Constructive Arm Drawing

i'm excited for this video this is something that i wanted to do right from the beginning when i started my youtube channel up again a couple of months ago this is how to draw arms i'm going to start with a basic block in and then we'll quickly go into anatomy and then from there we'll go into the practical construction of our forms and finally we'll bring it all together to draw two examples from reference i'm david finch and i've been a comic book artist for over 25 years if you enjoyed this video please consider hitting like and subscribe and if you have any questions or comments please leave them below if you'd like to know the tools that i use take a look at the description below the video my new course on drawing superhero heads is up on skillshare right now so give that a look and i've also included a link to my gumroad site where you can find my first figure pose pack it's got 14 male and female figures drawn from a variety of poses and angles all in a simple line drawing without shadowing or rendering for you to use for study or as a basis for your own drawings so we're going to start with our basic block in and in order to do that we're going to draw a tube for our upper arm and a tube for our lower arm and then just a little bit of a shape for our hand just to give it some placement halfway down the upper arm and halfway down the lower arm we'll draw some divisions the upper arm division is going to be for our shoulder our deltoid and then from there we'll attach in the body of our upper arm which you can see it inserts down into the forearm and then sketch in a basic shape for our forearm what i want to do here is just use very very basic blocking shapes to establish the overall forms it can be very easy to lose yourself in the shapes of all the little muscles in getting those all in and established and you can very quickly lose sight of what really makes an arm or a leg or your torso or any part of the body hold together and have a realistic pleasing look so not only does breaking down your forms into very very basic shapes make it easier to learn and understand but it's also incredibly useful in being able to turn and manipulate your forms in space and really the thrust of what i wanted to do with this video is focus on the broad shapes that make up the arm and then reduce those shapes down to some very blocky forms in order to simplify the process as much as possible now we're going to draw the arm from the back a tube for our upper arm and a tube for our lower arm the same as the others i'll draw my divisions in draw in my shoulder i'm feeling like i'm tending to be a little short with my upper arm on each example that i draw here and so i keep compensating and i apologize for that this isn't really the normal way that i actually construct my arms i use more of a gestural method and so i'm finding that this has actually been a bit of a learning process for me too it's been so many years since i've done these kind of studies that that trying to break these things down into simple forms and explain it to you in the most simple way possible is turning out to be a bit of a journey for me too and so now i'm just gonna draw on some shadow along the front of the arm and all i'm doing here is just delineating the plane change along the arm and i've drawn a shadow down the forearm that i don't really like you'll notice there and i'm just fixing that because the forearm divides into two parts the lower forearm inserts into the upper forearm basically like two blocks going crossways with each other and i'll draw a little diagram in just a moment to make that hopefully a little bit more clear so here is my upper forearm and you can see that i've drawn it as a very simple block and then my lower forearm goes crossways with that block and now my upper arm goes crossways with the block the same way as my forearm and i'm drawing in i'm drawing in my deltoid shape above that forearm rotation is something very very important to bear in mind when you're drawing your arms there's one bone in the upper arm and then two bones in the lower arm and when you rotate your wrist the bones actually cross over each other and the muscles follow the bones the muscles are essentially attached to the bones with tendons and so it's important when you're drawing your arms to bear in mind that your muscles will actually move with the movement of your wrist and so drawing an arm with actual musculature i'm going to do two examples and show you how the muscles move with the bones as they rotate around the arm when you rotate your wrist and so for the first one we've got the hand turned away from us and so essentially the the bones are actually crossed over in this one and now if we open the hand and flatten out the two bones in the forearm we'll draw in our upper arm or shoulder and get all that established all of the muscles rotate just slightly with the wrist and something that's very important to notice is that the wrist is actually much narrower in my second example because your wrist is basically this shape right here and so i'll draw it through attach a hand to it very quickly and you can see how it inserts into the hand itself it's not a tube it's actually much more of a flattened rectangle shape obviously no broad breakdown of anatomical forms is going to be effective without a solid understanding of underlying muscular structure i do find though that a very common problem i hear about is that it's a leap to go from understanding where all the muscles go to being able to use that knowledge in constructive drawing so with all that said here's a front side and back diagram of the muscles of the arm you need to practice these until you can draw them quickly and confidently i do have a couple of points to make that will hopefully make your anatomical sketches more useful as i'm drawing in my muscles i'm making sure that they all have a very definitive beginning and an end they all interlock together like basically football shapes this is something that i learned actually from a jim lee video he did a video with lee and wills potassium and rob liefeld and todd mcfarlane was in there he he very quickly sketched in muscles for the arms and it wasn't really done as a complete anatomical diagram because it's just too much to do in a quick video but it really showed me how muscles interlock together and when you draw your final arm how understanding that can make it look like your muscles are actually part of a working system that actually operates your arm or your leg or whatever part of the anatomy you're dealing with another thing i've always found really interesting is that while every muscle in the human body is essentially tendons connected to bones with one muscle between them but there are some muscles in the body that take on a different shape and in the arm those muscles that i try to be the most aware of