilted away from the head. And I want there to even be an angle that's different from the head. Okay, so now we have a Torso that's slightly tilted. And then likewise the pelvis, maybe a different orientation and also a different tilt away from the upper torso. We end up with something like that. We attach the spine. The spine runs through like this. You see real quickly How now these boxes that we've been messing around with do translate to a body. And this is more effective than a lot of people give it credit for. Because essentially, I always find this like I just draw, right? And I just go to organic forms. There's times I can pull it off and there's other times I can't seem to get the perspective right or the relationship of the proportions, right? I'm just a little bit flimsy. In my approach. This structure allows you to induce or you can utilize perspective in the body. You can see it. There's, there's perspective to the pelvis. It's on its own orientation. The Torso in the head. Each one has a perspective to it. If you go like this all sudden, you know the direction the head is facing, right? So it allows you to utilize perspective in the body. It's very mappable, it's very understandable, digestible. I just think it's a really good technique. Now, you do couple this width, slowly working into organic forms. Ribcage might become something like this. Simplified rib-cage, obviously finding the center line to it. You might convert a ribcage is something like that. For your next step. The pelvis might become something like this. Like he's floating underwear, right? But that's again, I want you to I want you to slowly build up to that. Like if that's too much for you, then go even more simplistic. Tried taking just the me go back and show you another possibility here. The main thing is that you stay simplified as long as you need to start expressing shifts in the perspective of the body. Because if not, what do we do? We tend to draw characters. This is a common problem with most beginners and even events artists. You get kinda caught up and doing this way too much. Alright? You want to really fight that. This is a great way to fight that. So again, maybe you just simplified this box like prism, this rectangular prism with just a center line. And just that upward, upside down V, you get right there. And that's it. You'd go right into the same shape. Maybe that's your simplified rib-cage. Whatever you need. Again, it's a matter of keeping things as simple as they need to be until you're ready to move up to the next step. But the thing I'm more interested in is that you start to realize that the pelvis doesn't align with the Torso. Torso doesn't lie on the head. They all have their little subtle differences. And it's easy to see that in something as simple as that right there. Now next, if you were to take somebody who shapes and say, okay, well that explains how you might use boxes for those areas. But arms and legs, you're not going to use boxes, right? Let's go back to these cylinders right there. And you're also going to practice like if I draw a cylinder like this, it implies it looks like column, but it implies foreshortening applies, implies that this is receding away from our view. Or it just means that that's a tapered object. It could be almost parallel to our view, but it could be tapered on one side. That's really what I would recommend for arms and legs. So when I draw an arm and I go back to the cylinder method to do something a little more like this. Okay. And then a hand becomes a bit of a wedge. And then fingers I could sit there and try to fill in little cylinders. I mean, that's what they look like. Our fingers do look like cylinders, but I never really do that. I go more gesturally at that and we'll, we'll get into the gesture of as it applies to the Stylized characters as well. But see I do something a bit more like that or another technique you can do again, keeping things as simple as possible as you can draw a hand with a mitten. And that's a pretty simple shape. Or you could, you could make the argument. It's probably about three or four shapes if you were really to break it down, Something like that. But it's super simple that right there, we'll do a lot of work for you if you struggle with hands. Because we can all kind of envision different hand gestures as a mitten. And then you just break off a finger to break it up, but break it off from the bulk of the form as the mitten and the handles that a lot you will see hand poses where the hand, the fingers are bent, Pinky's out, alright. Whatever they're holding the glass and the babies out. So same concept applies. This minton, you can draw the mitten. And by itself it looks kinda boring, but as soon as you pop that little pink you, it's a little bit better to look at. It's one step closer. The right direction for you, instead of trying to jump in and draw a hand that's all contorted and crazy. That gets a bit confusing. So look for the Gestures and the hand again, we'll get into Gestures more as we progress. But for arms and legs, oh, pose to Draw a Leg, kind of in a standing position and do that basic floating underwear. It's pretty simple shape right? Then. The upper leg would be a tapered cylinder. Like that. You would probably start. And the most simplest form is a circle, even though it's not very circular the most part. And then another tapered cylinder and then a wedge for the foot. This is bad, is that is, and so you can see that all these shapes, I mean, this is really all you need is some circles and ovals. Some cylinders. Will circles becoming the cylinders, the box like prisms with a little bit of imagined perspective. And just having a login pages of these. And I know it's boring and I know it's like really, I want to get to the good stuff. I wanna do, the font stuff. Don't discount this right here. This step, this step is super important and a lot of people don't spend enough time. So say you've got a lot of this and I hope Kim, I'm going to bring out a foreshortened version of the Leg because I'm feeling pretty good about all my practice and now I'm ready to make it look more dimensional. The next step is you take the same cylinder and you say, okay, if I was to bring that out towards the viewer, how would that taper? It's obviously going to look different than this because we have to imagine that foreshortening, changing the shape of it. But that's not too, It's not that hard to play around with this cylinder over and over again until you figure out the knee would be in a particular pose you might want. The knee would be really high up like this. So that means that if it's going to relate back to this same flat plane of the opening for the Legs. While it's not gonna get much wider than that, right? If at all. I mean, this is straight down, so I might widen out, but it's still has to meet here. Your connection points usually expose how big those areas and GDP. So that's your one point of reference. As you work out. You just kinda keep moving this oval. This one here, into different scenarios with the same general width of the opening of the Leg there. What if what if I moved it right in front? You know, how dramatic would that be? This one is going to probably didn't more difficult to envision. Let's say it was something like this. Now that needs like right in front of the upper leg. You have to almost imagine like this bit of depth around. I don't want to make it too confusing, but you'll have to imagine this being the knee until we placed it. But it's really that process of maneuvering that around. Maybe you want the Leg higher up and you want the knee way up here and the shorter part of the Leg, the lower leg is coming down here right? When that case and that oval opening for the knee is gonna be up here. Same reference point to about there. Something like that. Then when you add the next part of the Leg, it would come down from there. Right. Now you get a leg that's starting to go upward. But then as we refine it, we attached the knee kinda floating into here and we'll get into that. But I don't wanna go too far too fast. The main thing is that you utilize these basic shapes and take your time and express lots of variety to learn to simplify your work. So let's go and stop here. We'll head over to the next lesson and continue on. So let's move forward. 3. Overlapping Shapes: Okay, so now hopefully you've had plenty of time to draw lots of basic primitives and really try a variation, triangles, pyramids and all sorts of stuff. Just, just play around with all the basic primitives you can. But now, let's also think about how we can wrap those around forms because this is what happens generally when we move to the next step of thinking about some sort of Anatomy. So we get pretty good at maybe drawing a body and I'm going to skip over, but I'll come back to it. I'm going to say we've got some gesture of the body. Okay, So buys like this. So I'm skipping over how to get to a Torso like that. But again, I'll come back to more gesture. And you've got to Leg back here, Leg up here. And I'm just going to draw this in rather quickly to get to the point I want to make about how to look at other shapes over top. So when I'm doing this, I'm actually thinking a lot about silhouettes. And that takes some practice to do. But it's, it can be a fast way to draw characters. And I'm also again thinking about the gesture. So I'm trying to get that curvature of the spine, this slope right here. So this me is more of the gesture and even the Arm. I tried to get a rhythm of the Arm like that, so it's not so straight and stacked. Nothing worse than Santa shoulder, upper arm, forearm. Now, as we mentioned, that was in the previous step of how you would do it. You wouldn't stay there. That's an initial start to start getting a sense of perspective going so that you can maneuver these shapes and forms in a kind of 3D space in your mind. But you have to remember that the shoulder connects around the upper arm. The forearm protrudes out from the upper arm. And we'll get more into this as well. But they're just they're not stacked there, if anything, there's a back-and-forth, almost like a zigzag. It goes there but just not stack. With this. We get this basic Pose going. Like this will say, you look at this, there's a lot of Shapes going on here that wouldn't just be basic cylinders even at this stage. And I haven't even really started refining and placing a lot of anatomy. A little bit kinda hinted in there with the silhouette drawing, but it's not. There's gonna be more and more of that as I refine it. Well, let's get enough of this in here where you can make it out. Let's say we get to about right here and I'm like, Okay, I wanted to start refining this. But up until this point, the shapes have been doing or just cylinders and cubes. How do I even process and do something like this and get it to look more natural? What I would say is that when you go to do this, let's zero in on this Leg. So at first you're thinking like this, okay. You got a cylinder, you got a circle. Got a tapered cylinder. You're getting a little more advanced, so you're not drawing your Saunders like this anymore. Can you see the difference? One just has a little bit of curve to the outsides and the other ones more solid and flat. This is okay to start there, but eventually you're gonna get to here where you start to bend them a little bit more. Remember everything's a ball of clay and all of this is malleable. All this is something that you can twist and contort and move on the screen. Anyway you want. The more you start to think that way, the more the your imagination kinda opens up. Okay, so let's go back to to here. Now you're at this point and they're starting to get a little bit more curves are starting to think a little bit more about silhouette drawing as you do this. But you're not quite sure how you would build other forms onto these forms. Well, the way that you do that is you have to think about these as two ways. Really. One is individual forms. So a muscle that goes to Leg. It looks something like this. You might have another segmentation or noticeable mark to the Leg Right about there. You might have another one that comes down and back, something like that. Alright, so the trick is, what am I envisioning right here? And say, well, I know that's the vastus medialis, right? And to me that's the right shape. It might not be, it might be a little bit more like this. Remember, we're stylizing this are being imaginative or having FUN with it. It's not always gonna be exactly the way it is. The main thing is that I come up with a simplified shape and form that I can envision. And I can throw in there anytime I want. What I like to do. So it's the calf muscle To me, the calf muscle, it looks like this. It's a bit of a diamond. Like it's a there, it looks like a spearhead, but it's a bit of a diamond light shape. And so that's how I draw it. This is what I envisioned when I when I get to the calf muscle. Now obviously I'm not drawing it as segmented as you would see it right here. But to me it's a simple shape. In the more I can do that, the more I can get through an entire Figure doing that, the easier things are for me. There's another muscle I don't know if it's a solely as I pick, it is not going to get into name and every muscle here because I'll slaughter some of them. But I got to usually be looking at my reference sheets to get it. All right. But let's say it's this muscle right here. To me, it's that shape and on and on that goals. Now, again, this isn't going to be the end result or I'm gonna get somebody that looks very mechanical, very virtual reality, bad virtual reality graphics from the '80s. I know it's just going to look really weird, right? But it's a great way to think about it. And so the knee. So here's another quick example. Let me zoom in here and show you something. I think it's worth mentioning. So if we bring the knee out like this may say, Well to me, this is my simple knee. It's a triangle right there. Then that's fine. And that's better than nothing. But then at some point you'll probably get to where you keep paying attention to need illustrations or the body and gentlemen, You know what, there's a little angle right there. You go from basically this at first, which is better than a lot of people really. They won't even just, I don't know. It's like the knees like something where people try to do this and they do some weird thing and it turns into a lumpy look and elbow or something. But I would say in this case it's better to simplify. And then eventually as you develop your knowledge, I cannot. Your next simplification would be this. Then your next one? I'm just speaking from my own experience. We're all going to have a different road map to how we start to perceive the human body, I think anyways. But then your next one would be like this and go, you know what, there's always this little