Body/Clothing Drawing

 Hello again and welcome to the penultimate blog post for Character Design-Time,

With school going back online after a disastrous holiday break here in Ontario, I have had ample opportunity to sit at my desk for a couple of hours and learn some things about designing characters. I decided to move away from faces and start working on my character’s clothing/bodies. The way I see it, clothing/bodies might be even more important than what their face looks like. I mean it’s the first thing you see right?

This site had a great system for drawing poses that I’ve seen before but hadn’t given a second thought. After using this method though, I will definitely be using this every time. You start by drawing essentially a stick figure with notches at all of the joints in your character, and a head shaped like what I made in the last blog post. Something like this - - >

Then, you draw the ‘muscles’ of your character, fleshing out the body with how you want it to look. You use pretty rudimentary shapes in this step, except you smooth the corners. I know it doesn’t really make sense but it will in a second.

The chest is just a pentagon with the corners rounded and the top point smushed to fit your character's shoulders. The shoulders are just two circles and you erase the lines inside the body later. The biceps and forearms are just rectangles warped to fit the look of your character. By drawing the hips as a separate pentagon it made my character’s chest look more like an actual human being! Using these techniques and ways of thinking allowed me to visualize my final product and actually be able to draw something that looked like the image in my head! My first drawing using this method looked like the picture on the left.

The drawing that ended up the best using this method was this spartan armour outfit I did. I followed the armour tutorial pretty closely the first time I did this but I decided to change it up for the second one. I looked up some images of spartan armour and used images like this one and this. Although I’m not sure if the first image is very historically accurate, it looks super cool so I almost copied it to a tee. I’ve always wanted to be able to draw a figure that had its face in darkness, but it kept ending up with it looking out of place. But the helmet on this character was a great excuse to have the face dark and actually look pretty realistic. I like how it makes the character look more intimidating and mysterious, while also emphasizing the clothes they have.

Overall I think this tutorial was a huge success and I will definitely use this technique for many characters to come. Question for you guys though, what should I name this character?