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General Male Figure Tutorial - Basic Standing - Created 12-19-02 I felt it was about time I made a few new tutorials for the site, and while I am very aware of the number of requests for clothing and feet tutorials, I felt that I first needed to redo the basic male and female drawing tutorials. I'm leaving the old ones up for one reason. Simplicity. I am aware that the larger portion of the visitors to this site have never drawn seriously before, some have never really drawn before at all, and for you, the older tutorial might not seem quite as intimidating. I made that tutorial when I was still rather amateurish and still had a lot to learn. Because of this, I looked at it all from a different point of view. You might be able to relate with that point of view better than this one, but I still feel that a LOT of the things I will describe here are still VERY important for novices. There are two ways to go through these tutorials. The first is to just skim over the text and try to copy the drawings. The other is to take time to read a process the text written along side them. I highly suggest the later of the two. You can gain expreience from copying, however you do not make the knowledge your own when all your doing is turning yourself into a human xerox. The text will help you process and understand WHY things are drawn the way they are - and when you understand 'Why', you can take that knowledge and apply it to new situations as you progress. When I'm drawing a head that is facing directly forward, I usually don't obther with a cirlce, and go straight for an oval shape so I can get the general height and width of the head closer to what I want. I don't bother with ANY detail on the head or face yet. I usually wait to do that until after I've got the body structure finished. This is a male character, so the shoulders are wider than they would be on a female. Some books will tell you to make the shoulders the width of three heads, but I almost never do that unless the character is a very bulky and muscled character. The three-heads rule is more acurate for slightly more realistic pictures, but anime heads are usually larger than normal so you can see the details of the face more (which is the important part, after all.) I haven't bothered with a ribcage guide in over a year. I've found it's rather rescrictive when it comes to makeing the character's torso feel relaxed and believable. But when I was first starting, I did find it useful. Try out different guide systems and decide which ones are best for your drawing style. One VERY common mistake I see a lot of novices make when drawing the torso, is to make the hips area very short. The torso, or trunk of the body includes the chest, waist, and the hips. The hips area (from the waste to the crotch <- that's a technical term... really it is.) The lower torso should be just a little shorter than the upper torso. That means that the angle where the legs meet should be almost as far from the waist as the shoulders are! Remember this and you'll make fewer proportion mistakes. When we stand, we very RARELY stand ridged and straight up. If you want your standing characters to look more relaxed and believable, it's important to bend the hips. Stand up. Seriously. And stand relaxed. Now which foot are you putting your weight on? I bet you're putting most of it on just one of them. This is making your hips bend. Which ever side you're putting most of you weight on, that hip will be higher and that leg will be more ridged since it's recieving most of the force. The other foot is just to keep you balance. Because of this we lean to one side more, but to keep from falling over, the waist bends and straightens out the top half of the body. Weight is VERY important to understand if you want to draw a believable human figure. If you don't keep it in mind, all your people will look like they're falling over. More than anywhere else, this is important if you want to make a complex pose, but even with simple standing poses like this, wieght is very important to take into account. If you're ever having trouble with a standing pose, and can't get the person to look relaxed, or realistic, just try standing up and do the pose you want. Don't worry about looking in a mirror; instead close you eyes and examine in your mind what you body parts are doing. Where is the weight? Which foot is getting all of the force put on it, and what is the other foot doing to compensate? Where is it? How far out is it from the other? Is the weighted foot directly under you? And if you want to do a different kind of pose - one where the person is leaning against something - do the same thing but now pay attention to what you feet are doing to keep you from falling over. How far out they're going, what Part of the foot is the force on - heel or toe? Everything comes down to the feet, legs and hips, so it's important to get them right FIRST. Never worry about details until you've got the basics RIGHT. All the extra detail in the world can't fix a picture if you don't get the basics right first. If you try and try again with a picture, and can't seem to get them right, there is nothing wrong with starting on a clean sheet of paper. Don't just erase and try to fix things - sometimes starting with a clean paper can help. Drawing is a physical activity that takes warming up and practice - just like running! Seriously! The first few things a person draws in a day are usually not the best because you need to warm up a bit and get the feeling right. Once I'm satisfied with the basic guide-pose, THEN I start adding some details to fill out the figure. Fro the hips, I've found it helpful to picture the pelvic bone under the hips. At the point where the bottom of the waste, and top of the hips meet, the pelvis pushes the skin outwards. From the bottom of the rib cage, to the top of the pelvic, there are no bones that form the surface shape of the body - this is all shaped by muscle and fat. Since we are going for appeal over realisism, we usually avoid any extraneous fat around the waist. So at this point, we see the outward curve for the pelvic. At the base of the pelvic area, where the upper hips begin, the surface shape is no longer being affected by bones, but rather muscle. The muscles of the upper half of the legs are difficult to understand and this can make getting a realistic shape here difficult. I used to simplify it right down to the basic -an outward curve here, and an inward curve here- but that wasn't the most realistic representation of the leg, and looked bad a lot of the time. Essentially what I'm trying to get at is that anatomy study WILL make your drawings better. It will help you to understand why and when that happens you'll be able to draw it better. To the right is a simplified study I put together for this to help show the muscles of the leg. The red dots are the points where the muscles attach and pull from the bones. This is helpful to know when you're putting the leg in some position Other than just standing straight. If the leg is bending, and especially if trying something dynamic like a kick. It's important to realize that this works for both male and female figures. The picture to the right is actually a bit more femine because of the waist - on a man it wouldn't be nearly as pronounced as shown in this picture.
	Unless I'm actually planning on having the character bare-foot in the picture, I NEVER bother drawing bare feet. A foot is a lot harder to draw - and a LOT easier to mess up on - than a shoe is. I have, however, gotten a lot of requests for a tutorial on how to actually draw feet. I'm planning on putting one together, but can't garuntee I'll find the time to during my winter break. I am going to go over the best way I've found for drawing shoes here, and I have used this same technique for drawing bare feet, so you can give it a try too. When I first started drawing human figures seriously, the one thing I Hated the most, was trying to use primitive objects as guides. Unfortunetly, I'm here to say that when you get more experienced, they become a whole lot more efective guides, than lines do. The primary advantage to primitive objects is that it is easier to picture them in a 3-Dimentional space than the complex Real object is. For shoes, I break them down into two simple shapes. The heel and the toe of the shoe are two seperate objects, and I can get them to look and feel 3D more easily this way. You can see in the drawing of the full-figure to the left how I actually used it. I've also drawn a larger scale version with more detail to give you a better idea of what I'm doing. I don't actually draw in all those cross-sections - they're just there to give you a better mental picture. Use them if you feel they're nessecary.
	I begin to fill out the upper torso and start the arms. When I'm having trouble getting the right shape of the shoulders/upper pecks, I usually use a guide like shown to the right. I talked about the muscle structure of the Male Muscles tutorial, however I don't think I made it very clear, so I've drawn a diagram of the muscles here (which was virtually copied from an anatomy reference) to help you understand it better. The pecks (pectoralis major) are pulled up into the muscles that make up the shoulder (the Deltoid). They are attached, and when the shoulder bends, it deforms the shape of the pecks because those muscles get pulled and stretched. This is why I use the guide system shown to the upper-left, when having troubles. It helps me to remember that the pecks and shoulders are connected.
	At this point, I finished the arms and hands and cleaned things up some. I also made some small touch-ups. I brought the heel down on his right foot (left of POV) since I felt it looked like his foot was tilted too much. With arms, the top of the lower arm is wider than most of the rest, unless the person has a lot of muscle mass. If that is the case, then the person will have very well defined biceps. When going for a very muscular male, the biceps are usually exagerated a lot, but the top of the lower arm is exagerated in proportion. This part is still very large. Once I'm satisfied with the structure of the body, I'll move on to adding details to the body. The first part I start to add detail is the face. I defined the shape of the jaw and chin more, and added ears. To the right of the head, you can see two ears I drew a bit larger to show the detail. Adding this level of detail to the ear isn't really nessecary. Many artists choose the level of detail they want to include depending on the style they're aiming for. For simplified characters, and children, I've seen a 6 drawn in the ear (reversed for left-side ears) and it was effective for the style used at the time. Page 2