bump right there under the knee. But you see how even even this is really just a process of what I thought about the knee initially as all there's an angle, they're all know it's an angle and the kneecap actually points up more. And you start to learn this as you do Anatomy breakdowns and you'd look at where the tendons go and all of us in that. And then you realize, oh no, there's some bony protrusions right there. And at first you draw on the Leg, maybe completely straight back like that, the shin area and then also no, you don't want it seems like for most views that I see it bends out a little bit right there. And on and on that process goes. It's really just developing a memory of what you see and then also what you adopt as being right for your style. So let's go back to this. And I'll just do another quick version right through here. Because again, I think this something you have to practice, but now we're talking about the vastus lateralis To me, it's this kind of shape. And you get the hamstrings on the back, we see a little bit of a pull this way or it could be the other way. I might be. They could be this way down. And then you've got some muscles here at the glue here is kind of bring up like this. This might, you got to iliotibial tract in here, but I usually do is, I think it's a shorter version of that. Let me bring that up a little higher. Something like this. Rectus femoris here. So again, this is my simplified version of the side of the Leg. And it's gonna be a little different for all of us. Like you might look at that. I just look right, Rob. And that's fine. That's where Stylized drawings are. Okay? Because we have to make our own distinctions. So again, calf muscle like this on the outside. I think it goes more like this little bony protrusion right there. Down to the foot here. I'll just do a boot version here. Ankle here Something like that. Sometimes less is better, so I'd probably stop it there. Then you have to remember too, when you start to Shadow and shade and develop things, you're not going to use every segmentation and every, every bit of that. But if you, if you need more, that's when you take your basic version of what you considered, your style and your memory of it. And then you go to some source material. Pinterest is gray and I've got about four anatomy books that I rely on at any given time, medical Anatomy and then some that are illustrated by Anatomy. Burn hogarth is one of my favorites. So again, this is my stylized version. Now, here's the other thing. I love looking at other artists and seeing how they interpret it. And I suggest you do that with my work, but then also you have to all always table that with your own research and development, okay? Yeah. So you're gonna hear people say don't copy other artists because you'll copy their mistakes. I don't wholeheartedly believe in that if they're better and they've done their due diligence. And you can see that in their work, by all means, learn from them, grow from them. Never trust one source. I don't care if it's a book. I don't care if it's an artist, a mentor. You want to be a advocate for your own knowledge. You want to go out there and really just research in add bits and pieces into your own development. So again, we could continue on with this, but hopefully you get the idea. What I want you to practice here is not just the Anatomy shapes I've shown you here, but I also want you to think about these other shapes now because we're going to need these as we progress. And so you're going to take the Shapes I showed you in the previous lesson. And you're just going to draw some things that look a little more like this. That was pretty bad. Let me try that again. Have a hard time going left to right on the screen is really rotate it. But see how this gives you a nice dimensional feeling. And it's also got some curvature in there. So now what you're doing is you're incorporating again the previous step. With this step we're getting more of a sense of dimension. And this works great for Anatomy because you have to imagine that all of these muscles are dimensional. Strips of clay will save yeah, bands or clay or strips that I don't know how to really make that sound for you, but, but again, they're malleable. They have contours. Some are thick or thin. Lots of muscle groups in the body and you need that variation. You need some that appear strong and bulge out and then you need some that are like little bands and little tiny strips. So you're going to have to practice thinking of shapes like this. Maybe it goes back like that. Maybe it tapers together, gets thinner. So see how it starts thicker. The air gets thinner there. Then maybe have another one right by a lot of times muscles will converge in a similar area, right? So we do something like that. Again, these little lines, these little lines are basically like wrapping lines. So when we get into drawing the Anatomy, specifically, more and more I'll, I'll explain it further. But what you're trying to do is think about developing these shapes and a way where you can. It's almost like you're just, you're trying to see things. Everything is a basic shape, basic series of shapes and forms that you can maneuver. Again, I'll just keep relating it back to trying to get your artwork to become this malleable ball of clay on a, on this white canvas. It can sometimes be daunting. But if you go back to thinking of it as all these potentials for Basic Shapes. All sudden it becomes a lot easier to process. Because now you can just move these shapes around. They're not so intimidating. Yeah. It's not like that's right. But I can since I can understand each one of these shapes, I can maneuver, am I can nudge, want around, I can grab this piece of the puzzle and slide it over there. So that'll be it for this particular lesson. Hopefully that's informative where let's head on to the next lesson and see what we come up with. 4. Adding Volume to the Form: Alright, welcome back. So another thing I wanted to point out before we move on to this. So again, you've got this trips, you've got the bent shapes that you should be working on. These, again, will help out with a lot more than just drawing the Stylized characters. So really suggest you do it. It's also thinking about the belly of a muscle. So you kinda have it here, but let me just draw it off to the side. So any muscle or almost any muscle I should say, is going to have a noticeable kinda belly to it. So it's good to practice these types of shapes. You can call them teardrops. I've, I've heard people refer to them as chicken legs, all sorts of things. But it's just kinda this belly like form, something like this. And even practice just kinda wrapping these in front of and around each other. This is a lot of what makes the Form really complicated to draw. Because it has a lot of this that has some smaller ones that kinda protrude out. And you can think of them like many little cables as well. Pull up their since see it better. These tiny little cables. But again, it's kind of a noticeable thick, thick, thickened area and it's called a belly to the muscle. And you're going to see that in a lot of areas. So it's good to practice these as well. And then sometimes you're even going to see these areas wrap around. Another group. Do something like this. We kinda warm around. So that's something else. It's worth practicing. There's times I like doing this affect with cables. So it's kinda somewhere to this. It's been to practice and all that really is. And it can come in handy for muscles as well. As you draw. Let's just say one big cables so the will ignore the belly portion for now. Just to show you this little exercise, will do these little wrapping lines. So the wrapping lines are just there to get a sense of depth and dimension souls you do is you put a little curve on them. And that immediately gives you a little bit of a 3D kind of vibe to that, right? With hardly any effort. Then you take another one, much thinner. So I'm going to bring that over here. I have a wave around a little bit. So it's not just a straight cylinder, but other than that it is, it's a cylinder with a little bit of bend to it. And in some tiny little wrapping lines, right? And just like that, without hardly any work, you put a little shadow right here, maybe a little bit over here, but definitely more noticeable on this side. Groups that we've already got something that feels like a couple of cables on one beneath the other. I mean, immediate depth perception for very little effort. And you can continue on that path. And it's really kind of a font exploration. So I, I liked just going and going with this. It's almost something to just kind of zone out and do a bunch of, then you can play around with different variations to the wrapping lines if you want. But essentially, what I like about this the most is it's just an immediate bit of depth. With very little effort. You can keep building upon it randomly. So you can say, I'm going to curve it over to here and have this pass under these. I'm going to start with some really thin ones now and I get these nice and thin. I'm going to have them go against the current direction because again, these are random right? Now with muscles until you get to the veins. They don't really seem as random. Is this. Oh, you know what, I'm kinda disjointed. They're always draw it through as well. It's not disjointed, but it's maybe not as random as this for muscles, but this is still a very good exercise to get you thinking in that dimensional way. That interlocking kind of way of like veins even. But again, play around with this and then you can get to a point where you scale the brush down. And you can even do some that are just silhouettes in the background. You can use some negative lines to show the separation if you want. But you can really keep going and going smaller and smaller and show a little bit of variation in the wires. Stuff like this color is up really nicely too. But sales simple, that idea is really, and then you can add a little bit of rendering to, you know, if this is a cable. But again, I really just want you to think about the idea of depth perception and overlapping forms. And then here, thinking about the belly of the muscles and really trying to envision if one is in front of the other What does that do as a belly in front of the other? Is other one get dwarfed by the size comparison. Does it pass beneath the next few that come up? You'll see as we illustrate these ideas, there's gonna be a lot of that. There's gonna be a lot of things that move up and then overlap and other objects and other Form. And you have to think about how the Shadows react there, how the line Weight reacts, things like that. So practice that as well. And so back over to here, I wanted to mention one more thing before we wrap up this one that is basically to really envisioned and play around with the, remember, as I talked about, the strips of muscle down here, right here, and those are basically just thin strips of muscle. And there's a lot of areas of the body. We're going to have to think about that. But there's a lot of thin little strips of muscle that if you draw them too bulky, they're just going to look inflamed and ridiculous. And there's a time in a place, certain muscles you're going to want to show big bulging biceps, right? That's a pretty common term. But then you wouldn't want to do that everywhere. Because then what happens to the biceps? They look dwarfed by comparison. Or if you do it everywhere, it just looks like somebody that's got a really bad Inflammation brought me there all inflamed every words the swelling everywhere just wouldn't make sense. So what you have to do is once you get to the point where we're gonna keep going over these basic shapes to look for. So one of the Basic Shapes here, there's a diamond on the back of the the separation of the muscles trapezius. The trapezius comes up like this, like this into there. You get that diamond of separation there. They're pulling against the spine. Alright, so it goes like this. Then it goes up and around the spine. The spine of scapula, the shoulder blade is somewhere like this. It just kinda goes around that you get this bit of a shape. Now, if I was going to simplify that further for him and try that again. I would definitely start with the diamond because to me that's the most noticeable kind of landmark, we'll call it. And I would, if I was going very simplified, just do this. It's almost like, well, let's just say what the back there's a lot of v's and w's will get into that More like when you draw the lat, basically looks like a W shape right there. But again, we'll get into all that. But the thing I want you to focus on here is sit at your to the point where you're like, okay, this is the simplified form of the trapezius that I've gotten my mind. Right. But how thick is that? If it was consistently the same width or thickness strip of muscle that I talked about, maybe it will look like this. Look how flat that looks. All of a sudden. It doesn't look like overly bulky trapezius. I would say that's an error of the body where you would want more definition and more curvature. So again, it's not just memorizing the shape at first, that's what you want. You want some simplified shapes. You want to convert that to memory. You want to make your own distinctions for sure, don't trust everybody. Source, make up your own. Be inventive, be creative. You might just come up with the best, next best way to explain a certain muscle group and that's gonna be your style or part of it. Well, in this case, again, that's just too flat so the shapes not wrong. It's the perception of depth in, in relation to it. So now let's take the same shape. You do get a bit of a divide here. Sometimes you'll see there's more of a separation there, but I feel like just kind of implying that is enough. But what I'll do is I'll put curves here for the wrapping lines. And I'll just kind of envision a little bit more depth. See all immediately. We can get that to look like it's protruding away from the base form of the back. It's now it's got it's got some rural perception of depth there. And then obviously we added to that. Let's take a Shadow. Me, lighten that up even more. I'll just put like a nice big shadow here. Obviously, it's pretty easy once you start adding in these grayscale Shadows to show a lot more curvature in depth. But I just want you to get the point. Like you need to practice these in ways where you are perceiving depth and you are using your wrapping lines to curve over. This shape of the deltoid looks really flat, right? Right here, just to me, the deltoid is really like a heart shape and you can see that's pretty much what I drew there. Sideways heart. You do have a medial head. You have a posterior head or posterior? Had you ever anterior head what you would barely see it angle, something like that. I mean, I don't know if