How to Draw People

Posted by Sharon on Sunday, 17 May, 2009 @ 13:02

One of the biggest problems “How to Draw People” has always had is i originally meant for it to be a frequently-updated blog, rather than a somewhat static site. Seemed like a good idea at the time, except i didn’t take into account just how difficult it is to write a full tutorial, or even a decent book review, every few days. As a result, almost all the current articles on HTDP either have poor art, or poor instructions, or both. There’s been (fully justifiable) complaints about it, and i considered just quitting the site outright - but with almost 200 daily visitors coming in (even now, when i haven’t updated or even talked about the site to anyone else in about seven months - it was over 600 a day when i was still updating), it seems a shame to do such a thing. Obviously, people are interested; i just have crappy execution. So i did quit, sort of, but only while i worked out a plan to fix the site up and space things out enough to do everything properly.

Said plan is now more or less complete. There’s plenty of tweaks i need to make - both to the site itself (less blog, more proper tutorial site) and to the not-so-great articles currently up (*cough*decentart*cough*) - but i know what i have to do, and when, and HTDP will be fully relaunching on this year’s Drawing Day, June 6. The only thing left to determine is new content, which i am leaving up to you, as the students attempting to learn how to draw people.

There’s probably going to be a fine and proper Survey here by tomorrow. Until then, just leave a comment - will you be satisfied with just better artwork in the demonstrations? More (or less) book reviews? Do you prefer screencasts over screenshots? Want more links to resources like reference photos? More face tutorials, or more poses? More anatomy and less gesture lines? Let me know!

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Posted by Sharon on Friday, 26 September, 2008 @ 11:00

There’s two big differences between drawing normal women and drawing pin-up women: Proportions and poses. Proportion-wise, the women have narrower waists and longer legs. As for poses, there’s an infinite variety, but there’s a few key features common in most of them.

Most pin-up poses show the entire female body, posed so as to get a good view of the legs. I’ve seen pin-up images which show only the upper half of the woman, but these are much less common than the full-body pin-ups, and the arms and face are more dynamically posed than they normally are otherwise.

The woman is usually turning her head to face the viewer straight-on, or looking just slightly to the side, but her torso is turned in a wide variety of ways. I’ve seen straight from the front, straight from the back, and every possible side angle in between.

Although the body itself can be placed in a wide variety of poses, the perspective (or “camera angle” or “viewing angle,” depending on who you ask) is much more straightforward. It’s almost always directly at eye level, never a bird’s-eye or worm’s-eye view. The common exception is a bird’s-eye view looking down on a woman stretched out on a bed.

The bird’s-eye view of a woman on a bed is also an exception in that it is one of the rare times a pin-up woman is lying flat on the bed instead of being raised up slightly. A lying pin-up pose is often almost turned into a sitting pin-up pose. Of the poses in which a woman is completely lying down, most of the ones i’ve seen focus more on the woman’s face and hands than on the rest of her body.

These are just some generalisations to get you started in choosing a good pin-up pose. I suggest you also look through pin-up art for inspiration. Besides the plethora of magazines on the subject, there’s also some wonderful pin-up artists, such as Olivia De Berardinis, who has entire books of pin-up artwork available for sale.

Posted by Sharon on Wednesday, 24 September, 2008 @ 12:00

Let me start off by saying Chris Patmore’s How to Draw Fantasy Females doesn’t actually have as much information on drawing as one would expect from the title. It’s a great book on female character design, and there’s plenty of sketches and drawing ideas spread throughout the book, but beginners will want to pass on this one until they’ve got a bit more experience.

That said, if you’re ready to move beyond drawings and on to creating female characters with a story behind them, How to Draw Fantasy Females is excellent. It’s basically a character design workshop (the author even has another, very similar book with the title… yep… Character Design Studio.) The majority of the book gives various female characters two-page spreads complete with story backgrounds, completed illustrations, and sketches. The characters all come from different sources, resulting in a variety of styles throughout the book. Some of these styles are great, some… not so good. Fortunately, the great styles vastly outweight the not-so-great ones.

