Exercise 0J: Drawing the Arm

Hi Guys Now that you’ve learned about drawing the torso and hands, let’s learn how to draw the arm!

I took some time and drew some arms in a few positions, and with different poses. I thought I’d work with a Sakura mechanical pencil and Bristol paper. The Bristol paper is nice and tough, and is really nice for pencil work.

Here’s the whole page! I started by doing warmups from Exercise 01 in the upper left corner ^_^
(You can enlarge any of these images by clicking on them!)

Ok, now let’s walk through it, a couple of arms at a time. First up is our cylinders and spheres! Throughout the lesson, we’re going to use these two poses to look at how to draw the arm.

First, notice the proportion. The shoulder sphere starts a bit up, and to the side of the ribcage sphere. The upper arm cylinder then hangs down to the bottom of the ribcage. Leave some space for the elbow, then the forearm (or lower arm) is the same length as the upper arm. Finally, the hand from our previous lesson!

Next, notice how the forearm A points either towards or away from the body. On the hand, notice how the thumb B also points towards or away.

Now let’s add some muscle! You may recognize the chest (pectoral) and shoulders (trapezius) from earlier exercises. Now, you’ll learn about the bicep on the front of the upper arm, and the tricep in the back. I’ve drawn some contour lines on the bicep, so zoom in and take a look! The contours follow the cylinders from the sketch. The bicep bulges more than the tricep, and will be on the same side that the forearm A is pointing.

On the forearm, there are tons of muscles, but they’re all long and skinny. They don’t bulge individually through the skin. But if you follow how the thumb points, you’ll see that they do gather together on one side and make it curvier!

You don’t have to make the bulges very big to make the arm look really nice. You can draw slighter muscles for characters which you want to look younger, more feminine, or more flexible. As you write the story, you can decide whether they act that way, or if they will surprise the reader with their inner strength!

Let’s finish up with some armor. When you add armor or clothes, first make sure that the details of the clothes wrap around the contours of your arm. Look at how the cuffs of this sleeve, and the straps on the armor, wrap around the arm. Secondly, it’s good to use parts of the design to accentuate the straights and curves of the muscles. See how the bicep gets a cover that looks like the bicep? And the backside of the forearm has a solid guard that matches it’s straight line?

That’s all for this week! I made a quick note on the page that next week will be a lesson on the “T intersection”! It’s not for driving class, but it is being used all over this exercise.

See you next time, x0×0!

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