that's exactly right. But then again, is there an exactly right we're talking Stylized Anatomy, but, but the difference is here. I need to figure that out where that segmentation is, where those three main muscles are. I can break off into smaller striations. But then I need to, again, I need to really perceive the curvature of the muscle groups. It's gotta be depth and dimension there. Let's see all that immediate looks a lot more dimensional without the Shadows and it's just those wrapping lines versus something like that. Where are we really don't know, you know, is that flat? Is that what does that, you know, it's implied a little bit but not enough. So again, the separation figure out where the heads of the deltoid would be. Something like this. And then get in the curved wrapping lines. It's almost like you're drawn Spiderman suit or somebody, right? There you go. Now you've got some implied depth. You can also add a little bit, a little bit of Grace Hill to it, which are really push it out at the viewer a lot more. So you get like you're shapes of shadows going. Again, we'll get into all this. I'm just trying to slowly warm me up to these concepts. And just like that we have something that looks and feels a little more dimensional. Let's really, and again, it's going to be practicing all these things. So focus on this, for this particular lesson, focused on the belly of the muscles in print and really play around with this as well. So I probably should've showed you a little more variation to that. One more. It's not just gonna be, you're going to have the belly of the muscle and it's good to find that and pinpoint that all throughout the body. But you're going to want to show like really some variation in the way that occurs. So some are gonna be big center belly and they're going to thin out quite a bit. Sometimes you're gonna get a belly to the muscle and the tendon is going to be a lot longer. And then again it's gonna be the variation and the overlaps to those. Sometimes they're going to pass in front of around through underneath. So again, play around with the variation to that. Then also couple that with the idea of conveying thickness and weight. You can use definitely use your wrapping lines. You can also use a little bit of gray, gray-scale and shadowing value. But keep it simple and practice all sorts of variations with this. And then also practice studying from life or Comic Art that you like. But break it down in this way and see what you come up with. Let's go and stop here and we'll head over to our next lesson. 5. Drawing the Front of the Leg: Welcome back. So now what I'd like to do is talk to you about simplified shapes. So I'd like to break down some different areas for you with you so that you can practice these. And again, really try to think about the shapes and forms of different parts of the body. Simplified ways. Now, be inventive, tried to come up with your own versions of what I'm getting ready to show you. But if you don't have any better versions and you're feel free to use mine and then you'll slowly develop your own process and skill set over time, I think, but let me show you the ones that resonate with me the most and hopefully that'll get you going on this thought process. So as we draw something like a Leg, Right? So say we start with a cylinder method to get a base structure going. Ok, and I'm going to taper the inside a little bit. I'm going to put a curved outside. Put a circle for a knee, lower leg, bit of an angle on the inside, curve on the outside. Now remember what I said is about starting with basic cylinders. So very straight cylinders at first. Okay. Then you go to tapering those inward. And then eventually you start to imply Anatomy. So I'm skipping those steps a little bit, but hopefully you understand that, that I'm just going for a little bit of a sense of applied Anatomy. But feel free to do whatever steps you need to, to get to here. But I think this is a better way to kinda do it. And you don't have to even draw him a, a version of the calf muscle like that. But you could definitely do a little bit of curve like this. One of the rhythms that we see in the Leg. Our curve, relatively straight curve and the insides a lot straighter by comparison. Okay. So it's definitely not that the Leg, the inside of the leg is straight. It's just by comparison, it's kinda noticeable that's a little bit more straight than the outside. So just pay attention to that. And that's kinda what I'm implying right there. Even with this basic cylinder approach, it even goes right down into the foot with a foot. Jets out, usually a little bit more like this. All right, so even a very blocky representation, you might draw the foot something like this. Again, it's an oversimplification. But there's a lot of times where that's very beneficial. And then as far as proportions, so you're also gauging proportions. And we'll get into that in more detail as well. So it's hard to really teach one before the other. A lot of these things are interlocking techniques. So by looking at this, I would say that upper leg needs to be longer, taller by comparison. So I would adjust that, something like this. So again, we are thinking about proportions as we do something like this. So now to the Basic Shapes. So again, this is kinda been something we've already covered as far as this portion. But when you go to Draw Anatomy, it, it becomes a little bit trickier to figure out how to overlay this in a way that doesn't get confusing awfully quick. So I'm gonna do is I like to actually add a layer at times like this. And so that's the screen mode. I just want something to be able to draw over top of in a way that you could soft erase it, whatever you wanna do there. But to draw over top of it in a way that's very discernible, very easy to see. So the shapes that I'd like to think about the Leg from an angle like this. One of the things is the quadriceps. I like to look at those like an upside down heart Leg shape. Okay, so at first I'm going to start even more simplified than it really is. An upside down heart-shaped with this middle of the heart roughly where the knee is. Right there. We were probably doing better than a lot of people in the beginning stages of work because they just draw legs too awfully straight. Now, one thing I want to point out is the medial side, lateral side or not even. I've purposely made them even here because again, I want to slowly work you up to these ideas. I just want to throw you into the deep end of the pool and say, well, good luck started swimming. It's like you need to slowly, hopefully understanding. Now if you're more advanced, you can progress passes. You'll have to make that decision for yourself. But what I like to do here, if show this shape, practice the shape. You should be able to Draw heart. And if you can, just keep practicing, it doesn't even have to be. Is Stylized the minute you could homeless really just get away with a really stretched heart-shaped for the spot. It does explain the shape that you're going to see their for the quadriceps. Now, the quadriceps are the medialis lateralis rectus femoris. Again, we don't need to get it in the terminology too much. I want to say there's one below it as well. I don't think the sartorius is part of it, but you do get this sartorius muscle that comes up right through here and goes down like that, like a elongated as we'll talk about that as well. But The next step to here is just to really take the middle muscle that you get in the Leg and just kinda segment it like this. You see how simple this is really a good thing to think about here are teardrops. Okay, so we've started with the heart Leg shape. We break off into this other segmentation, right up the middle. And we think about a teardrop shape. Look if you take another color here, you go right through here. Let's just looks like a teardrop. And really the Leg itself can be simplified with a bunch of teardrops. A lot of muscles have these teardrop look and shapes. Remember what I said about paying attention to where the belly of the muscle is. But you can really keep going and going and draw a lot of teardrop look and Shapes. And you generally will get heavier organic look and feel to the anatomy that way. So it's worth paying attention to. But I just want to show you that. So we're taking this quadricep area, we're segmenting it with an upside down teardrop because it would be falling the other way. These could be considered to other teardrops falling kind of a standard way of looking at them. And then over here, we're just going to take the what does this I believe it's the adductor group, but we'll say the inside of the thigh. We'll just have this kind of come out. So think about this, instead of even picturing the entire volume there, just think about this one line out and then a wave inward. You can play around with variations to that slope into this muscle more. Also, also I'm really trying to convey their is it you just don't want to do that. There's nothing completely straight, even though we did start that way. I'd rather you just think about, well, this has a volume to it and one part of it's thicker. In one part of it's sloping into the neighboring muscle group. So something like that. And as I mentioned with that sartorius, it goes from up here and all of these, by the way, come up here and connect to what's called the ASIS, anterior superior iliac spine. Really, it's just good to know that they come up here and they attach to the Front of the hip area. But this muscle goes down here through the side of the knee. It does this big kind of sweeping. Or this is another rhythm that you'll see in the Leg. It does this big sweeping. Look at it like a giant elongated S right through there S, right? And so when you start to see these different rhythms and you connect it with these basic shapes. It starts to get a lot easier, but it takes some practice, so don't expect too much too soon. Let's move down here to the the calf muscle. And let's just explain this with a diamond light shape. Will see that just a basic diamond there. Again, these are oversimplifications, but I think that's important to start out with. So as you come down here into the knee, knees are tricky. But one of the things that I do as I just simplify it with this shape here. If you find that to be even to complex, you can go a step further. You could say, well, what if I just drew the bottom of the knee? Just this shape right there. It's like it's really like a little triangle with, instead of having that tip there, you just kinda cut it off. So just think of it like that, just a little triangular like shape. And you're just going to cut that base off like that and flatten it out. Pretty simple, right? It's just drop that in there. And so what you have to envision here and maybe not even draw, sometimes I even leave it out. Is it, It's coming up like this. It's connecting to a tendon that's going to the rectus femoris. In fact, I don't even know if it connects there, but it does a sort of shape there. So it's worth paying attention to. So really you can just divide these up and kinda get this feeling that it comes down into the knee. It's pretty simple to do. But again, let's keep this very simple. Something like this will probably bring the inside of his knee and further it looks too wide there. I'm always gonna be nudging this stuff around. And then for the other side of the knee, we're just going to keep the knee is a bit of an oval for now. So this whole area of the knee just going to keep it very oval like side here. I'm just going to bring this down. And we've got a lot going on over here. We'll talk about this more. But for now, what I really wanna do is I want to bring this out and slope it right into the vastus lateralis. Usually what you see on the side of the Leg here, looks to be Like one shape, but this muscle cuts in. So we're just going to do something like that. Again, trying to keep it simple. Same thing with the Leg here. Remember we talked about those Initial curves earlier. So we're going to bring that out, curve it down. And I feel like this curve needs to be pushed out. Again, always nudging the stuff around, just kinda sculpting it. And our ankle is higher. Just get an idea like that in place. Okay, so now what I want to show you here is that after we get enough of this and let's get this part right here. So we've got these muscles that come in front of the Leg. I'm not going to get into too much. Again, I want to keep this simple, but I do want to say that the Front of the Leg needs to feel a little bit like it's in front of the calf muscles. The calf muscles are on the back of the light. So it's very easy to draw these like I have and they feel like they're on the side of the Leg and other they're poking around the side. But this part right here needs to have the feeling That's definitely in front of you. Got a muscle that wraps around. You've got these little divisions. You get one that pops out here to the toes, the digits, but I don't wanna get too much into it because it could be very confusing. And rather you focus on this and you go okay, If I had a wrapping line going right through here, this would clearly be in the Front. And these aren't too far off to the back, but they're going to wrap back in a way a little bit. Hopefully that is visually making sense for you. It's a subtle area, but it needs to be that way because if not, you get this very flat widened out view of the Leg there. Likewise up here. I wanted I want to show you two things here. I'm going to bring this out a little bit more. Again. Always pay attention to the difference from the n-side to the outside of the Leg. The more you can zero in on that, the better your Leg illustrations will get. But right here, this is an example of it. So the media Alice is a lot lower than lateralis. So just like we have this angle right here for the ankle, we have to also get this angle like here. You see, I didn't I didn't start with that. I wanted to show you the simplification of that heart Leg shape, but it can't stay there. Well, I guess based on your style, it could I've seen styles where they they definitely leave it like that and I have a lot more evened out. So that's up to you to decide if that's your style and it's okay if it looks good, it looks good. But for me personally, I guess it's one of those things once you start to see can't unsee it. And I feel like this needs to come in like this. Have that distinction from the one-sided being up higher, the side B and lower. They're also not exactly the same size. Again, I'd probably change that as well, but first I'm going to just adjust that one to be higher. Also going to leave that divide I talked about from this down to the knee. And I could get in here and keep detailing, but I'm actually going to slow down because again, if I detail everything and I go too far, I mean, this might already be too far