are the deltoid the triceps and your major extensions at the outside of the arm by the elbow you'll notice that my deltoid actually at the bottom has a bit of a flat shape and it kind of curves forward into the arm it doesn't go directly down and come to a point the outer head of the tricep actually has a bit of a hook shape at the back of it and it connects to a very noticeable tendon that you can see connecting down to the outside of your elbow and the last muscle is your major extensor of your forearm that's the one right here you'll notice that the back and the bottom it actually takes a noticeable curve downward so the muscle makes a bit more of a hooked triangular shape and your arm extensors here tuck up underneath it another thing that's very very important is your bone structure you really don't see your bones in your body because they're all covered with your muscles but there are a few bone landmarks that you really need to be aware of and that are visible on the arm your elbow is the most noticeable one but also at your wrist on the outside and the inside of your wrist you can see the bump outs where the bones stick out slightly from the body when i'm drawing my anatomy i like to delineate the small wrist bone at the back of the wrist with just a little circle it's a really useful landmark to connect up my extensors to also you can see where the bone of your elbow extends down into your forearm and your extensors surround it and so understanding how that connects can really add a lot of solidity to your anatomy now we're going to move into practical arm construction this really is the part where things get fun for me i'm going to start drawing my arm with with two soft tubes and just start roughing in my anatomy really quickly over that shape it's something that's a little ill-defined all of my anatomy is there but it looks very soft and so what i like to use is really a bridgeman method i highly recommend you find george bridgeman's guide to life drawing so much of what i'm doing here is really based on that book he's an absolute master at volumetric drawing and taking anatomy and constructing it almost like building blocks and that's what i want to do here and so i'm using very hard shapes and and i'm blocking in my anatomy like interlocking pieces that actually have dimension and this is something you really don't get from an anatomy book and so while it's it's vitally important that you learn where all of the muscles go in order to draw them well and from your imagination it's incredibly helpful to think of your arm as a series of interlocking blocked in shapes i'm just going to add in a hand quickly again just to give the arm a little bit of context and i want you to notice that i've got a very very clearly defined hard elbow and it's really just like almost a simple board shape that i've attached my muscles onto i'm just going to clean this up just a little bit here re-rough in some of my lighting and now to really drive that point home i'm drawing basically a block of wood in an l shape and i've got two major forearm landmark muscles i've got this one here and then just below it bumps out just like that and make my forearm just a little bit longer and now i'm attaching in my bicep my tricep i've drawn a little circle there for my landmark bone on the side of the elbow for this next piece i'm bringing my arm down into individual shapes for my upper arm my shoulder and my forearm and i really really like to think of these kinds of shapes this is very robotic in a lot of ways i'm just creating really simple geometry to describe my forms in space and how they interconnect and it's it's almost like a toy or an action figure i really like how action figures connect because they're they're designed to emulate the way that the body moves as closely as possible with with no bending or stretching so you get a real sense of very simple mechanics that go into how the pieces move against each other so i'm just drawing in some lines to kind of define exactly where my forms are turning on my forearm and that's where my forearm inserts into my upper arm and then i'm just going to add a little bit of lighting along the side there just to delineate my plane change and so now for the back of the arm here i really like to attach my elbow and that construction to my upper arm and i've drawn a shadow underneath it to show that it actually bends underneath and attaches to the lower arm but it's part of my upper arm construction uh it just seems to really work for me that way from just a construction standpoint now i'm drawing the inside of the arm again not anatomical this is very much a construction drawing and so i'm going to separate all my pieces out into individual parts i'm going to draw a hand there just to give you a sense of of where my arm's going and and where it is in space so i've got my upper arm it inserts into the forearm and there's my basic shape for it as just a simple block shape i've got my shoulder i'm kind of defining it in there as a bit of a ball that inserts into the upper arm and then my lower arm is a flatter piece and i've got a bit of a bump out right at the elbow there on the inside of the arm and then it bumps out again for the actual muscle halfway down it narrows out into a tube for the lower arm i'm to delineate my plane change and then draw where my forearm ends just before my hand there so i wanted to take a moment to show you a really important concept in putting all of your your muscles together and making your arms look realistic and believable in space and that is the deformation that comes from clenching and unclenching muscles it can be a complex thing in every muscle when you contract it it it balls up and when you release it it stretches out and gets much thinner but in actual practice i i find there are only ever a couple of muscles that i really need to show this in and i'm drawing my hand with the palm facing upward and so that's stretching out the muscle and making it thinner and longer on the inside of my forearm now i'm going to draw the same forearm and i'm going to actually clench my forearm by bringing my hand down and clenching the muscle and now i've got that muscle balled out and hardened and you can see the difference one is longer and one is much shorter and contracted and balled out and the only other place where i worry about that is just in my upper arm and that's in the biceps and triceps so i'm drawing in an arm that's just relaxed the arm is straightened out so my biceps is very long and flat and my triceps because the arm is straightened is much more balled up and contracted and now in the next example i'm going to bend my arm and so i'm drawing my arm as an l shape bent out drawing the same basic shapes we were drawing a moment ago and now my biceps because the arm is bent is much shorter and more balled out and my triceps is much longer and flatter and