How To Draw Better Bodies: Part One

hey this is Brooks with character design Forge I want to try something new series of videos that are a little bit smaller and condensed uh and broken up into multiple videos or segments but each of those videos is going to give you something that you can take away and start to use right away now the first thing that I want to talk about is bodies and how they contribute to the overall interest and shape language of your characters how to make more interesting bodies and we're going to start with some simple steps first of all and before you kind of move on to the next video or you kind of feel like this is a little bit too simple for you I want you to at least practice these things so for demonstration purposes to make it easier for me to show you what I'm drawing I'm drawing digitally uh in procreate but you can be doing this anywhere in a sketch pad with a pen or pencil you could even start misting up the shower door and drawing with your finger there doesn't matter where you do this so here's something that I see a lot with newer artists especially younger artists when they go to draw their characters or design new casts of characters they start with something you know any kind of head like this but then their bodies always kind of tend to skew to this kind of really rectangular t-shirt mold of a body basically it's just existing as a pedestal for the head um but just it's this rectangle that's not too interesting and it's almost like it's just there to Showcase whatever slogan is on the T-shirt nothing necessarily bad with this body style or this shape of body but then this happens where because the artist isn't maybe as experienced or not comfortable with trying other things well now you have character one with hair like this and character 2 with hair like that and it's the only way that you can really distinguish between the two of them maybe the color of the hair is a little different some different facial features so what I want to do is before you get to that point of Designing the characters I want to show you some of the tools that you can use to vary the Torso of the character starting at the Torso is a really good way of kind of changing the overall shape and adding some contrast once you get to like a big cast of characters so this is the exercise that I want you to do no more complicated than this start with a straight line on the ground and now we're going to add some heads that are all the same exact size but from varying Heights off of this ground so the reason that we're keeping all of the heads the same size is we want to learn a little bit about proportion from here we're going to draw some lines uh some kind of curved lines from the head to the [Music] floor now what this serves as is our line of action and this doesn't necessarily mean that the bottom of our line is where one of the characters feet goes it's just where the overall weight and their gravity exists so I want to show you some very Broad and basic shapes that you can be using for your torsos you may be familiar with some of these Concepts first here is just kind of our regular rectangle shape the one that we were talking about before very basic very plain and in character design what we're doing we want to exaggerate so we're not just looking to replicate what people already look like we want to accentuate that make it really exaggerated push it over the edge next up is going to be this kind of um topheavy sort of bean shape you can do this too with just a simple rectangle that's wider at the top and thinner at the bottom like that we can do the same rectangle shape here but wider at the bottom than at the top and see how there's this sort of difference uh in the space from the bottom of this torso to the ground we'll probably add some legs later but just for the purposes of this demonstration this next one is probably going to be like a child or like chibi proportions so it's going to be a pretty small uh little bean of a torso and here you've probably heard of the pear shape uh before this is what we'll do here is just kind of these two circles one kind of bigger than the other and this is the same thing where we could invert this and make it kind of heavier at the top than at the bottom we'll add just a little head extend this for that so from here what we can do is start to build out and complicate these shapes what's great to do in character design is start with the most simple and Broad shapes that you can and work into more details and more specific so obviously the Torso isn't going to be made up of just this one broad shape all the time so we can go back in here now and start to kind of segment out where the rib cage is how that separates and then we can add some very simple legs and remember what we talked about that that bottom of the line is where their gravity is so almost we can uh put our legs on either side like that some really simple triangles we're not aiming for this to look super realistic right now we just want to get some really kind of lifelike uh action and flow to these lines [Music] [Music] one more body shape that's usually lumped in with these is this hourglass shape which is usually used with female characters and this one starts wide at the top tapers in at the middle and then widens back out at the bottom so you can already see how Chang changing not just the shape of the Torso but also the size of the Torso uh where it is how far it is off of the ground how far the head is from the Torso it's a cool way to get a lot of different and interesting characters U by changing around those proportions so before you get to the next video or uh before next week's video comes out which will follow up on this I want you to fill a few pages of your Sketchbook doing these exercises and start to see what sort of shapes that you can get uh and what kind of characters you can start to develop from this you might want to start with just the head off of the ground with some rectangular shapes that you sort of squash and stretch and you might move on towards some more complicated ones where uh the head is accompanied by some torsos that are made up of multiple shapes and you start to sort of embellish more detail that's it for me today I'm making new videos every week at character design Forge subscribing on YouTube lets you know when new videos are made available my course learn character design is a comprehensive character design cre culum head over to learn characterdesign docomomo Dennison there you'll get exclusive videos just for backers like the ones on this channel and new episodes of our show character select a week before they're available to the public thank you for watching and have fun creating

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 257,355

Keywords: art, learn to draw, character design, art tutorial, tutorial, bodies, torso, characters

Id: CDBRYxTu5Ow

Length: 7min 26sec (446 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2017