for so many. Now, keep in mind if it is to slow down, go back, redo the lesson. Don't pressure yourself to draw as fast as me. This stuff takes practice. And then remember, get in here, do some of your wrapping lines and really flesh out the dimension that you're looking for for these forums and volumes. And just try not to make them look too flat, right? So you're going to put curves here. You can go back like the previous lesson, add some volume to it, which will continue on with this one. I don't want to move passes too awfully fast. But go ahead and work up until this point, work on this and see what you come up with. But let's go ahead and stop here, head over to our next lesson and add a little bit more volume to this. So with that, let's move on. 6. Volume to the Front of the Leg: Welcome back. So now let's continue on with this. And so what the adductor group kinda divide this, but you always see a whole lot of that. I'll just draw a couple of those divisions in there. In the Leg is going to attach on a bit of an angle. Keeping in mind that when we do male to female, you'll see that the angle there is a bit different. It's more steep angle lot board for females. Also. If you struggled to get your, your shapes right, always remember that center line can be very helpful as well. And then there's a slight plane changes. We'll get into plane changes and in more detail as well. It's all this stuff. It's just, again, it's hard to really talk about the one without getting into the other a little bit. But then they each really require their own explanation and practice activities, I believe, because they're just also powerful. All these techniques really help drawing things to look and feel a little bit more mechanical is great for the start. I just don't feel like it should stay there. And then you also get these in this little shape right here under the knee. So just to show you a simplification of the knee area, let me go over to the side here and say, okay, if I was just this is zero in on the knee, this would be my simple set of Shapes for it. Remember what I said about the angle being cut-off. Now, I would start to round these areas over a little bit more organically as I preceded. So again, just like I mentioned about the foot, you can start mechanically InDesign, but you don't end up there unless you're drawing a robot and then you'd stay there entirely. But then the next shape that I see, something like this. Again, overly simplified. I would try to get in there more organically. And then when I bring the knee up, comes up like this. Now, the medialis sits really right on top of the knee. But what I tend to do is I tend to put a little bit of the pocket of the skin right over top of that. Now, hopefully this isn't too confusing for it, but I'm just trying to give you let's even take that part of way. Let's just focus on this right here. That is the shape. The basic shape memorization I have. For the knee. Obviously you have the inside of it and the outside of it. I feel like the inside has a little bit more of a bowl like this. It's lower. Side has a curve like this little higher. But again, that's my overly simplified version of just the knee. And I do that for really each part of the body. And then I just practice interlocking those shapes together and then building up the organic drawing over top of it. Get rid of that for now. You know what? I'll leave it right about there. Just save that in illustration for you. So going back over to here, I want to add a little bit more of a sense of volume. So as I mentioned, these quadriceps, which are basically a heart and teardrop like Shapes go up to that point called the ASIS. Look at your anatomy books fine, that it's really great to find these pinpoint, these areas where you can pinpoint the Anatomy like that. It's also good to pay attention to where are these bits of Anatomy start, where they end up. Always study your Anatomy. But for now, I want to just show you the shapes and how I build up on these and connect them altogether. So let me add a little bit of volume here. So I like that. Grab a solid brush. Can actually what I'm gonna do here is make it at full opacity. And I'll just control the layer to drop down the opacity. You can get away if you're working traditionally, this just means a nice, hopefully have some gray markers. I have some by Prismacolor wall. I definitely have some promo who who which just got a set from them. Alcohol-based markers, which are great for filling in these grayscales. But for me, it's really easy to do this. You could use a gray colored pencil, whatever you have, just use your graphite pencil. But what I'd like to do here is really pay attention to the way that I can build up the feeling of volume to these muscle groups. And I might add some angles in here to the Shadows. And I feel like I'll be giving you a lot more on shadows as well just because again, it's all super important. And I do want to say that really practice patients, really practice, enjoying the moment of doing this and not pressuring yourself to be great overnight and a month. You have to slow way down, enjoy the journey It's going to take awhile to get all this stuff mastered. But if you're enjoying every day, then that long while will be perceived as a quicker amount of time. It is like if you go to some FUN, exciting place on vacation, it flies, right bye. Alright. So the trick is not to be so impatient and put all this unnecessary pressure on yourself, just, you know, I'm sure it goes without saying, but right here, what I want to point out in this area, I'm trying to add that shadow all along the side vertically on that group, that muscle group because I needed to feel like it's in front of the calf muscles. If not, It's gonna be aligned with it. It's gonna be two parallel, two side-by-side. And it's just going to flatten out the Leg. Also, you could probably Shadow, I tend to Shadow down into here and then pick it back up with the light source as it pushes out away from the foot. And I absolutely love creating these types illustrations. Because I feel like there's a lot to be learned here. It feels like a very designed way of illustrating. And I can always apply Anatomy over this later. But hopefully you can see now, you know, the distinctions from the inside of the Leg to the outside. How we started very even, but as we cut into it, we just kept pushing the sense of, of differences from the segmentations. Now this is overly segmented. Hopefully you realize that as you would apply Anatomy over top of this, if you wanted a more realistic character, you would, you wouldn't connect all your lines. You would still try to imply and establish all your forms and volumes, but you would do a lot more implying than tracing. So just remember generally tracing gives you more mechanical looking characters and then implying areas and leaving line breaks definitely on the light source side is going to give you a lot more of a natural look to scan or even clothing or just in general, just in general, you don't want to trace around every object. But for studies, I do feel like it's very helpful to do prior to shade in the whole medial side of the ankle here. And then again, as we get into plain changes, I'll explain that further, but I really kinda over accentuate plane changes for Comic Art as well. So even the knee area, simples, that is, I would Shadow this bottom plane of the nice section. You see I did it right there. And then I would leave a light source to the top. Likewise, I would shadow under this era the knee, maybe the side of it a little more. And on and on that goals can I'll get into that more as well. But that's basically it. So use your wrapping lines also. You can actually use your wrapping lines the other way you see I've only established them the one direction where you can go up the volumes vertically as well, right? And I don't know To me, this is super powerful and often overlooked. If you're finding it tough to get a dimensional feeling to your characters and tear Anatomy. Try these wrapping lines really, really stay here. Dedicate some time to it. Think three-dimensionally. Look at some 3D, never see those 3D diagrams where they show the grid through it and look at those, even pull those and then draw them in your own style. And see we come up with use your center lines to your advantage as well. A lot of times they have to turn the page to get a horizontal feeling of it. Horizontal lines are always tricky for me. Really get in there and detail that I don't know. I just find them to be super-helpful. Really more-is-better, but maybe not, maybe, maybe just as many as you need is better. More is not always better. There we go. So now we've got a leg from the Front view. Obviously, you know, I'll have all these illustrations saved for you so you can check them out in more detail. Maybe some all refining greater detail, stuff like that. So let's go ahead and stop here and head over to the next lesson and keep talking about simplified shapes 7. Rear of the Leg: Alright, welcome back. So now we're going to draw the back of the Leg. And what don't wanna do here is first draw this floating underwear shape. And then we're going to draw the bone coming out. This particular little illustration right? There is a really good one to remember, mainly because it helps you to think about the Leg coming out towards the hip, back down, inward towards the body, and then coming back out. So it's just a very simplified skeleton. But it's better than thinking about everything stacked upright. So we'll just do the one side here. Get something like that drawn in. And then on top of this, we can lay on our cylinders. And you can see that even from the slant, it starts to give us that feeling. Remember what I mentioned about the curvature on the outside of the Leg and then a relatively straightened us on the inside of the Leg. You can see that kinda comes from the starting point right there. And taper this N word will say the ankles about here will attach to heal. So as far as simple cylinders, maybe something like that. Okay. And so from here we can say, okay, well let's start a plant, some Anatomy. But what are we going to look for? So you're going to bring it out here. What I'm gonna do, let me show you this. I want to show you a silhouette version. So we're gonna go right from the cylinders here to a silhouette drawing. So we'll put the glute here inside leg, which is straight or straighter but still isn't straight. Obviously. You get a noticeable bend the knee, you get the calf muscle. This calf muscle which is a little bit more elongated where this one has a little bit more of a protrusion outward towards the metal. You also get, even though I'm talking more about the silhouette, I just wanted to show you. You get this bit of a diamond right there. So I'll explain that here more in a minute. And then for female characters, you're going to do more of a widening at the hip area and also a taller pelvis. Something like this. Alright, so there's our basic silhouette. Needs a little bit of work, I guess. But just to start out, those are basic silhouette. So I'm gonna do is bring this over now and show you how we'd refine this. Okay, So the reason why I wanted to go with the silhouette version here, really, I just want to give you different ways to think about all these different areas of the body and your illustrative work. Again, I've mentioned it, I'll reiterate it. A lot of these techniques inner weaved together. And I think what you have to do as an artist, as learn when they suit you the most. I think there's very different techniques that I use for not only arms and legs, the Torso, whatever. Also, there's different techniques that I use based upon certain poses, even that I'm just more comfortable with than other ones, I have to revert back to a bit of basics, things like that. So why don't wanna do here now is break down some of these, these interior shapes for us so that you know what to look for. But again, it's really helpful. Let me actually let me get rid of stuff on the inside right here. But it's really helpful to pay attention here, silhouettes, there are certain silhouette, certain angles and poses that are just gonna make perfect sense to you. We're actually really good at spotting bad silhouettes. It's something something that's, we have a bit of an, of an innate ability for honing that can really be helpful. You'll see painters take advantage at quite a bit. Digital and traditional painters, they do a lot of Shapes and then cut into the Shapes. So with this one I want to show you, is that one of the most discernible things? And you're not always going to see this in a character, but as the divide right up the back leg. So you get the hamstrings. This is where you start to see that diamond. And then the calf muscles actually go up and spend into those something like that or they intersect or either way they create this sort of diamond. And really the diamond is more important than I think the segmentation of the muscles now the calf, you could say, is pretty important because what happens here is it's very discernible That the calf is has a has a divide back here. Okay. So that's that's worth paying attention to. Because again, if you've got somebody that's pretty defined, you are going to see this. This divided the muscles right there. I think to me the capture one of the most noticeable parts of definition and most people were not. Everybody has big biceps and triceps and all this other stuff. I mean, but a lot of people, even if I've even seen overweight people that have pretty definable calves. It's just something that is a lot more common. Now. Then you have this tendon that comes down the back. And now everybody knows this one, your Achilles tendon. Then right through here you have your ankle. Again, as I mentioned, you have the definition or the angle of the N side, ankle being higher. But opposing to that, you have the inside calf muscle gastrocnemius being lower. Okay. So that's something to pay attention to. Again, you have this definition or this protrusion here that you want to be getting in place. And you have a bit of curvature right here. So it's not just completely straight. You get a bit of a been there. I know I am drawing more organically here. This is a bit different than the previous exercise, but now the other thing to pay attention to, I think that's a good one is that you've got these your hamstrings to the back here. But then through the side here, you have your IT tract known as your iliotibial tract. And he wanted to say that would be your vastus lateralis. So we've got the medialis lateralis. And I want to see you're seeing some of that as well. But a lot of times in your medical illustrations you're just going to see this labeled as IT band. But again, it's good to pay attention that does come out like this. If you were to fully illustrate the glute, you would get the glute that looks more like this. And then you actually have the medial head of the glue divides down basically where the IT track is beside. But again, if, if you're going for basic forms, you're going to ignore that because I don't think in most people you ever see that definition. Again for the back of the Leg? I find this to be more than adequate for what we're gonna be doing. Now, again, I just want to let you know that these are meant to be simplified versions of what's lot more of a complex subject. Obviously have a course on the detailed anatomy in a more realistic depiction. But this has meant to teach you the basics so that you can get to the Stylized drawings that we're gonna be doing later on in the course. So keep that in mind. I just don't want to overwhelm you with Here's a little muscle and there's another one here and here. And it's just that it can be a lot. And again, I don't think that's really necessary to teach you to Draw Stylized characters. Now, also, this is meant to be a preliminary basis for your understanding. And I would still recommend that you do continue to study anatomy and go as in-depth as you possibly can. It's just, we have to always be mindful of how much of it we're really going to be able to retain. And you generally are just going to retain things you're using more on a daily basis. But then it becomes easier to resource the other data when you need it. So for instance, I'm not really going to study organs and things like that. But as far as the superficial muscles, that makes a lot of sense, but also making the simplification so that we can resource that material easier. So there's the back of the Leg, again in a simplified form. Now let's go ahead and move on to arms. Will do the Torso, and then we'll get into some other aspects of character creation, creating these poses. Dynamic and interesting way. So with that, let's move forward. 