I’ve had a copy of How to Draw Fantasy Females for some time now, and i absolutely love it, but i have trouble recommending it to others, simply because it’s not about how to draw fantasy females, it’s about creating interesting fantasy female characters. And as far as strictly creating characters goes, there’s many more books out there on the same subject. They’re mostly targeted towards writers, not artists, but they’re out there. Then again, i’ve had two such books on my shelf for months which i haven’t managed to finish reading yet, whereas How to Draw Fantasy Females is full of pictures and the written information is in scattered, bite-size chunks. Basically, if you’re looking for information on creating characters and don’t feel like slogging through blocks of text, this is a great book; if not, it’s only another book to pass up.

Posted by Sharon on Monday, 22 September, 2008 @ 11:00

Tattoos can go far towards adding personality to a character, but drawing tattoos is also a bit tricky, as it requires duplicating a flat image on a curved surface. Here i’m going to show one basic way of getting tattoos to go along with the contours of the body instead of lying flat.

The tattoo design i’m using for an example is pretty basic by design - i didn’t want to use a complicated image where the curves of the body would get lost among the details of the tattoo. However, the basic principles for adding a tattoo to a body are the same no matter what the tattoo looks like.

Contour Lines

The first step is to figure out how the tattoo should align with the body. Contour lines - lines which wrap around the body - are very useful for this. For some parts of the body it’s very easy to figure out where the contour lines go without need of any reference, but other parts (such as hands or areas around the joints) can be trickier. Obviously, you’re not very likely to find proper photo reference where a model has lines drawn all around em, but most 3D software includes a wireframe option which works well as reference (Daz Studio is free and has a low learning curve, which makes it great if you’re not likely to use 3D software for anything else.)

You don’t need to draw every line in the perfect spot - just having a general idea of which way the lines should be curving will be quite enough.

Adding the Design

The trickiest part of adding tattoos is getting them to curve along with the contour lines. I find the easiest way to make tattoos look right is to sketch a flat grid over the original tattoo design and a contoured grid on the body of my drawing, then copy the tattoo in the squares of the contoured grid.

The Finished Product

Once the grid has been removed, the difference between the tattoo on the contoured body and the tattoo as drawn flat is obvious. The contoured tattoo looks much more like it’s inked onto a living, flexible body.

Posted by Sharon on Monday, 8 September, 2008 @ 2:22

Click image for full-size

In figure drawing it’s important to be able to draw all the body parts at the right sizes. As a result, many books on how to draw people include a chart like this one, which marks off the body in head lengths to show where important proportions are. This one isn’t much different, except i’ve also marked where i draw the shoulder line and hip line in the early stages of the drawing (about a third of the way through the second head-length and halfway through the fourth head-length). If you don’t already have a similar chart handy in a book, feel free to print it out and tuck it in your sketchbook for reference.

If there’s any other proportions anyone feels should be marked off, let me know in the comments - i’ll update the chart to show them.

Posted by Sharon on Thursday, 4 September, 2008 @ 12:00

I own several books in the How to Draw Manga series, and thus far How to Draw Manga: Bishoujo Around the World is the one i own with the least information on actually drawing in the manga style. Despite this (or maybe because of it), Bishoujo Around the World is my favourite book in the series.

I’ve already mentioned in my review of Comic Artist’s Photo References that Bishoujo Around the World is the only book i have which shows the differences in body type between various races. However, breaking body types down according to race is only the first of four sections in the book.

Chapter Two, “How to Draw Bishoujo from Different Countries and Regions,” is where the book really gets interesting. There’s not much on the differences in body types; in this chapter, it’s all about faces and clothing. Each region has a page dedicated to what makes faces in that region different from faces in other regions - different eyes, noses, mouths, sometimes even getting into the variations in forehead appearances. The pages on facial differences are followed by 1-3 pages showing clothing styles specific to the region, often including illustrations showing how the characters put on multi-layered costumes or tie garments such as saris.

The third section is all about clothing, though it’s specific to more primitive clothing styles, such as togas, loincloths, and various other ancient costumes. There’s not much information on drawing different types of women in Chapter Three, but there’s some great inspiration for putting them in fantasy costumes.

Like most books in the How to Draw Manga series, the book ends with a section showing examples of professional artists’ work, complete with sketches and helpful tips. In Bishoujo Around the World, the artwork is mostly fantasy pictures, including a magical woman drawn by Minoru Aki and a downright gorgeous Arabian dancer by Keiko Shiono. These artworks give great examples of the basic principles explained in the book as applied to finished art, instead of the sample drawings spread throughout the book.

