Male Anatomy

In this Anatomy Lesson, I’ll be discussing about Male Anatomy in Comic style. My name is Lalit Adhikari and we are at LTY.

Related Topics:

• How to Draw Human Anatomy
• Anatomy of head for drawing
• Foreshortening

Observing Hulk’s Anatomy

There is really something epic about powerful comic characters. They are fun to play in video games, watch in movies and also fun to draw. And there is something primal and animalistic about our fascination with characters like Hulk.

Just take a look at the Hulk. Although there is not much with this dude other then the appeal of that visceral crazy masculine persona but the reality is that this isn’t a normal look and it’s a pretty common thing in comic books and cartoons.

Because it’s so cool and powerful looking, in this blog post I will share my perspective on how you can make changes in the normal anatomy of a male proportion to make it strong and powerful.

Therefore by following these tips and tricks in anatomy, you can modify and over accentuate that masculinity.

Related Topics:

• Muscle Anatomy
• Female Anatomy

Proportions priority list

I will start off by talking about proportions. The reason is that when you draw big, tough muscular guys you don’t need to make everything in regular proportions to achieve that hyper-masculine look.

Here, I’ve drawn a triangle to illustrate the priorities of what should be accentuated first.

The first priority is the chest and shoulders: Because whenever we think of big muscular guys we imagine broad shoulders and biceps.

The second priority is the upper arms, upper legs, and neck.

And the third priority is hands, feet, and legs.

And even though all these parts will be growing, the size of the head remains the same.

And these are the two sketches which show how they are growing in mass.

In the second priority, I’ve told that neck is usually bigger in these powerful masculine characters and not just bigger, the head and jaw part is also a bit downward.

The neck is directly connected to the back muscles which are sort of like a mirror in the front of the chest. So, the neck is going to be grown as a result of those muscles being expanded.

Having a thin, long and a visible neck makes the character look a bit weaker and by adding mass, thickness and even shortening the neck it makes the anatomy much more solid, rigid and strong.

The tricky thing here is that when you are drawing someone with this amount of mass you start to stress things out because there is no room to keep everything in the middle.

So, by changing the pose a bit like bringing the elbows out and widening the stance of the legs things will start to look much more natural.

And from all these, you can see clearly how this prioritization of what to expand and in conjunction with that expanding of the pose makes a really powerful figure.

And from this figure, you can see how this very quite effective change of proportion to create that really masculine character.

Related Topics:

• Principles of Design
• Bit Depth
• Color Mode

Drawing Hawkeye

In the next step, I will put all these tips and tricks into practice on creating a version of Hawkeye from Marvel’s Universe.

As usual, I started off with the construction lines with blue color and then moved into adding muscles by roughly blocking the shape of the character with red color.

After I finished drawing the construction lines, I moved into adding the detail and the final clean sketch with black color. Keeping in mind the muscle anatomy and all the points I described above I completed the sketch.

Now, moving on to the coloring part, at first I chose the regular plane colors as a base. Then, I carefully moved on to the details part and started adding all the features of the character to make it look a bit lifelike.

I added some extra shadow’s and highlights to give this character a bit more depth.

And after a bit of adjustment, this is the final look of the character. So, that was just an example of how to bring that hyper-masculine, comic book video game style.

But you really can go beyond that by creating more monstrous looking creature keeping in mind that hierarchy of proportion and little features like the pose tweaks and details like veins and lines indicating the muscles.

If you are following our Free Anatomy Lessons and Tutorial Guide, then next you should read about, ‘Female Anatomy in Comic Style‘.

Related Topics:

• Color Profile
• Graphic Design: Everything you should know!
• Elements of Design
• Basics of Design
• Types of Image File Formats