8. Basic Shapes of the Arm: Okay, so now for arms, again, I'm going to just jump in and get us moving on this. I'm gonna do a very basic Arm. And another one I want to show it, or another technique I want to show you here is after you establish the length, something like this, a couple of things you can do jump right into cylinders, but one of the techniques I would like even more than that is this one. So I show this one off a lot. I honestly think it's so simple and effective. Absolutely love it. It's a little bit of a lightning bolt. And so what this helps us to remember to do, and you still combine your cylinders if you want. But what I like about this is helps us to think about how the Arm is not so upright. So when you get somebody that's new to drawing, generally even with the cylinders they Draw, will do something like this. That's their arm. And there's times that I've started it that way, but I just I know enough about the body now and I end up there. So say I did start there. So I go like this. I would at least move the cylinder over a little bit in this cylinder over and tapered. So hopefully you see it That's a little different than that even with that messy line. So I'm gonna, you can do it that way if you want. But again, remember not to stack it so awfully upright and aligned. And what's better is to get in this basic shape of something like, will say something like this. Like this here. Kind of a football shape for the bicep, diamond or something like that. For the tricep, the Arm will come out, the form will come out away from this a bit. In, then back in, towards the wrist. The wrist is actually a bit of a thin rectangular shape. And then another diamond off to the side. So it's a bit messy the way I've done it here, but let me clean this up for and show you what I'm thinking. Let's get rid of some of this construction stuff through the middle. So there's our silhouette to pay attention to. Right? If you're just looking at the silhouette, attach a hand here, bit of a wedge to a block light shape, making sure the middle knuckle is a little bit taller. Even if this is the knuckle here. And these are the fingers. You always make sure that middle mcals just a little bit taller. The thumb is a diamond or I'm sorry, a triangle, I guess. And then another little piece like that. So that's my simplified first from an angle like this. Now keep in mind when the palm is down and away from us like that. This is called pronated. So just remember, pronated Supinated palm up as Supinated hand down, palm down as pronated. So this is a pronated Pose. Say at the Form of it too long as well. But I guess I should be able to adjust that as we go. I also feel like the deltoid, It's too small. Now another thing about the shoulder, the deltoid. Deltoid comes from, pretty sure it's Latin or Greek, but it's part of the same I guess, but it's a, it means it's like a triangle. The symbol is an upside down triangle, delta, right? So that's something to think about when drawing the shoulder. You see I've started with a rounded version of it. But if I was to simplify that, be a triangle like this, what I like to do is a little bit of a mix. I actually like to do what I consider more of a heart shape. If you go like this. And I kinda see something like that. And the reason being is it doesn't all line up right in the shoulder. The one heads a little higher. You get a segmentation from the anterior head to the medial head. The medial head protrudes down lower into the Arm. So to me it looks more like a heart or fruit or vegetable oil, you know, something like that, but not, not so much, just a triangle. But again, it's good to know these things about, you know, what the shorthand ideas are. Just makes you realize there were simplifying the shapes a long, long time ago, right? Even name them after simple shapes. So if we keep adjusting the silhouette, I would increase the size of the Form, which might help make it not look so elongated. In which case I would have to increase the size of the fist as well. So just remember that as you're playing around with your silhouettes here, you can't just, I would say just one thing. It's going to affect the neighboring part. So you gotta look at that. And I still feel like this shoulder needs to be bigger. So I think personally, you really have to get these proportions right with the Arm, especially the shoulder, because the shoulder houses it holds all that weight and that all that strength and I got everything connects through the shoulder to the Torso. So it's kinda has to be right there. But just keep playing around with it till you get what you like. So now we'll cut into this. So want to bring this over? I just need this part. So get rid of this right here. Just to show you, we got that silhouette. Now cut entity shapes and I'll show you the basic shapes that I tend to see. And actually, let's, let's try it this way. I'll start with a color. For the deltoid, as I've already mentioned. I see it as well first, I think it's helpful to get the separations of the heads. So let's just put this in with some basic kind of ovals for now. Remember, we're going to refine all this as we draw our character concepts anyways, and we'll get more into striations and all that. But I want to keep this simple for it. But what I think is important to do is to at least first start making the separations. So you have anterior, medial, posterior. It's easier to see on something like a top view where you're gonna get the three heads more visibly. Say you're kinda looking down at a little bit, I guess it's kinda Down in out and you get like the clavicle spine of scapula. They're not exactly even but just simplifying that. And the trapezius goes to the middle, some neck muscles. So again, medial head to the deltoid. The back of the head is the posterior and the Front had on the chest, the anterior things you probably don't need to know to draw this wall, but there it is. Now at the bicep. Obviously it's in the name bicep. You've got two heads there. I very rarely if ever draw the two heads. But the divide is kind of up the middle a bit. Unlike anything else. They're not even, even though in my illustration and kinda look a little too even it's always a long head, short head, anterior, medial to lateral. But I want to say it's long and short head. It's it's just basically just know that they're not the same in but what the bicep, I really don't show the definition hardly ever with my illustrations. So that's up to you if you want to seek out where the divides are more and you want to show that more. I'll just very rarely show it now if there are very flex position, the arms up and shoulders are rolled back, then it kinda makes a bit more sense. You're going to see it more noticeable be there, I guess. Now with the separation here, you've got bleed. It's the brachialis. Forgive me if I'm wrong on that, but there's a muscle that is very distinct right there. The main thing that I want to point out here by time you get to the center muscle and then you get to the tricep. It's really the staging of it from this angle That's super important. So if you look right here, it all just looks flat across. But what I would really recommend that you think about is that it's actually if you were to look at it a little bit more from the side, like a bicep. Let me zoom right in here real tight, but I'm gonna do a small illustration. So it's a bicep, say we're viewing it and I was kinda level to the middle of it right through there. Right. So you're looking at it. This next muscle is a bit higher and the tricep is even higher than that. So if you are looking at it straight on, you're actually going to see these. And you don't see that from an angle like this unless you illustrate it as such in the way that you apply or Shadows and everything. So what I mean to say is that you have to think about it stacked. And when you start to do that, it looks a lot more impressive. So the shoulder comes through like this. Segments down here are there. But this is all kinda stacked and that's why you will see it from looking straight on. If not, you would see the bicep and these would disappear entirely. In sometimes they do like if the arms rolled back far enough, you're just going to see the bicep. But sometimes you'll see these and they actually raise up and away. I don't know what they're much higher, but there are a little bit higher enough to make a difference where you can see it from certain angles. So just pay attention to that. Hopefully that little illustration makes sense. Yeah. That they're not just, it's not like this is a straight flat line going across the Arm Right there. Now maybe for somebody with really little definition, okay, so there's always different instances, I guess, but now another tricky part, especially when doing the silhouette first is right here. So you've got these muscles that come out, but then they come back this way and point towards the thumb. In fact, they actually coincide where the tricep is. Now since the tricep is disappearing back there, I probably brought it out a little too far, but I like to over accentuate some other stuff. But the main thing is that this line right here from the tricep and these muscles coincide. So they come from here. They wrap around the forearm and point towards the base of the thumb Hey, something like that. These mostly come through. So this is where it's tricky because all this kinda spins around. There's a lot of spinning aspects to the Form. Because of our ability to rotate, radius and ulna, all those muscles twist with it. But these ones right here go right to the base of the thumb. Your extensors. I like to group these together, especially for simplifications, become like this. I hit the hand. You go out to the digits. So it's probably extensor digitorum. So, but the extensors, and there's a few segmentations in here, but I'm going to want to group those together to keep it simple. Then here you've got your flexors kinda protruding around. So you get a little bit of a diamond like shape there. My see a little bit of elbow back here but not much. Then the other side of the cell, your flexors, you're just seeing it from the other side. And then you also get one or two that comes out to the side here. I want to say this is your maybe extensor that goes to the pinky. Don't quote me on that one, but actually let's leave that out. What, again, what I want you to see is these overall shapes. And I don't want to put too many of men there were just it just becomes too confusing for you to get. I mean, there's a couple of little ones that wrap around here. There's lots of details, right? What I want you to focus on as these big, broader Shapes, I'm going to clean up some of these illustrations for it and I'm actually going to label them. Because again, I want you to really zero in on the silhouette, the bigger, broader shapes that you can commit to memory easier. And then you can always go back and do more detailed studies of each one of these areas. And you'll be able to see like, hey, what was he talking about here? All of these are actually, this is actually two muscles that spin around there. There's actually two more divisions here. And you can break off into smaller, again, incremental studies to get better at that. But I want you to really get this basic shape memorization going first. So just to recap, three heads, the deltoid, two to the bicep. Even though for these illustrations we're going to keep it as a big football shape. I perceive the tricep here is a bit of a diamond. A lot of these are glorified teardrops. So you could really go through all this and do teardrops if that's easier for you. Remember that the tricep and the muscles here coincide along that line. And then they wrap to the inside of the thumb. This is probably a bit big by the way, so proportions will vary. These are just proportions I chose to use. Your extensors go into the back of the fingers, group those together and like one big tear drop shape. And then your flexors protruding out around the side. I kinda see that as a bit of a diamond, but maybe just a triangle. You'll see a lot of ovals and triangles throughout the body as we go. Triangle here for the thumb, wedge like shape for the fifth. That's it. So remember the smaller diagrams here explaining how you might perceive the heads of the deltoid and the stacking of these muscles through the upper arm. Okay, So we'll go ahead and conclude right here. We'll head over to the next lesson. Do another view of the Arm. And with that, let's move forward. 