The key is dont try to draw the whole body at once. Lightly lay down shapes and geometry on the page in the layout of a human. There are all kinds of different geometrical layouts of shapes you can use for figure drawing and honestly some are better for some poses than others and each artist ends up having their own preference for layouts. Here's one I found someone uses for laying out the poses their model uses in the figure drawing class they teach.
General layouts are some variation of the following.
- Sphere for head with a jaw outline drawn under it. Sometimes the bottom sphere is the eye line for some artists and other times its the nose. It all depends on whether you draw your hair inside of the sphere or on top of it later honestly, but spheres let you layout which way the head faces.
- Small neck shape. Usually a cylinder but some take this shape and combine it on body builders with all the muscles from the collar bone to the shoulders.
- Either a sphere , box or ribcage shape for the chest. This is a MAJOR point of variance between artists and you should experiement with many. Most artists draw breasts on females by attaching squashed spheres to this shape or by simply drawing an upside down heart connecting to the base of the neck to get the shape right. However, a turned chest ALWAYS means one breast is facing the camera and one is at a side view unless you are entirely at a side or top angle.
- Stomach...sometimes they dont draw it and other times its a sphere. Your call. Spheres are pretty popular though and allow you to create deformations. The bigger the sphere the bigger the belly on your character. Just remember that the hips on the next shape maintain their distance from the RIBS not the stomach if you try to make a fatty. This is how you avoid stretching characters.
- Hip shape. Its usually a box but some old school artists still layout everything with 3 spheres (chest, stomach, hips) because it allows for lots of arching. I use boxes because it lets you get the angle correct on the leg for side views. Just remember the ass and crotch attach to this shape. They lay on top of it and the groin doesn't go all the way down. Leave a gap slightly above the base of the hip shape and draw the base of your groin there. This lets you get the crotch outline right on side views during walking and kicking poses and avoids the whole "GI.Joe figurine with two sticks attached to a stomach for legs" look.
- Legs are cylinders with a bit of curve to them. Use references to figure out how you like them.
- Knees vary. Some use spheres under the upper leg,some put them overlapping the upper and lower leg, some use dashes just to mark them, some use boxes and some make up their own shape. Practice drawing legs from photos and make your own call for whatever helps you visually tell the easiest where your lines should go.
- Lower leg same as the upper leg scenario...find a reference make a shape. I STRONGLY suggest studying King of Fighters art for this. They have some really good stuff on this.
- Feet are their own beast. Practice JUST FEET alone before you get big on this. Make up shapes just to draw them. Practice them from all angles and poses. Do what you can starting out, but practice these.
- Arms get the exact same instructions as legs except circles are ALWAYS used for shoulders. Generally 2.5 times the width of the head=female and 3=male. Some males can get up to 4 but you start getting Hulk levels of deformed then. Use references.
- Hands are like feet only harder on perspective. Practice them by themself over and over again.
You can see all that happening in the example I posted.
Honestly though PRACTICE USING REFERENCES OF REAL PEOPLE! I cannot stress this enough. I went to a convention and had Steve Scott, Jim Calafiore, and several other major DC artists and begged them to put me through the ringer. The only thing they all had to say was stop drawing from comics and draw off of real people. If you draw from comics it will be like the 5th xerox of a photo...so distorted its lost its basic substance. That is literally what they told me every time. Its that important. You can stylize and shit, but learn your basics and you will have more control.
Layout your images with rough shapes. Dont try to get them right on the first pass. I make a bunch of swirlies lightly for my circles and when I get a general outline I like I move onto the next shape for my layout. When I'm all done roughing a bunch of loose shapes I erase all the extra lines I didn't need in no time at all. I mean I'm not pressing down hard on my paper because Im not worried about making a mistake in my layouts. THATS WHAT ITS FOR! Dont press hard dont struggle with erasing. Thats why I use 2b (really brittle and dark) art pencils to start placing my real outlines and details too. If I make a mistake with something like that it still erases because its not mashed into the paper.
I'll try and film something soon for you guys just to go over roughs. For now find a picture and JUST do some geometry in that pose and dont try to draw it all at once. Get a limb the right rough geometrical shape loosely and then use it to measure how far away the next shape is from it. Proceed along like that and you will proportion it right AND have all the proper geometry laid out on it for your cleanup and main pencils. At that point its like tracing something and adding embellishment.
EDIT: Shit...forgot my logitech camera only works on photo mode now and then only in standard low def and not even wide screen. Long story, but even out of the box it had that "reversed controls" problem some had and its steadily lost functions over the past year. I'm getting another soon, but it may be awhile on that video unless I resort to smaller videos in photoshop using a tablet and screen capture.
