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General Male Figure Tutorial - Basic Standing - Created 12-19-02 Page 2
Moving on to the detail of the face. I've shown a step-by-step of the way I drew this eye. I've gotten a lot of e-mails requesting a tutorial about how to draw eyes, and while I feel I had lightly covered it in the face tutorials, I figured I'd show it here anyways. I've found that a lot of times I'll end up drawing an eye that looks good, but is either too high or too low on the head and I'll have to erase it and start over. To avoid this, I've found drawing the bottom of the eye first helps. It's important to remember that the pupil is always located in the Center of the iris. The pupil doesn't not move side to side when a person is looking around, the entire iris does, and the pupil alwasy remains in the dead-center of the iris. The little crecent shape I cut out of the pupil is for the highlight. I've found it's easier if I just draw it first, and draw the pupil around it. Next I drew in the hair. The hair didn't turn out very good on this guy, but I don't mind too much. The big hair strand down the center is probably what's bugging me the most about it - if I got rid of that, it would feel more unified. I cover hair a bit more thuroughly in the Hair tutorial. There are also a number of other good hair tutorials that can be found in the links section. First, I drew in a hair line - which in this picture ended up being unnessecary - however there are other times when it helps. Generally, if you know that the character is going to have bangs that completly cover the forehead, a hairline guide is unnessecary. But when I started this guy's hair, I didn't have anything specific in mind yet. I made a very light sketch of the flow of the bangs and then I went back in and added more detailed lines.
	When I'd finished with the head, I began to draw in the clothing. I started with a pretty rough and light sketchy outline to get my ideas down. The two tutorials I get the most requests for are a Clothing Folds tutorial, and a Clothing Design tutorial. It just seems to be the one thing that most people have a big problem with. This character's clothing is designed around the whole Old Japanese/Chinese tunic idea with some western influences. General Fantasy.
	If you find you're spending an hour just trying to think up the clothing, and then not knowing how to draw it right, then try drawing some realistic clothing first. Get out a clothing catalog and try drawing some of the people posing in it. The best way to get the hang of drawing clothing, is to DRAW clothing. Spending hours messing up on clothing won't make you better unless you actually study some real clothing. Cloth folds are Very difficult to picture in your mind. You have to actually look and study cloth folding on an actual human figure. Drawing a piece of cloth draped over a chair might give you some better ideas of how cloth drapes, but it won't help show you how cloth drapes over a person. Draw from a catelog, or draw your classmates while you sitting in class with some freetime. Draw the kid sitting in the desk to the right or left of you. Draw your teacher - it's all good experience. And DON'T worry about it looking bad. We ALL HATE to draw bad looking pictures, but it's unavoidable. The only way to get better at the things you're bad at, is to draw them over and over. That means the one thing that you Totally Suck at the most, is the thing that you NEED to be drawing! You have to attack your weaknesses and keep attacking them until they are your strengths. I believe it was the great Chuck Jones who once said that Everyone has 10,000 bad drawings in them. You can't get to the good drawings until you've gotten those 10,000 bad ones out of your system. (FYI - Chuck Jones was the Director of most of the old Warner Bros. cartoons - he also created the final character designs of Bugs Bunny & crew that we are all familiar with today). It's also important to realize that less is usually more. You don't need a bunch of clothing folds to make it look better. A lot of beginning artists I see make the mistake of putting cloth fold lines in there, just for the sake of having them there. They make the picture look messy, busy, and they don't add to the realisim of the piece. A lot of clothing folds aren't always nessecary. Adding too many will often times detract from the appeal of the drawing.
	I didn't feel that a lot of clothing folds were nessecary on the tunic, but I wanted the part of the sleeves on the shoulders to be very bushy and bunched up. The important thing to know about clothing that bunches outwards, is that it does this because it is tight below the bunch. This tightness causes the cloth above it to bunch up and outwards. Since the cloth is tight at the base of the shoulders, there are a lot of folds here. Understanding how to make it look like this takes practice and requires you to actually study real cloth. It's not something that can be easily taught from a book or webpage. I do plan on adding a clothing tutorial to this site, but am not sure when I'll be able to get to it. Hopefully I can during the winter break, but if I can't, don't expect to see one until summer. To tie you over until I can find some time, here are links to two very good clothing tutoirals: PolyKarbon's Clothing Folds Tutorial Julie Dillon's Old Clothing Tutorial When I was satisfied with the shirt and tunic, I drew the shoes. I almost always draw the shoes before I drew the pants since the pants bunch up at the place where they meet the shoes. It's just easier and makes more sense to do the shoes first, since they play a role in the way the pants will actually fold and collect at the base. I decided to go with a pair of boots with large strapes. Different artists draw shoes differently. I tend to simplify them a lot, while others like to get really detailed with the shoes. It's entirely up to you. PolyKarbon's accessory clothing tutorial gives some great examples of shoe laces and buckles that you might want to check out if you like details.
Here I've started drawing the pants. On the left I tried to give some exampels of the clothing fold's movement. If you're having trouble with cloth and are really serious about trying to learn more, you might want to get a hold of Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery. It's a rather good book for cloth folds, but it can be a little pricy. Anyways, cloth folds are generated by stress points. Places where the cloth is attached to something, and being pulled from. These are most often joints. The cloth being pulled from the armpit, elbow, knee, crotch etc. And the cloth collects on the insides of these stress points. On the inner side of the elbow when the arm is bent, the cloth folds up and collects. If the knee is bent, the stress is coming from the top of the knee but the cloth bunches up along the inside of the knee. When cloth that is draped hits a solid object -in this case, the shoe- it bunches up and generates inward crevaces and outward bunches. The cloth folds up and down but the upward bunches also come together in strange patters. It can be difficult to picture this in your mind. Once again - I HIGHLY suggest you look at some Real cloth on a person. In this case, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to look at your own pant leg. Different types of cloth will gather and bunch in different ways. Stiffer, tigher cloth will wrinkle and bunch all over. A lot of times, it's best to simplify this type of cloth to avoid the piece become too busy. Looser cloth will have long flowing wrinkles and only bunch up when it hits something solid like the shoe. I went for a more loose, flowing cloth type for his pants. This is the finished picture. there are probably a few things I would fix with this, but no picture is ever really finished. An artist never finishes anything, they only get tired with something, run out of time, or decide to move onto a new project. The trick is to know when to move on, and when to keep going. If I were to change anything, I would remove the single large hair strand in the center of his face, and move his right leg (the leg to our left). It's out too fat and feels unnatural. I hope the material covered in this tutorial will help you get a better understanding of drawing the human form and assist you in drawing more complex poses in the future. Good luck with all your drawing and feel free to visit the message board for more assistance and to get feedback from fellow artists about your work. Return to Page 1