9. Shapes of the Arm Supinated: Hi, welcome back. So with this one we're gonna do palm facing up until this is going to be Supinated. And let's say for this one won't will start with the lengths again. So shoulder, upper arm or humorous and simplified skeleton. Now, one of the things you'll notice when you see illustrations with the arms out, in, not even out, but the palm facing up. You'll notice that the forum kicks out a little bit. It doesn't come like so say here is the show you real quick. Let's say that we have the body next to it, the Torso, simplified Torso like this. You're never going to see the Arm Supinated coming straight down. It's almost hard to even do. It's you almost have to force your triceps behind your back. It just feels really awkward. You'll notice that when you drop them down, Supinated and your arms out, they fall outwards just a little bit and then light in the opposite with pronated, it's more likely to do this. Think about how much more comfortable with as have your hands in your pocket or even when you're swinging your arms back-and-forth, just kinda looked down and notice your elbows kinda poke out just a little bit. So I know it's such a little thing. But it can, these little things really add up, they can make a world of difference. So as we draw Supinated version, might as well have the Arm commodity little bit and that's maybe a little bit much. Let me move that just a little bit over. Because it needs to be there. It doesn't need to be extreme, but it needs to be there. Okay, so we've got our lengths established. Again, I'm gonna go right for silhouette drawing on this one. Or you know what better yet we'll just take what we learned on the last one and we'll go right for shapes. So I'll follow along using the shapes I'm using or just use ovals. You don't have to go with angles data if you don't want it, you can start with ovals. And then you can apply angles. So you could say, well, there's three heads to the the deltoid. I just saw him explain that. So you start with a couple of ovals had here, had there, and then you just cut into it and I'm going to add some angles, don't want it to look more rigid. You see how that's pretty easy to do. You remember the heart-shaped I told you about or the fact that it's named after an upside down triangle, things like that. So again, I'm just going to go for a shape about like this. This is the medial head dipping down. And then for the bicep is going to draw this elongated football or oval shape. Definitely just put an oval there or an oval it to angles at the base. Remember what I said about seeing that muscle before you see the tricep? Now, the tricky thing is this. You may not actually get all of that. You might from an angle like this. So this is what happens as we rotate our hands upward and outward. In any way. The bicep follows. They all have connection points and they twist with it. Alright, so let's go ahead and drop in the Form first because we might want to just get a little bit of the tricep and we might see, we might start to see more of it here. The other thing that pay attention to as a tricep is such a wide muscle by comparison that there's times you'll see a little bit of it on the outside, a little bit of on the inside, sometimes a good amount on one side and very little on the other. And then obviously when it's rotated so far, you're not going to see them the other side. They also have a little strip here, the coracobrachialis, I believe. And so you bring these ones over. Remember that I said that these ones came out and pointed towards the thumb will now the thumb is over here. So these come out. They're no longer wrapping over the forms that we're drawing. And then you've got the flexors can actually come out from this. Let's say this, the condyle, the bone anyways. But you'll see that pretty distinctly. And then you'll see them spin out from there. But we're good. We're going to group those together just like we did the the digitorum, so are the extensors. So again, remember that the wrist is really more rectangular than, than oval in cylindrical. So it's kinda tricky to teach that part, explain that part when it's kinda contradictory to the beginning stages I was showing you where are you drop in cylinders. Again, you have to remember that Lot of that stuff is a way to start. But you don't have to end up there. Okay, so just like how we're doing these segmentations and very almost robot-like illustrations at this point because it explains the different muscle groups more effectively, I believe then. But by the time I show you how to render this, we're going to be changing things here and there to make it look more organic. Again, these are the shapes. I'm looking at. My group these together. And then we'll draw the, will attach the first tier of the poem divides right up the middle. Thumb comes over to the side. You've got 12.3. Then for the closed fist, get the shape and first little fingers a little bigger, and it's right next to that divide and the palm in really am, again, I'm oversimplifying this, but really you should even get a little bit of curvature in the fingers, even as a squeeze and press together. Just notice that when you pull your hand together, they're pretty straight, but there's actually pointing towards the middle just a little bit. The more you squeeze, the more that happens and they roll inward this way. So just those two little things. So you'll see a lot of, and I make the same mistake. I draw these phis that look like this. But that's like wait a second, pivot, slight little curvature into the palm. And the more squeezed, the more that occurs and then also the more squeeze the more of these role. And that's the superhero fish. You always see somebody Draw, right? The good artists, these draw it with the knuckles up like this. It kinda over accentuate that because there's expressiveness. There were this way, there's not a whole lot of expressiveness, right? So we have to pay attention to that. Will make sure to get that in later illustrations. There we go. So now we've got one that's Supinated, That's it. Rest a little long. These aren't, these shouldn't be so even as well. So that's another thing, is that the inside is always different from the outside or however you want to look at it. One side is always different than the other. Even the tricep here is not even from side-to-side. You've got the, the inside had his long in. The short head is more abrupt and they're just not aligned. So this is a bit to a line for my taste, so clean that up. And then what I would say is, I'm just going to extend this one quite a bit further down like this. This one's more abrupt. That's right word, but it's just, it's got more of an angle, I'll say, compared to this one being more elongated down the arm. Same thing with the long head there versus this shoulder again, what I mentioned from the previous one, I really want to make sure the shoulder is big by comparison, so it can look like they can support all that weight. While the strength comes from the shoulders. So it needs to be evident in our drawing. And I feel like the other thing is just proportionately, I could really thin some of the stuff out. So as I mentioned, kind of what the chest to chest to waist ratio. A good thing to also pay attention to as redrawn this stuff is the width of the areas where it should be more tone or it should be closer to the bone and less overall muscle tissue and things like that. It's really good to pay attention. Those are the risks. Here is a prime example. Even this area is any connection point from the next neighboring area of the body will get more into that as well. But that's really it. So this is again, another simplified version, which we could clean up even further. But I think this about covers. What I would like to do is get you more examples. So even though some of these might not be as clean as I mentioned, I will find some of them for your notes and things. But I want to get you some more dynamic examples because you really need to see this stuff working a bit more functionally. It needs to be presented in a way where it can be an actual poses and dynamics, not just these flat starter poses, but what they do is they give you that base knowledge of the group shapes. That's really what I'm trying to show you here. Okay, so now I'm gonna go ahead and copy this. Move that over. And I just want to show you the simple shapes so that I get a little bit messy heroism. Drawing this. Again. Let's pick route here to make sure you can see this. I just want to give you this simple breakdown of the Shapes. These ones actually just say no, these actually go right into the tendons of the risk, but I always show the divide like this, and then the separation of the tendons like this. That's up to you. But there's just so you know, if you look at the Anatomical illustrations Extra go like this. That's another thing is kinda confusing, is when you look at either defined bodybuilders and then you look at medical anatomy. It's almost hard to read. It's it looks different because of volumes of the muscle and different definitions, different way people flex versus just a standing illustration. I think that's why it's such a complex topic. Then you see Stylized drawings and that puts a whole, another variable into the mix. So again, I just want to give you these simple shapes, make it a little bit more discernible for you. Hopefully, these next lessons can work more effectively. So let's go ahead and stop here and continue on. 10. Male Torso Front: Hi, welcome back. So now we're going to talk about the Torso. And so for this, Let's just draw a center line. Line across a W like shape cylinder. I'm gonna put an angle here, angle here. So he uses this to measure Cross. Actually have a bit of a circle right here. Angle here, angle here, angle here to here, here to here. And keep in mind that if any of these are harder for you to draw like this, draw through. Always remember to draw three. You should draw through anyways to check where you're at. So always you can draw through in a couple of ways. Let me show you that. You can draw through like this. If you're good at that, if that's hard for your hand mechanics and that's not your, your way. Another way is like this. You find center and use straight lines but you draw through. I would say it, this is probably a better way, especially if you're used to using a ruler, you're going to really be able to map things out. If you use a roller ruler, you can go from a certain point, roll up. I mean, they're just amazing and love those things. But just keep that in mind that drawing through in either angles and, or curves will help you to map your symmetry. So it's super important. Now we've already drawn the shoulders, but I really, I like drawing the shoulders here again because they relate directly to the chest, the pectoralis. So I'm going to Draw those again like this, like this. That's kinda the shape I used for the simplified shoulders. Trapezius. Neck is a cylinder like this. Wider for a masculine male character. So there we go. And then for the ways or the abdominals and just kinda draw a shape like this. It's actually two up here that complete the set. But for the hero, Esq., Form. I leave those out. They're still there and you could still you'll see people shade them. They almost look like ribs because they're not as, they're not generally as noticeable. Especially if somebody's bowing their chests out will explain more of that. And we get into the, you know, when you cover the section on Gestures, remember that each one of these sections bounce back-and-forth as needed. Again, these are interlocking techniques, not always one before the other. So something like this is our basic shapes for the Male Torso. Okay, so there's lots of the things to consider the serratus, I'm gonna do an overly simplified version. The serratus are pretty complex looking, interlock with the obliques and not going to confuse you with all that right now, a lot of times for simplified Anatomy, you'll see even marks. Just as little as that to imply. The main thing that I want you to focus on here is that the kind of the hierarchy of these forms, the chest is out the furthest, right, the Front of the ribcage right here. That's what we'll call it. Is. Out. Next. The serratus go from there and connect back into the lats and the simplified version. But in any obliques, you can leave it relatively strip. They usually taper down into this area just a little bit. Not usually completely straight. Sorry, the abdominals rectus abdominis is actually on top of or in front of the obliques. So again, as far as a hierarchy of levels, because when you go to start illustrating this stuff and shading it, That's really what makes a big difference that you start to think of it. And that way, if not, you'll just shade it, cross it, it will start to flatten out. So you can have as good looking illustrations that look really flat. But that is the simple shapes that I use. Now if I was to help you envision this as these primitive basic shapes and forms. And you kinda get a little bit of a divider here to the obliques. They actually go up in front of the lats are behind all this by the way, you want to be careful not to illustrate it with, Let's look like they're parallel to the size or something there. They're very much on side and the backside of the bag, you'll see as we illustrate the bag. So again, let me go over this one more time and kinda hit home the simplified shapes to look for another color here. Okay, So if anything, I think the chest is good to group together. But remember what I said about the chest and the shoulders. The shoulder is really cut into the chest pretty significantly. In fact, even have the shoulders come in and you have a divot here. It's actually called a fossa in one here So those are good to pay attention to as well. So you have the jugular fossa in-between your clavicles and you have the clavicular fossa in front of or below the clavicle and in-between the pectoralis and the deltoid. So it's a really good one to pay attention to. That's actually a lack of muscle. There's there's nothing in the spots are hollow I guess, or something but but you can pinpoint things off of that. So it's good to know those spots. Obviously, the sternum runs right down the middle. For the chest, the shape that I would say there is, I would really look at this whole shape. You get it obviously dips down with the collarbones and collarbones are obviously not that straight. I'm really simplifying them. Collarbones are more like like that obviously from a view like that. In just so you know, the pectoralis doesn't go right up to them, which you'll see that in a lot of comic illustrations. It sits below it in it. Believe it connects to, it connects to that and the sternum. And they divide and spend towards the armpit right here. So that's why I drew this one right here for you. But again, as far as the simplified shape, look at this whole shape right there and you could even go straight across it first. Kinda looks like a little bit of a superman logo, but it's kinda like, uh, a bit of a diamond. But then you'd cut the diamond. The diamond would go like this, right? So it's like a diamond, but you cut the base of it off for like a superman logo, we've cut the base, base of it off. That's the shape that I would say for the chest. Then you dip it in for the