cyperus:

I don’t know what possessed me to color this like this

letmefixthatyaoiforyou:

I’m gonna talk about shoulders before I fix this one…

the shapes that make your shoulders are really complex so I actually have 3 images to explain some of this lol. First:

• The first thing to think about is the collar bones (in red), how they fit and what shapes they make around them. When you lift your shoulder, the collar bone moves with it (cause it pretty much IS your shoulder anyway lol).
• The bones are close to the surface but there isn’t much muscle around them, so when the skin goes over it creates a few pits that are good landmarks. My favorites are the pits on the outer ends of each collar bone (in blue here). They’re made where the pectoral (boob muscle???) goes under the collar bone. I love them because it so definitively outlines the edge of where the chest turns into the shoulder, it makes it way easier to find your way around the shoulders.
• In green is the trapezius muscle, which is actually a back muscle (it’s shaped like a diamond whose 4 points are at the top of the neck, outer end of each collar bone, and middle of the back) but it’s top 3 points peek over to create the sloping shape from the neck to the shoulder we all know. Since it’s all one muscle, both sides match up so it can help you to draw through the neck to get the proper slope of the trapezius.

• Next is some neck muscles! There are 4 major ones, 2 on each side, symmetrical. They don’t have cool names so I forgot them lol. The more important one is the one I’ve done in solid blue, which attaches the inner end of the collar bone to the skull up behind the ear. At 3/4 view, the farther one of these is what creates the visible edge of the neck that you can draw, as it goes from the front and wraps around behind.
• It’s important when drawing the shoulders because… well it’s attached to them so it’s gotta all fit right lol.

• Lastly here’s something to help make more sense of the armpit, one of the most confusing things ever. Since 99% of my drawings are animu boyz I don’t really bother to remember every specific muscle in the arm, and I just look it up when I need to. So what you see here is my method of remembering masses in the arm. The deltoid (the blue one) is like a cap on the shoulder, so when you raise your arm it bulges (it’s the one doing most of the work of holding your arm up). I them imagine the main mass of the upper arm (red) as a carrot or something that’s jammed into a hole in the side of the torso and is covered up by the deltoid cap lol.
• Also notice that when you lift your arm, your shoulder gets closer to your face. Too often I see people just make the arm go up vertically but leave the shoulder down and it just… makes this really awkward right angle and looks bad cause it’s wrong. Actually, when you raise your arm, your whole ribcage tilts to accommodate it too. Actually when you raise your arm it changes your whole body. LOL but that’s a different conversation.

You’ll see in my fixed version of this post that the angle of the shot and his raised arm leaves no room for negative space between his shoulder and face.

TA DA

(Let’s give him a ribcage too lol. I didn’t need to change the width of his torso this time, it’s just that his pecs+nipples were too far over so they were flattening him)

p5stuck:

letmefixthatyaoiforyou:

So, other glaring anatomy problems aside… how do muscles in the torso work?

Ah, a very good question. This isn’t really yaoi but I’ll do it anyway since it’s such a good question. to be frank I’m not really an expert on the muscles specifically since I tend to focus more on the overall shape than interior detail things (plus I like drawing skinny guys so the my treatment of muscle is usually really subtle) so I’ll just show how I organize the male torso:

I break it into groups. Green is the pectorals, which sit on top of the ribcage (in red), which transitions into the abdominals (blue) aaaand yellow is kinda just “everything else”. oh and the blue dots are there to point out a subcutaneous landmark (meaning “below the skin”, a place where the bone comes very close to the surface that is good to help navigate the body) of the Iliac crest on the pelvis, just because I love that landmark it’s so useful. I googled “male torso” and did the same to a sculpture I found so you can, like, see it in action or something

Ok stuff:

it’s IMPORTANT to realize that the pectorals are on top of the ribcage. see on the line drawing on the left, the area around the left armpit, see how everything layers. there’s an overlapping indicated where the ribcage swells forward from underneath the thickness of the pectoral. emphasizing this line really pushes the skinniness of the body, though it is still good to put it there on guys who work out more (it keeps a rounder, bigger, pec from looking like a boob)

next, keep in mind that the torso has thickness as well as width:

it varies from person to person but I find it generally ideal to have the bellybutton here:

Also something I see a LOT in yaoi manga is people outlining all these muscles with solid lines; no :( Well I guess it’s kind of unavoidable if you’ve only got black and white to work with, so if you need to put lines on the interior, make sure they 1) don’t outline things and instead are placeholders for where a shadow would be, and 2) aren’t drawn with the same line quality/thickness as the outlines of the body. the point is to make soft contours look like soft contours with a softer line, right?

Honestly I’d avoid putting any lines to indicate abs altogether unless I was drawing the Hulk or something, but I wanted to see if I could do it in an acceptable way so I drew this. it looks fine I think. if it’s in a black and white line drawing sure, but if I were doing full color and shading on it then I would never leave those lines in, and instead let my rendering tell the viewer that there are abs there. I attempted to do that to the submitted drawing (it’s low res so it didn’t work out as well as it could have, but you can get the idea)

I tried my best :|;;;

anyway since the torso and shoulders are connected I have this post as suggested reading

I tried doing this in some figure study doodling and HOLY SHIT thank you, none of the framework techniques were working with me because they were sticks or expecting you to know how to pull off depth and this is SUPER HELPFUL for placing parts of the torso in proportion and drawing decent muscles

(so is the arm one, seriously)

vanillavalerian:

antemrd:

Blah, so bad LOL.
I am still more appropriate to draw nsfw.

perfect

ibelievepracticemakesperfect:

Knees by Salacia-of-Vanadiel

gangbanglerfish:

greytaliesin:

A super quick trick for drawing draped fabric that my art teacher taught me in high school.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

amarits:

Heart and Ass have basically the same symbol. They’re easy to confuse. 

This is a follow-up to this and this, because sometimes I just can’t help myself. I think I’m done now, though. Maybe.