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Tutorial -- Proportions Here's some basic human anatomy rules, along with a list of common proportion mistakes! (Of course, I'm certainly no master of anatomy, myself ^_^;. I'm just trying to share what little I might have picked up, and hopefully it might help some people) This section deals with the body. The head has a special section here. Also, I'm only going into female proportions. Male is pretty similar, but I'm still not as familiar with it ^_^;. The one, most helpful tip I have would be...to use a mirror! After drawing your sketch, look at it in a mirror (or if you don't have a mirror available, you could try flipping the paper around so you're looking at the back, and then holding it up to light). If some part of the anatomy suddenly looks wrong, that means there really is something wrong with it you didn't notice before!

The Classic Stacked Heads If you've ever looked or seen anything on human anatomy before, you're sure to have seen various incarnations of this picture....a standing person with a pile of human heads beside them. It looks so...bizarre, doesn't it? O_o; But actually, it's really REALLY helpful. After drawing and measuring a figure like this several times a day for several days, I went from having my classmates go "...errr, that's nice, Kathy" to "Wow, that's so cool!" over my notebook doodles! I'm serious O_O. Good proportions makes a HUGE difference. (if other people are likely to see the sketch, it's also okay to put a swimsuit on the figure or something XD XD). So! How does this work? You have to start "measuring heads". First draw a head. After that, measure the height of the head. You can use a ruler at first if you want. Eventually, you should be able to just use your fingers and estimate, though XD. Now, using that height, you can figure out how long the other parts of the body should be! Here are some of the basic rules (for a girl standing straight): The shoulders are approximately two heads wide The middle of the chest is at head height 2 (like in the above figure) The waist / belly button is at head height 3 The wrists and crotch are at head height 4 The knees are at head height 5 The ankles are at head height 7 The feet end at around head height 8, more or less. (The light colored heads to the right of the girl are just for your info, so you can see how it works. You don't actually have to draw them in O_O;). This probably seems like way too much work to do every time when you draw...but the trick is, after you draw and measure like this for a few weeks / months, you start getting used to the anatomy proportions, and then often don't have to draw the lines anymore!   Fiddling With the Pose Of course, the above measurements work for someone who's just standing there looking straight ahead. That's kind of boring, and not helpful if you want another pose. When you want a person to be in a different pose, the   Prev. Page Page 1   Page 2    Page 3    Page 4 Next Page   Navigation   Back:: Tutorials On to:: Proportions