collarbones. If you want to be more realistic, you put the curvature of the collarbone. Again with the shoulder. This is where you really see where it got its name from. The side. I said to me, this view is where you really see the diamond or upside down triangle should say. But again, it's just a bit of a, a wedge like shape or this is the basic shape that I would see there. Remember it's the medial part of it that goes down to the middle of the Arm. Something like that. Then for here it's really easy. It's a big like why didn't W curved edges of a W? I don't know To me that I just go with a very simple form there. It's probably a bit too much, but it's so easy to remember, it's really simple. And then for the abdominal, the rectus abdominis, you could just make this point straight line and a curve. I've seen styles like that. They render it beautifully. It looks nice. I just add a little bit more to that idea. It's the same thing. Point up here, slight angle here, straight than the curve. You can obviously take that a lot further. And keep in mind that really the abdominal muscles have a lot of asymmetrical values there. I keep them pretty symmetrical and Male illustrations, but that's up to you. For the lat. You'll see the lat on the back is another W. But here I would just say it's basically just a big, you like shape if you were to draw through it. But in front of that makes sure that you get your obliques coming up. And I would say, personally, try not to make them completely straight. If your style looks good like that, go for it. You gotta be careful with these little bumps at the base of the obliques because if you, if you protrude them out too far, people are going to see your character as love handles, right? So you kinda wanna figure that out. It's usually for very heroic form. You're going to take it easy on the love handles, but I don't know. Who's to say your character couldn't have love handles and still being superhero. The trapezius from here, I just generally go with an angle, make sure that you perceive that this goes up behind the neck, up the back of the neck. You'll see that when we do our back version, the neck as simple as a cylinder. Maybe not as simple as that because you have the V from the sternocleidomastoid and they also sloped down like this. They do these two little bends like this. So it's maybe not as simple as just a cylinder, but you start there. I like to draw the neck and think about it. All of it flowing down and curving into this area. And the trapezius going up and behind the neck. So that's how I generally illustrate it. But just like that, we've got the Front male Torso with the simplified shapes. And hopefully that makes some sense for you. And let's go ahead and do the back and they'll do the Female Torso. And then we'll get to actually putting this all together and creating some cool character poses. So with that, let's move on. 11. Female Torso Front: Hi, welcome back. So now we'll do the Female Torso. And same thing. We will start with a bit of a center line. A lot of the same shapes here. So we can do the V for the collarbones like that. And I'm gonna do the floating rib cage first. And I'm just gonna go ahead and attach well, actually it's not a patch, I would say detached. But the floating underwear like this. The reason just say no, the reason I'm attaching the pelvis here and I didn't the previous one is because here it's more necessary for the previous one. We'll get into that as we draw the character concepts. But just keep in mind, it's the same thing. From here down to the pelvis. The pelvis difference is the angle, a big part of its angle of the connection point with Legs? It's more sloped for a female like this. And then also the Male hips are less angled inward like the hourglass form like that. Other than that, it's the same and don't worry, we're gonna get into lots of examples where we draw that the Male hubs as well. So I just don't want to be too redundant as I show you all that stuff. So as we get into here and we get our center line, we've got our upside down a or upside down V, no, right there. But again, it's like this W shape for the ribcage. So now the position of this and comparison to the aces, the Front of the hip area is pretty important depending on depending on what you're after your style. So I noticed that a lot of times I have to maneuver this. Okay, so I'm going to drop that down right now because I just kinda know how I am. I'll end up needing more space up here. So this is another thing we tend to do as artists. We want you to Draw an office stuff. You start to remember what I always seem to make this area too narrow. Let me go ahead and fix that now. And that's a great thing, right? It's like showing that you're starting to learn more about yourself and your process. Remember the abdominal muscles, how I dipped him in. What I tend to do here with the Female character is really put more curvature through these kind of instinctively right there. So they go pretty low. I know it seems a bit low right there, but you generally don't define them as low. Like when you refine that she joined, don't maybe draw every abdominal muscle, but they do go pretty low into the pelvis. And so for here, again, we've got the collarbones. Remember what I said? I like to attach the shoulders and get that angle in their shoulders are generally a lot less massive for females. Something like that. And then for the brush, you can start circular obviously. But I like to try to envision teardrops so that I don't keep them to spherical. So I bring that shape up like a teardrop into the chest. Likewise, if I want something that looks more natural, I would put those remember what I mentioned about the collarbones going like this, I would get something more organic. I'll tell you a cool trick for the collarbones is just remember, draw them like a bicycle handle. Handlebars is what I always say. Like if you were to think about bicycle handlebars coming down into the sternum, That's a good shorthand method for the, the collarbones or a good mnemonic device or something. So trapezius, they're usually sloped inward just a little bit. Will bring up the neck. Remember the next starts as a cylinder in this area, but then it slopes into this cavity of the upper torso area. Also you get this a little bit of skin that comes in to the side. So the pectoralis, you'll see a bit of an angle right there is it blends into the breast area. And another trick that I like to use for placing the nipples is just a triangle like that. Just kinda helps you to align that from, from each other. And just remember that angles in general help you to map these things out. Then from here I would just keep checking proportions and nudging things around. I think I tend to do that more with the female characters. Like I really need to find the right balance from proportions and width to width to width ratios. So yeah, I do a lot of that kind of clean up Abdominals, I would show the division here and maybe a little bit into the next division. And then that's about it. And the belly button would be right about where the tapering of the waste is. It does vary. Keep that in mind. Not everybody is belly button is exactly in the same spot. Imagine that there's our crude version of it. We can push back, get rid of some of the center lines here. I would definitely soften up the forms. There's times I bring the breast closer together, some further apart. That's up to you. It's just there's different ways to go about that. But again, I think that would helps as well. One of the things that helps to, and you'll see the angled shots that we're gonna do. The more dynamic poses is also perceiving the breast as not sitting like so spherical onto another plane like that. So even that has a little bit of a flat spot. You want to think about gravity and then also that there's soft, right? And then you have the ribcage sternum is pressing it so they're going to flatten out at spots. And again, I think teardrops or better representations of them just from any angle. So just keep that in mind that really want to think about the flat spot. And you could put that probably on a pose like this. You'd probably put a little bit of it right there. Generally is just going to make it look more natural. Likewise, wider at the bottom and then tapering. And again, this is kinda teardrop thing, wider at the bottom and then tapering thinner towards the top. Again, I'll show you that as we, as we do more refinements. So let's go ahead and take this. Now. I'm gonna do two things here. I'm going to redo the shapes again. But actually I want to show you how I clean this up. Because again, I think that for female characters I typically do this more. So I'm going to clean this one up where it just a little bit because I feel like what I have here is is just a little bit uninteresting for the female form. So what I would do is try to thin this part out. Which internal widen out the hips without having to. If I thin this out and widen up the lines on the hips right now, it might be too much. So always try to ease end of this stuff so you don't go too far past your mark. But I'm going to soften some of this up. I'm going to still keep the shapes that I wanted to see. Obviously. What I said too about the angle being more extreme. The slope of the opening of the Legs here. Try that again. And then it's also bring the breast is filled to straight and flat. So I'm going to try to show you what I was talking about. Their soften them up a little bit and bring them in. I'm trying to push the curvature towards the center of the chest more hoping see that. Which means that I really don't need a lot of the other stuff. So to me, that's starts to make it look more natural to because I'm not tracing all the way around it much like a lot of the other forms. Now bony landmarks are different story, I generally will over accentuate those. Actually, I'm gonna go ahead and show you the more organic version for this part. I think it just looks better. So the other thing is this. Whenever you do these characters, if you're leaning more towards angles for everything, they're just going to look more rigid. And so now for somebody want to appear strong and powerful and all that good stuff, that's fine. But sometimes you want these characters to be soft and friendly and nice and approachable or whatever. You don't want them all to be tough guys, right? Well, that's when using more your curves in every part of the illustration. Even bony landmarks, just something as simple as a round over versus I could draw this same collarbone with almost identical and I could put this very sharp point right there. And not only is it going to make it look more Stylized, is just going to make it look a little less often friendly, I guess. I don't know. It's just going to give it a different vibe to the shape language. And the more I do that all throughout the illustration is just going to keep hardening up the, the illustration where the softer a little bands will do the opposite. That one I just wanted to show you how you could add more curvature through there, even the stomach muscles. I would hint to the definition. I would fade that out as it went down or wouldn't go all the way down with that. But I would get little bits of definition in there. So I'm just kinda slowly adding it in just to see how much I really want details around the ribcage they're in on and on, but that's That's kinda how I would approach it with the Female character. I would, I would really ease into the details. Unlike where a male character, I would just all sorts of details and striations and cuts. And so it's just a little bit different approach. So there's the Female Torso. I guess it could feel like I want to add these definition, definition of the hips there, but then I put it in and I feel like it's too much. We'll keep working on. And really we could say, well what about the obliques? I'm going down to here, has too much too. Alright, so we'll go ahead and stop it here. So let's move on to draw on the backs of the characters now and then we'll get into some practical applications. 12. Back of the Male Torso: Okay, So again, just a straight shot of the back. I'll start with a center line. The back is actually, it's pretty hard to draw. But then once you realize it's all triangles and a lot of triangles really, it becomes a lot easier. So let me show you what I mean. So the trapezius comes in like this, dips out. I'm gonna go very angular. You gotta diamond right here. Roundabout. You've got the shoulders, as we already talked about, those are triangles. Something like this. I like to put that little angle right there. As you can see. Then the neck would pop up here but just a little bit. And then the W for the lats. So we're very powerful looking character the lats are really discernible. So something like that. Then as you work down into the trunk or the base will just do a cylinder for now. But our add the glutes or somebody else. I'm going to get mad at me for not drawing a button. Content. Got to have a bot. It's part of life. So these angular, I would say maybe you could get away with something like that. But obviously they're gonna be, even on a male character. You're typically going to draw them more organic than Angular. But I do mean, but to start, you want to always my own opinion, you want to always start angular because it's just easier to map all this stuff. Easier to, it's like when you're trying to draw buildings, so much easier to get all those details and stuff in there with the angles of perspective that applies to even drawing the body, especially the symmetry, because you're trying to think across the line here and get things placed accurately. So I feel like have too much space for the lower lumbar, but let me just put them in and see what we get. A lower lumbar, you typically see the two muscles right here. It's escaping me what those are. Always, always just say lower lumbar region. Then again the lat, now the light actually if you could see it in more definition and you'll see it go across like this. You don't generally don't see that in moles, so I could probably leave that out. Also. I think it's a good thing to point out right here at the arms. Really, you can see that noticeable protrusion outward. So I'll just go to about here. But again, that's where It's kinda helpful to draw these, these shots of the body from different angles because then you really pinpoint different things because of it. So if you avoid drawn backs, it can really be a hindrance to your work and a couple of ways. So let's go over like this now. Right about here is the the spine of scapula. Just like the collarbones are really important in the Front spine of scapula is very important landmark in the back as it relates to the trapezius, the shoulders, everything. And then the scapula comes down like this. Now, in a male character, you don't really see them as much. Unless they're doing a pose that is like pushing really, really hardcore gets his shoulders and pushing the scapula is out. But what I will say is it just for a shorthand method, you kinda get like this, a little bit of a Y, like this. And this covers these few muscles. But what I'm going to say here is it honestly, you have to Draw this area over and over with different points of, of, of flexion or whatever. But you have to see it in action. You really do. You have to draw a box or punching you have to Draw arrests are getting their arm pull back a bit or whatever. It changes so much. This is a basic idea of the muscles and it's like first vanitas, teres minor, teres major. But that's not really what's important for these lessons. It's More importantly, you just realize that for one they're not flat. This may be a short-hand diagram to get you going, but they push out differently, very differently based upon the definition of the character and the Pose that they're in and what they're under stress for, what stress or putting on the muscles in that area. So you just have to Draw those. