Female Anatomy Study Sketchdump 9-3-11

Hi!

I have so many things on my plate today, it isn't funny. In lieu of drawing something new... which I really wanna do... here's some stuff that's been sitting around in my sketchbook, for some time...

Most of it is for the yet-to-be-named "Baen-Shee comic book". In fact, all of it is. For as little as I have nailed down for this story, I can't keep my mind off of it... so research has become my primary objective thus far. That's in all areas, mind you. I'm reading tons of newspapers right now, because I think reading the news (note I didn't say watching the news - that doesn't count) is always a good way to get ideas for stories. I'm boning up on many many intricate details of world history in the last milennia. I'm even re-reading the Bible, a little...

I bought the sketchbook at Matt's insistence... Apparently I'd been bitching too much and for too long about taking the time to give my knowledge of human anatomy a kick in the pants for the first time in three years. I wanted to take it further though. This time, I wanted to not just glance over medical books and take notes, but also to take notes on my own stylization and the reasons that I draw people the way I do. Especially chicks...

Females have become so easy for me to render to my own satisfaction that I basically don't have to think about what goes where and why. And that's kind of a red-flag for me. It's a safe spot. I don't like to be in safe spots, creatively. I have to be sure that what I'm doing makes sense before I get too comfortable and forget to try anything to improve...

Anyway, let's get to what you all came here to see: HARDCORE NUDITY.

I looked at a bunch of my drawings, and this is pretty much a breakdown of what I consider to be important lines on a woman's torso:



Breaking it down to different body-types would look something like this:



I draw lots of heads too, and here are some sketches of basic head-shape, the way I normally go about drawing those...



Pay special attention here, because this is super-important -- Different chicks have different kinds of boobs. As illustrated in this sketch:



Then I have this strangely-angled render of Sparkles' torso (with breakdown). I see so many people drawing ladies with very manly six-pack abs or none at all. If you're going for muscles on a girl, there's a nice in-between you can achieve, if you take the time to look at pictures of, or are lucky enough to coax modeling services out of real women...



Nita sketches... Typical hourglass figure renders, etc. etc...



Caj sketches. I wanted to go a little more realistic on her differently colored eyes, so I spent a lot of time researching heterochromia in cases of people with brain tumors. The color variation is caused by blood clotting behind the iris, which would likely show up speckled, as in the sketch, below.

I also looked at lots of pictures of David Bowie (though, no, his eyes don't display heterochromia at all -- one of his pupils is permanently dilated due to a beating he received as a kid.)



I get all kinds of excited when people ask me how to draw people of all different body styles. It's honestly not so different from one person to the next (see the line-up near the top of this entry, for example).

But I'm not always comfortable with it, either. It's challenging. But it's important to remember that no matter how much or how little fat, muscle, aged skin or other things are piled on the body, the rules of proper proportioning don't change and neither does the underlying structure. Here are some drawings of Cherry which have helped me a ton in getting her figure down, correctly:



More doodles...





And more to come... :)