Drawing outline of human body part 2b: General Male Anatomy

We will continue from the previous anatomy session, and proceed on to do the general male anatomy.

Today’s topic will also cater for beginners, therefore it will be as simple as possible for beginners.

This is a another simple example of one of my practices I had with my manga teacher when I started out. I was again required to add flesh and a simple facial feature to my stickman drawing. To see my previous post about my stickman sketches, please click here. By referring to the blog post., it will help to relate what I am going to share in this post. Please compare the male stickman figure with the above body outline sketch.

Again, notice the details from looking at the male outline sketch. There are some differences from the general female anatomy. These are some of the differences:

1. Instead of breasts, manga males have chest muscles and a prominent rib cage. (For an attractive manga male character only and not the plump ones.)
2. Male characters do not have a very wide hip and butt size unlike their female counterparts.
3. Male characters instead have broad shoulders, about 1.5 to 2 times the hips.
4. Male characters have bigger limbs and muscles than female characters.
5. Muscles are to be emphasized for a good looking male character, while female character’s prominence is their shapely body.
6. There is a little space right between the two legs and directly below the bottom-most triangle; it is marked with a circle. Keep the space there as we don’t want a manga merman instead of a manga guy.

Again, use the male body outline sketch as a guide to draw over your stickman. As this is catered for beginners, the picture above isn’t very advanced or sophisticated.

Again, this type of sketching isn’t going to work for manga comics; as it can be easily seen to be poor art and a lack of details.

However, it is needed for drilling practices, to familiarize our sense to accept the overall body structure of a manga male character intuitively, so that more advanced character doodles can be drawn.

Once one is familiar with the body structure, then he or she can move on to draw other forms of practices to improve on manga human anatomy. What I have shown had only been very general and basic manga human anatomy.

The above is a higher advanced level of anatomy training that I am now currently doing. Of course the hands are in blocks as my manga teacher wanted me to focus on the outline of the human body instead of the specific details.

I had drawn the doodle art above and my manga teacher made corrections on it.

It is not a perfect doodle, as I made many mistakes on it, however it looks much better than the above practice.

Without familiarizing with the body structure first, adopting a more sophisticated stickman drawing or drawing a more advanced outline of human body will make it extremely challenging.

That’s because if we do not correct the mistakes we make at the basic level, we will be prone to carry our mistakes into the later stage of our training.

Hence it is imperative to get the grasp of basics first before venturing forward.

This hub is taken from my blog at http://manga-journey.com/ where I share about my experiences and learning curve of become a semi-professional manga artist.