Body Drawing Poses

Male and Female Reference Bases

Body drawing poses for different body compositions.
Easy ideas to lock down step 1 in whatever your step by step process.

• Anatomy • Full Body • Plus Size

Anatomy Drawing Poses

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body drawing pose base for gesture figure anime and manga reference strong anatomy muscular female girl woman

Full Body Drawing Poses

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Plus Size Drawing Bases

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body drawing pose base for gesture figure anime and manga reference plus size female girl woman sitting magic cute

Body Drawing Notes

Learn Your Anatomy

The fastest way to stop relying on step by step processes is learning how the body actually fits together. The muscles and bones all fit together in a specific way – like pieces making a puzzle. Once you are aware of the major pieces it becomes much easier to draw a body. And you don’t need to know every single bone and muscle, just the important ones – which only number a few dozen total.

Even male and female bodies are mostly the same. Girls and boys have the same bones and muscles. There’s just some minor differences between some bone shapes and overall proportions.

So prioritize learning anatomy. Knowing the pieces of the puzzle makes organizing the puzzle easy.

Learn How Muscles and Fat Work

If your focus is to learn how to draw plus size or muscular characters, you need to understand the characteristics and patterns of different tissues of the body. There are two main tissues when drawing figures – fat and muscle.

Here’s the important parts for beginners:

Fat is much softer and more malleable than muscle. That means it’s more likely to respond to outside forces like gravity or surfaces pressing against it. Drawing a character sitting? Make sure to think of how much the ground pushes against the legs.
Fat sits on top of muscle (just under the skin). So even if a character has a lot of muscle, if they have a lot of fat, the fat will dominate the figure.
Muscle is much denser and rigid than fat. While fat sits just under the skin, muscle lays against the bone – because it’s attached to the skeleton. So muscle reacts far less to outside pressures like gravity or surfaces.

Study Real People for Reference

As you stack your limbs, be very careful to pay attention to perspective.

Nothing breaks an image faster than bad perspective. If you’re lost either find a reference, draw some vanishing line guidelines to draw along, or simplify the piece to meet a level of skill you’re more comfortable with. Hopefully these poses can act like a generator to help you practice.

When you run your arms and legs move opposite each other. That is, your right leg and right arm don’t move forward at the same time. They swing opposing to each other.

Whenever you draw a dynamic pose, be mindful of it. It’s a very common mistake to put limbs on the same side both to the front or back of character. The human creates torque and movement through twisting of the trunk – this is why the upper limbs and lower limbs oppose each other during dynamic movements. So remember to keep the arms and legs opposite.

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