How to Draw People

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com, and I'm going to show you how to draw people. Okay, the first thing about drawing people is that you want proportion. You start with the head which is of course your basic inverted egg shape. And the remainder of the body is approximately six heads long, one, two, three, four, five, six. So now you know what you're dealing with. The way I do it is I start with the head, give it a little neck just to give some distance, and get your shoulders which should be about twice as wide as your head. Get your shoulder points, then I get a barrel chest in there. We're going to do the male figure now, this works for the female figure as well, but male figures are easier to start with. Get your middle line, and of course about halfway, slightly above, you'll have your hip line. Now your hip line, this is something that a lot of artists forget in their artist's skeleton. They're a little narrow than the shoulders, and get your legs in. These of course are about halfway in between. A good way to remember the length of an arm is that the wrist should come about parallel, just above the hip line. So now you have your basic human form, and of course this is going to be adjusted a bit from a skeleton of proportions to the reality of subtlety. We'll talk about faces in another video. So we'll just put in something basic there. The barrel of the chest where at the top of which we'll make the trapezoid muscles, the shoulder muscles, and then you do an oval, for the shoulders or deltoids, a longer oval for the biceps, this will also make your approximate placement for your triceps, then an oval just over halfway the length of a forearm for your forearm muscles. Now the best way to do the abdomen muscles, is to make a sort of a pinched hourglass that stretches more at the bottom, and then from there you can get a slightly curved angle to get your pectorals curved slightly down from your original shoulder line to get the color bound, put a little you in the center, don't necessarily connect it, of course when you go over to finishing, you can make that more subtle, the color bound is often more of a curved angle like this. From here you can put in a slight wave to where your side muscles are, hip bones, a little hint of the gluteus maximus you can see from behind, a big oval for the thigh muscle, now it should come pretty much centered to the hip line. Get a little oval for the knee, do the same with the calf as you did with the forearm to get the calf muscle. Now you'll notice that the thigh muscle is not lining up with the groin area, so 'cause that's actually two different muscles, you'll have a curve in here, curve for the groin, do a little smoothing, on the calf muscles, and thigh and the knee there, and then your foot is basically a wedge which you want a little round a little bit, the ball of the foot, hint of toes, forward facing foot is also a wedge, basically a triangle, but you want to see the hint of the heel and the ankle. We'll finish up the arms and get the curve, there is the sharper curve on the inside as opposed to the outside of the forearm. Get your little elbow in there and you have the basic form of a person. There we have it. And that's basically how you draw the human figure."