you can see i'm just drawing an arrow in there to show that it's longer and flatter as opposed to the the tricep on the other side that's much shorter and more accentuated i could do these constructions all day i really really enjoy doing them it's a fun breakdown and it's actually really informative for me but we're going to do one more example and that's going to be the arm kind of from behind just so i can really show the elbow construction and how things insert and so i'm drawing up my elbow and defining my upper bone along the sides there and then the insertion from my lower bone and then blocking in my major anatomical shapes just as as very very simple blocked in shapes now i'm going to insert my lower arm again using block in shapes and showing how it inserts into the upper arm from this angle before we move on i really wanted to stress how useful these kinds of studies can be for working out your anatomical forms and getting them really well thought out as 3d forms in space in this last section we're going to take everything that we've learned so far and we're going to put it all together so that we can draw from reference in an informed way and so for my first example i'm using a picture of wolverine that i drew just about a year ago for a marvel cover i really want to be as clear as possible that while i use my volumetric forms while i'm drawing this this is really more of a method that i would actually use in in drawing a real arm for a comic and it's more in keeping with my actual day-to-day uh workflow i really like using the kinds of volumetric forms and they help me out when i'm drawing and i'm having a little bit of trouble envisioning how i want to get a form placed in and how i want to define it in space i fall back on on the kinds of drawings that we were doing just in the last section quite a bit but i i don't go in and draw those as completed drawings it's really just part of the sketch phase so i'm getting all my anatomy drawn in here and now that i've got that in i'm just going ahead and tightening up a bit of a cleaner under drawing and this is going to be much more my my final framework for my uh my arm and so what i'm doing is i'm looking at the arm that i have in my reference and i'm using my knowledge of anatomy and my knowledge of volumetric form to draw my own arm using that as a guide so i want to try and get as close to those forms as i can but i don't want to just methodically copy out those forms that i'm seeing in in the the final drawing and i i find this is a problem that people can run into when they're using reference is that it's a real tendency to just line for line copy what you're looking at and the point of this kind of copying study is to be able to break down the art that you're seeing and understand it for yourself so you can recreate it and use it in your own way this is copying but this is copying for the purposes of study and it's a very important distinction and so now that i've got my line weights and everything drawn in just in terms of my overall outline i'm going ahead and putting in shadow i've got my lighting income coming in from above and just slightly to the left and because i've worked out all my forms volumetrically it's very easy for me to confine all my shadowing to the undersides of my forms in places where it's away from the light and i'm also using reference the drawing that i have from earlier in the year as a guide for where to put my lighting and this is i find the best way to take simple anatomical studies and reference and diagrams and be able to turn them into a real working understanding of how to draw comics or if you prefer and you like something that's more of a fine art style you can do the same thing with photographs the idea is understanding what you're looking at well enough that it's something that you can recreate so now before we move on to the second example i wanted to just quickly draw a simple sketch of a forearm and put in my football shaped muscles they're all just interconnecting football shapes and then in order to light them i'm just connecting those shapes so i'm really accentuating the connection points if you notice i'm going a little thicker away from the light with my shadowing but the real thing that holds those things together those kinds of muscle connections is making sure that you have interlocking football shapes that are complete forms unto themselves and then accentuating the connection points and creating essentially a negative space drawing and so for our last example i'm going to quickly sketch in the form for my arm just get it defined in there you'll notice that i don't have a defined elbow because i'm using tubes but i make absolutely sure to define it once i start bringing in my blocky structural forms and so i'm blocking my shoulder i'm using very very hard lines on this too i generally prefer to use angles rather than curves wherever i can i think a good mixture of angles and curves really makes art look much more dynamic and solid than something that's very very curved or really too angular so i'm getting everything drawn in this is just using our knowledge of anatomy that we've developed along with a mixture of the kind of volumetric studies that we've been working on now that we've got that in i'm going ahead and putting in my outline getting all my muscles defined i try not to put too many lines in here because i find that really delineated muscles into the light portions of your anatomy can start to make things look like there's really no skin on your your muscle and i've actually gone a little bit far with this this is a study so i feel like i i really should have done a second pass with the eraser just to clean things up a little bit more so there aren't quite so many lines up into the light portion and so i'm drawing lighting looking at my reference but i'm really not copying my reference per se i'm i'm letting my own anatomy that i've defined and where that deviates from my reference i'm using my own anatomy as a guide and doing this will broaden your understanding of your own lighting and also bring in the techniques and knowledge of other artists i find way too many artists are reluctant to use other artists work as a study tool but this is a tried and true process and this is the way that the old masters learned how to paint it's something you really shouldn't shy away from you don't want to copy another artist's work in your own pieces that you're signing but refusing to learn from the techniques of other artists will absolutely hold you back alright thank you so much for watching we'll see you monday nights at 8 o'clock for our monday night draw live stream and i will see you in the next video

Channel: David Finch

Views: 194,018

Keywords: drawing tutorial, how to draw, comic art, inking

Id: JoFljtqqypw

Length: 19min 51sec (1191 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020