Drawing outline of human body part 1: how to draw manga easily

Human anatomy is a tough topic to talk about, because there are many things to discuss concerning the human’s anatomy. Yet today I hope to cater even for beginners to have an understanding of basic human anatomy.

Therefore, for simplicity’s sake and for everyone to learn together, I would have to take it slow in talking about human anatomy today.

The above picture is from Slam Dunk, Hanamichi Sakuragin.

You might be thinking, “hey, I want to draw manga comic characters, not stick figures!”

Never laugh at drawing stick figures, because somehow it forms a basis for us to know human anatomy well.

My manga teacher gave me stick figures to draw for a few lessons. Why?

1. It is for the purpose of recognizing the locations of the joints that can rotate in the human body, and the locations of the parts of the body that can bend and move.
2. It is to know and be familiarized with the size and proportion of the major parts of the body so that we don’t draw an alien instead.
3. It is to train ourselves to be able to draw our characters in different sizes without messing up the proportions of the body.
   

We aren’t going to always draw our characters standing straight, and when we want our characters to take on a certain pose, we certainly must know where are the parts of the body that can move, rotate and/or bend.

Many books will suggest that a manga male character will look the best with 7.5 heads. However, for the purpose of simplicity, 8 heads is still good proportion actually, and because 8 is a multiple of 2, and we can split the body by 2 always.

There are many things to notice in the manga male’s anatomy. Using the left stickman as the reference, I shall summarize it in the following points:

1. From the top of the head to the hips is exactly 4 heads, and the hips to the legs is also exactly 4 heads tall. Use this as the proportion to draw the character.
2. The shoulder is about 1.5 to 2 times wider than the hips. That’s natural, for males have wider shoulders than females.
3. The two triangles above the hips give a guideline of how to draw the gradient of the body. At the cross section, it is where the waist is, and it is the narrowest part of the torso. (It gives a slight hour-glass figure of a slim male’s body.
4. The circles other than the head are joints that can bend or rotate. (It is not exhaustive, for I have not included 2 major parts yet, and it will be revealed when we come to the female’s anatomy.)
5. The triangle below the hip line is for the male’s private/sensitive part. (Please don’t be shy partitioning space for this, it is needed for effectiveness and realism.)
6. For the rest of the parts of the body, such as the length of the arm, or the length of the thigh, just use the scale given in the picture.

The above guidelines is for a slim looking male character. Plump ones will have to be done through personal experiments.

It is slightly different from the male’s anatomy.

The circles that represent the joints and the proportion of the female manga’s anatomy are exactly the same interpretation as above, except that we need to know a few different features:

1. The widest part of the hip and the widest part of the shoulder is exactly the same length.
2. The cross-section of the two triangles above the hip is where the thinnest part of the torso should be, to give the ladies a good tight and slim hour glass figure. It is slightly higher than the male’s anatomy.

Also, the red circles at the extreme right stickgirl are areas that can bend, but isn’t exactly joints. Especially the waists, where ladies bend to give lots of different poses. It is the same with the male’s body.

After having a stickman, we can add its flesh and muscles to produce a good figure.

I admit that the above picture is at least a few steps beyond drawing the stickman and adding its muscles & flesh, but this is the incentive of going through a few basic drills of familiarizing ourselves with the outline of the human body using stickman.

Guidelines are important to give a skeleton of what to draw next, and it is a technique where every manga artist will use.

However the above guidelines can only suit to teach and train beginners, because it is too tedious and time consuming for professional manga artists to adopt. They have their own different and easier system for guidelines.

Also the guidelines shown in my stickman pictures are too straight; the human body is full of curves, hence it is only good to be familiar with for beginners, but we would have to go beyond that for us to draw more realistic characters.

Therefore just use the stickman pictures as guidelines for proportions, and draw some stickmen yourselves with a scale to effectively train your senses to know manga human anatomy.

Next time we can move from stiff stickmen and draw a different set of stickmen which is more realistic, and then it will lead on to adding flesh and muscles.

More will be revealed soon!

This article is taken and slightly edited from my manga-journey blog at http://manga-journey.com/ , where I blog about my share my experiences and learning curve in the pursuit of becoming a semi-professional or professional manga comic artist.