Drawing outline of human body part 3: Advanced stick figures drawing

October 14, 2009 by r2moo2
Filed under: Doodle Art, How to draw manga tutorials

bleach01 from tom tom – The gaze into the sun ( i love inu )

In this post I am going to share about advanced stick figures drawing, and it is moving closer to our actual drawing to manga comic characters.

Let us assume that many readers have gone through the previous drawing outline of human body sessions. If any reader needs to know what is happening, start from part 1, part 2a and part 2b.

The above picture of the manga Bleach looks cool.

Advanced stick figures drawing example

I will begin by sharing some advanced stick figure drawing, in contrast to our previous manga anatomy exercises.

By comparing with both pictures on the left and on the right, one might guess that I have used the left stickman as a guide to draw my right picture.

This is exactly the kind of exercises my manga teacher asked me to practice on, and though it was tedious, it brought in tremendous results.

I had to trace my stickman into another piece of paper, then draw muscles and flesh into the stickman drawing, trace the stickman with flesh and then finally produce a full profile character as shown on the right.

And we haven’t gone to the details of drawing hands and legs yet. That must be left for another day.

There is actually an intermediate step of drawing muscles and flesh to the stick figure before drawing details such as the image on the right, but I will leave that topic for another day too.

Drawing outline of human body: Advanced stick figures drawing

Notice on the stick figure exercise, it is much different from the skeletal stick figure that I have been advocating in “drawing outline of human body part 1“.

The spinal cord actually has a shape, as the character has a side profile view. The two triangles at the middle of the stick figure bends forward, giving the stick figure volume.

Most important of all, while drawing our stick figure guidelines we must take note of the balance of the body, and the centre of gravity of the entire character.

I wonder will I ever cover the topics on the balance of the body and the centre of gravity of manga characters, because these two topics are very technical and very difficult to describe in words. Will update if I ever get to the topic.

Anyway, besides observing how the overall stick figure look, notice that the stick figure has a pose. In this exercise, I was required to produce several stick figures with different poses, and then draw them into full profile manga comic characters.

Hence, in this advanced stick figures drawing, paying attention to the pose of the character is very important.

The pose of a character actually can dictate the femininity or the masculinity of a manga character. There were errors that I drew that made the male manga character look very sissy. I will show some errors that I made in future posts.

These are other examples of advanced stick figures and doodling that I had to do for practice, and the above are showing female poses.

How should one practice drawing to improve on manga anatomy?

Simple, just draw the stick figure in various poses that I have posted, according to the proportions that I have suggested in the previous “drawing outline of human body” series.

Notice that certain similar features are still in my stick figure drawings, such as drawing circles to represent joints, and drawing triangles to give a guideline of the shape of the upper body.

All these proportions are exactly what I had advocated and discussed before. Apply them to different poses shown in topic.

And in future poses I will discuss about adding flesh and muscles to stick figures drawing.

Final Words for this post

My friend, who graduated with an arts degree, told me that during art school they practised drawing stick figures for an entire year as foundation!

That is really tedious practices, however it built a strong foundation of the different proportions of human anatomy for the students.

So, if we want to develop well in manga drawing, there is no escape learning how to draw stick figures well.

Stay tuned for further updates! I will be posting more examples of different poses, silly mistakes that I made and how to add flesh & muscles to stick figure drawings in future posts to come.

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