Original subtitles

Welcome to the lesson on ideal body proportions.In this lesson we're going to look at a basic framework

for drawing out the measurements correctly, of the human body.

But before we do that, we need to actually understand what are proportions, right, what are proportions?

Proportions are the size, the spacing, and the location, of elements in any particular design.

So cars can have proportions, people have proportions, and so on and so forth.

So they're the size, the spacing, and the location of elements. We build a rule set out

of these things to give us some kind of guideline as to what the correct, or reasonably correct proportions,

of the human body should be.

So, something to remember is that these are really just general guidelines.

And the reason we want to emphasize this, is because, you know, there's all kinds of body types out there,

all kinds of people out there, all ages of people, and so their proportions vary.

So the ideal broad body proportions are really the size, space, and location rules are just the idealistic

kind of middle aged person, maybe a 30 year old a 40 year old the type of person, someone is just kind

of your general adult person.

OK.

Other thing to remember with proportions is that, when we manipulate proportions we can get different

looks.

We can get different styles.

So a large part of other drawing styles, for example drawing manga, drawing Disney style

work drawing cartoons, drawing chibi style things, or American comic book characters.

This really has a lot to do with altering the proportions of the general guidelines, and using them in

different ways to achieve different looks.

All right.

And then last but not least let me say as well,

before we move onto the actual body proportions themselves, that this is really something you want to

learn off by heart, right, learn off by heart.

And the reason you want to learn this off by heart is, if you have some idea of general body proportions that

work, that look reasonably correct, then you're able to manipulate the proportions as to how you might

want them for a different body type, for a different look,0 for a different style.

Right.

So you really want to learn proportions of by heart.

And truth be told, they're not really very hard to learn off by heart.

I'd recommend doing just your own drawings of the ideal body proportions, head and the hands. Draw them

stick them on your wall, and every morning just memorize it by heart

the main locations of things.

OK.

So we're going to look next at a diagram of ideal body proportions here; and it's drawn very basically,

it's not drawn to look good . It's drawn so that we can capture some fundamental measurements of the form,

that we know work and that we know look generally correct. That we can then use to draw really appealing,

believable characters off of these measurements.

So let's go ahead and actually start breaking down ideal body proportions here, and taking a look at

the measurements of the form here.

So the first thing to note, is that we use a head measuring system to measure everything, so whatever

you've defined the head size as, can be used to measure out all the rest of the sizes of a particular

character.

And so here we have the eight heads system, because we're using eight head sizes, and we've drawn a very

typical front view of an average kind of person, middle aged, at this particular head height- 8 heads.

In the first head.

We have the head right.

So from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin, is the first head, and the second head, the bottom

of the second head aligns with the nipples right.

So this is kind of the nipple line.

So we know that the nipples should always be at the bottom of the second head.

The bottom of the third head, we have the navel line, right, or the bellybutton line if you wish to call

it that. Bottom of the third head is the navel line, and then the bottom of the fourth head is the crotch line

and the crotch lies reasonably around that position.

All right.

So it's not a very super ultra scientific super accurate system, it's a general system right.

The bottom of the sixth head- the bottom of the knees.

Right.

So it's the knee line.

And then the bottom of the eighth head is the bottom of the feet right.

So the foot line.

So we want to remember these very basic kind of front view measurements, primarily first. But then we

also have a question of width.

How wide do we draw things.

How wide do we draw the head and the shoulders.

And generally speaking you want to have the shoulder head length, to be two and a half or sometimes even

three heads wide.

Right.

Depending on how wide the shoulders are that you want, but three heads looks can look right, to and a half

also looks pretty right.

And you may also be wondering, "Well what about gender differences? Are there some key gender differences?"

And there certainly are.

We'll talk about them shortly.

Let's just cover some other things quickly.

Next thing is, how long do we put the arms? I mean how long do normal arms look?

So the rule we use here is really, that the elbow aligns with the bottom of the ribcage, wherever you may have

drawn that or understand that to be in your drawing, or otherwise, slightly above the third line, right

the line, the navel line. So slightly above the navel line we'll draw the elbow line and that helps us

define the length of the upper arm, and then the length of the lower arm is from the elbow down to having

the hand meet around half way on the hips, right, half way on the hips.

That's where the hand usually touches. And in a nutshell, that is very typically the idealistic body

proportions rule set. Learn these off by heart.

Make sure you know the locations of everything, the general width of the shoulders, how to measure

out the arm length, the leg length is kind of implied in here because of the bottom of the crotch kind

of going down to the sixth head, you know where the knees are.

And then six to eight is the rest of the legs.

You generally get a good feeling of the length of all of the elements based on the head measurement.

So my advice to you once again really is, learn these off by heart, it's not really a hard system.

You can just really print this out if you wish.

Put on your wall and learn it off by heart.

However we do have a question of gender and age differences right.

Gender and age differences, particularly gender differences and age differences we will cover it later on

in the course.

But in terms of gender gender differences, instead of drawing out this entire 8 head model again, having you

learn another entire model of head proportions.

I thought what would be much better is to really just cover the key differences between male and female.

And really there are two to kind of core differences.

The first one is that females tend to be shorter.

Right.

Females tend to be shorter.

So what you can really do is just draw them at maybe seven heads, or seven and a half heads, right. Seven

or seven and a half heads.

So they generally tend to be shorter than your idealistic male proportions.

And in the second thing, which requires some additional drawing, is that we want to understand some fundamental

truth about the skeletal structure of men and women.

The basic rule really, is that men have broad shoulders and narrow hips.

All right, and women have narrower shoulders and broad hips.

OK.

This is just a basic symbolic representation of what I've just said, but it's useful to remember it in

this way. They're not to exact proportions but basically you want to make sure that in men the shoulders

are broader than the hips, and in women, the hips are broader than the shoulders.

And the reason this is so, is the pelvis inside.

I mean the pelvis from our skeletal structure. In men is usually quite narrow and more vertical, and in

women, the pelvis is actually very wide. It's wide to accommodate childbirth.

So there's a kind of typical drawing of the pelvis and the great trochanter, which is at the top of

your femur bone, your main bone in the top part of your leg, and your top leg bone right, It pokes out.

And because the woman's hips are broader, the great trochanter pokes out a bit further.

So it kind of looks something like, that how the bone is.

And so it sticks out further.

And then the skin wraps around and goes down to the leg.

Whereas with men, the pelvis itself is actually quite a bit narrower.

And so the great trochanter doesn't stick out as far and so male hips are narrower. And that is

the end of idealistic body proportions for the human body.