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better answer for you for that. Yeah. You really do. You just have to draw them over and over. A lot of the other parts of body a little more discernible because or a bit more stationary. They all, they're all tricky and their own right because our body moves and flexes and all less than that. But but yeah, what this area I think you really do you have to draw like a shoulder pushing back against something and you're like, well, you start with the trapezius because you know, that's kinda understand that form from a different shape. You understand the shoulder, understand the lat. But then when you get here, that's where you have to think about the way it might push and create a few Shapes. Oftentimes you'll see in Comic Art. They'll just explain it with a few interconnecting kind of bumps. But that's really what it almost looks like because it's not just a simple I don't know. It's like every time I see that arrow, it looks different to me. I don't always explain it. But I would start by making sure that they're not flat and they're not even. And I would go for the big muscle groups first, you understand like hopefully by the end of these lessons you have a lot better confidence of the trapezius has shoulder the lat. And then you'll be able to bridge the gap and drop in some of those. And sometimes you will see the shoulder blade pretty distinctly. You see it a lot more distinct, distinctly and vividly and female characters, their shoulder blades are a lot more evident. So we'll get into that. But again, do some specific studies of that area. From, again, life studies of action, sports is a good thing to reference. So with this diamond here, lots of triangular like Shapes, lots of angles and general W for the lat. Why for the divides here above the scapula? We've covered the shoulder quite a bit. So you should have a good idea that by now would hold a quick cylinder for the upper arm. Obviously it's one more complex than that, but just starting, the other thing is this. I have drawn the trapezius where the right against the spine. Keep in mind that all of this pulls away from the spine. Alright, so really there's a divide to all this. And then you actually can draw a couple of the vertebraes here and there. That's always a kind of a cool look and you can just Shadow to one side and drop those in there. But again, that's a simple shape. You have a medial side of the glutes. So a lot of times you'll see the definition of the glutes kinda dip in and come out like that. Again, starting very angular with that. But there's our, here's our quick representation of the back. I want to distort that. There's that. And just to make a few notes over top. What I will say too is it's gonna be very important when you start to illustrate these. And again, we'll cover this in greater detail, but you're going to want to show the definition of the muscle groups raised up. So actually let me do a quick refinement of this one. We're going to turn this back. But what I want to do is show you hopefully that the you want to really get the volumes going. Was an area like this. For one, as is, muscles are going down the back but dipping N, right? So that's going to be a noticeable difference from what we see here. This is going to look pretty flat even as I introduce some wine way. But we have to really envision that this area of the back is receding away from our view. It's not all flat. The trapezius would be the furthest out. They need to appear the highest on all these forms. Remember, if you want things to look a little more natural, tried to break up the lines a little bit. Something like that. And kinda speeding through this. I don't wanna take too much time, just some PR example. And this isn't gonna be our finished finished renditions. This is all just techniques and ideas that I just want you to think about in the real, the real exercises for you to do it. But I do want to show you a little bit of, a little bit of volume on this one. So now what I'll do is add in something for a Shadow layer Like so. And so again, I want you to think about how as you move down the back here, this is all, a lot of this is gonna be placed into shadow. We get a little bit of light hitting the base, but definitely from the bottom. If you were to think about just the lats on somebody, It's really defined this superhero Anatomy. There's just no way you could Shadow that flat. There's no It's not it's, it's like a big barrel or a lot of curvature there. And that's going to cast a pretty big shadow on this information down here. That's really what I wanted to point out. Now, I'll Shadow the rest like so you're gonna get indentations are here. You can probably make the argument. All of this would be in shadow because it's, you get this big trapezius that's casting some Shadow. And keep in mind too, when you Shadow something that you can bring that Shadow into the Form in different ways. It doesn't have to just trace around it. It can be heavier here than it can thin out down to where it collects this other Shadow. But yeah, sometimes you have to. Well, you remember the lesson where I talked about the belly of the muscle. Same kind of concept. That Shadows should reinforce that concept of the belly of the muscle. So just think about like that. Alright, and then go over to here or here. Bottom plane, right there would obviously be a flat plane that would receive no light. So hopefully even this little exercise and Shadow helps you, but I'll do more of them as we render full characters. I know light and shadow can be a nightmare. I know I've struggled with it. Still get my comfort zone there with that, but that is why we practice right over and over and over. Something like that. You could get some of the sides a little bit. Some interior here. Same thing with the glutes there. They're very rounded, right? So I probably could bring the shadow up higher. So it can be think about the way I did the lats now. But just remember if you're really trying to round something out, you're going to bring that Shadow up higher. Doesn't necessarily have to be a round shadow all the way through. So I cut back a different angle. But I do mean I keeps it and I do mean by but it's like you have to bring that Shadow up higher if you want that form to appear larger. So really it made me think more about this. Like maybe I can even bring that up a bit higher because this is, to me in my mind of visioning this illustration, the bank is very large right here. If I put the same way to shed on everything, it flattens right out. So I have to think of ways to be creative and say, well, maybe it could put a little bit heavier shadow here. Shoulders are pretty spherical. I could really bring that Shadow up higher there. I want to show the difference from the shoulder to the triceps. Maybe put a shadow here first. In online, you go with that. So hopefully that starting to make sense plus probably wouldn't be bad to check it from a distance. You also do have a bit of divide and definition here. I feel like that's a little too much, but it is there. So pay attention to that and your anatomy books as well. But again, I want to show you more from a stylistic standpoint, so I'm not gonna go too crazy with this. Yeah, Let's say right about there. So that gives us back illustration for the male character. The females just the same as the difference of proportions. But let's go ahead and do one of the Female character to have that on file as well. So what that Let's move forward. 13. Back of the Female Torso: Alright, welcome back. So now I don't wanna do is talk about the, the back of the Female Torso will start the line down the middle. And again, we're just going to keep this really straight for now. But we'll get into some more dynamic versions. So don't worry. This is established two circles for the shoulders. You could draw the simplified rib-cage if you want. Mainly just a sort of V or start the hourglass shape, right? So you'd go down into here and attach the hips to this one. Just kidding you. An hourglass kind of form. You could draw the floating underwear. Just make sure the rural difference. As you start this especially will mainly if you're drawing this from the front, I guess, but you still want to think about it, this steeper angle that you get in the female body like that, but this is gonna be from the back, so we'll put in the glutes over this. But if you were to get to about here, we could do a little attachment. The arms. Always find it helpful to draw like the neighboring muscle group or appendage or any of those things. My goal is to stop here. I almost feel like I need the neck here to define this because all these muscles run into each other, right? So muscles, bones, everything. It's all, it's all different landmarks that you need in relation to the neighboring bit of anatomy. So what I want to show here is that the typically in a female that's relatively lean, maybe not even that. I mean, it's usually pretty noticeable that the scapula Female character is just a lot more discernible for the most part than men. Not, not always, there's never an always scenario here, but I tend to notice that you see the scapula pretty well-defined. So it's almost like maybe because of a lower overall muscle mass, you're seeing more of the bony structures for more predominantly. It really depends. You can have a sheet hall type of character, right? And you're going to pack on the trapezius and it's gonna go right over top is, or maybe you show both. But it's almost like they fight for a little bit of dominance. Now, in an illustration that's tilted, then it's easier to pick your, pick the area that you want to discern. So for instance, we come over here and we say, okay, we're going to angle back, alright, well, then you're probably going to pick one. Pick like the shoulder blade this time. It's not that I'm not going to draw the trapezius. Of course they're gonna be there. It shows I might get the maybe going after the effect where the scapula is more raised. Now, there's certain poses where that happens. Flexing the shoulders back, I guess would pinch the trapezius together. Really, it's almost like when you flare your scapula all. So if you roll your shoulders forward, it does it. But again, I feel like on the female characters, it's just more noticeable. Now keep in mind to the spine of scapula as part that would come up like this. Lead off to the deltoid, the trapezius. It's right along that. So that's a really great landmark for the bag, which I believe I've already alluded to that. But then obviously you have these other muscles that are on top. But again, if you're if you're going for a skinnier female or one that doesn't have as much muscle mass and definition, then I would probably I probably wouldn't do a whole lot of definition right here. So we get kinda like that Y shape. And it's as simple as that. Obviously, there's some bulk their to each of those areas. But I would probably shy away from that and I'd go more like this. And then you'll get the curvature of the spine. So you have these also, you have these muscles right through here and they almost look like they would be the latissimus dorsi are the lattes but it's not, it's actually the erector spinae. I couldn't remember last time I was talking about the back, but I always call it the lower lumbar region. But the erector spinae. They have these two muscles that go right along your, your vertebrae all the way up the back. But they're more Predominant in a, generally on lean females, I mean, lean individuals nonetheless, but, but you see it really evidently in lean females. It's almost like That's just one of their more dominant muscles that shows true supports the spinal that but it looks like it's a lot because really the lack comes down like something like this. But I didn't show you that in the previous illustration. As far as with lead as I showed you, the W effect, the simplified shapes. Because I want you to look at the volumes, not really knowing exactly where they insert and which ones layered here and there will talk about some of that. But it's really not pertinent information to Drawing while at least I don't I don't believe so. I've never, you know, a lot of this stuff I've learned more recently and I think I was already drawn it pretty decently enough. Now, the knowledge is always great. I'm never going to say it's a bad thing to learn this stuff. But I want to teach you the things that are going to get you up and running the fastest gets you Drawing well. And you can always go back and keep studying, which I do recommend. So we'll get like the glued in here because it looks kinda funny. We got like a twisted character here. For the glutes just when I start rounded right in this area, as I mentioned on the male character, you really have this kind of, we have this medial head to the glutes. It's off to the side like that. So you'll get a bit of definition here. But I don't know that you need a lot of it. And then the, the main thing that is super important besides obviously the hourglass figure, but it's where you get that. So you get that from the bone coming out like we talked about, like this. And so make sure that you widen it out and then taper back in. You can generally get pretty soft. Good luck to the character, the female form like that. Just by thinking about that. So again, we know the trapezius comes in through here. Dip sound, and you get that separation. You get that little diamond up here. That's all. It's all the same Anatomy. It's just different proportions and definition. And ultimately, it looks so different because of the fact that again, it'd be too redundant here. But essentially when we have low muscle mass and body fat and general, we're going to start to see more of the bony landmarks, but it ther