Posted by Sharon on Monday, 1 September, 2008 @ 20:59

Over the next week or two, i’m going to be posting a few articles on drawing the female face. Before i get into that, though, i wanted to show this video i found on YouTube, originally posted by user Sycra - a portrait comparison showing the differences between male and female faces.

If you’re not very good at drawing faces, this is a good video to watch to learn from someone more experienced. Even if you’re good at drawing faces, it’s worth a watch to get a better idea of the differences in proportions between male and female faces.

Posted by Sharon on Sunday, 31 August, 2008 @ 12:00

It’s a bit early for me to try any “month in review” type of posts… i haven’t even done a full month of posts yet, after all; How to Draw People’s first post was on 08 August.

Still, i’d like to give it a shot, at least for a few months. It’s not like i’ve absolutely nothing; there’s some posts here which, considering the age of the blog, have been pretty damn popular.

And so, without further ado:

Most Popular Posts of August 2008

• How to Draw Romantic Couples
• Demo: A Quick Kiss
• How to Draw People: A Beginner’s Guide
• How to Draw People in More Exciting Poses

Post Theme for September 2008

Obviously, August was pretty pose-heavy. For September, though, i’m planning something a bit different: Girls. Yep, just girls. Pretty girl faces. Female proportions. Pin-up models (yes, really). If you’re not already subscribed, be sure to grab the RSS feed for your month’s dose of pretty ladies.

Posted by Sharon on Tuesday, 26 August, 2008 @ 1:34

Couples are a unique challenge when learning how to draw people. Not only do you have to draw two people accurately, but you often need to draw them in a way which shows the closeness of their relationship with each other. The easiest way to do this is to draw them physically close - embracing, kissing, etc. - but it can be difficult to draw two bodies pressed against each other and still have them look natural.

Embracing

Embracing is a fairly standard pose for couples. Often, the gesture lines of the two people arc towards each other, allowing the torsos to press against each other. Make sure when drawing the torsos you get them as close together as possible - otherwise the embrace won’t seem as though the couple really wants to be hugging.

Kissing

A couple kissing is often embracing as well (except in very quick, peck-on-the-cheek kisses). In a typical embrace, though, the couple’s heads will be slightly back from each other, allowing them to look at each other. In a kiss… well, proximity to each other’s mouths takes priority over looking at each other. Be sure to draw the heads at slight angles to each other - the noses make it impossible for two people to kiss straight-on.

Notice in all these drawings, i’ve drawn an extra line between the people’s heads. It’s very rare to see a couple in which both people are the same height and stand in such a way as to have their heads always even with each other; usually, one will be looking up and the other looking down. Drawing a line connecting the two helps get the angles right, especially in poses where the heads are touching (such as kisses).

Carrying

Whether it be the traditional prince saving a damsel in distress, the less traditional damsel saving a prince in distress, or just a modern-day couple goofing around, poses in which one person is carrying the other are great romantic poses. In drawing these sorts of poses, i prefer to draw the gesture line, torso, and head of the person doing the carrying before starting in on the person being carried. This is a bit like drawing a person on a chair, where the standing person is the “chair” for the person e is carrying. Limbs, however, are left undrawn until both people are sketched in well enough to get the limbs in accurate positions.

There are, of course, many other possible poses for couples - everything from dancing to sitting flopped together on the couch - but these are a few of the more popular ones and, with the basics of how to draw people close together down, you should be able to draw nearly any couples’ pose with a bit of practice. On Friday i’ll be posting a demo showing a quick kiss under the mistletoe; in the meantime, leave a comment if there’s a particular pose you’d like to see.

Posted by Sharon on Monday, 25 August, 2008 @ 23:57

Hands are considered the most difficult part of the body to draw by most artists. However, everyone who draws people will eventually need to draw hands - you can only cut off the frame at the elbow or put your subject’s hands in eir pockets so many times. Furthermore, hands can really add to the overall mood of an image.

That said, there’s a great article by Todd Harris which gives a quick but thorough description of drawing hands. The article is, appropriately enough, titled “Drawing Hands Made Simple,” and will take you through the entire hand-drawing process, from the rough outline to the final details.

When you are drawing the hand, you do not have to worry about all of the detail, this will come later. You always want to start with the overall shape and then work the finer details last. Break down the hand with simple shapes.

Read more…