One of the things which many artists struggle with is drawing varied body shapes. I will be adding more examples with drawing tips in the next few weeks.

One of the criticisms I often received was I skipped from rough sketch to final drawing with very few intermediate steps. What most folks don't know is my books get edited down from a much larger selection of drawings the publisher has to choose from.  I believe the idea in putting in fewer steps was to make the books appeal to a younger audience.  I actually do lots of middle steps, usually taking all figure drawings through the same basic steps. Brutes! features not only more of the middle steps (the good stuff!) but also color charts showing which muscles I have memorized and mentally use in every figure drawing.

Brutes Team Cover

Hard to believe but my Brutes book was finished in 2009, since then my publisher has been bought and my editor retired. Somehow the promised contract for the book fell through the cracks and the project ended up in limbo. So it is sort of like starting all over in the publishing business and needing to make connections from scratch. I've come up with at least three different cover ideas as different editors have wanted to emphasize different aspects of the book.  This was an idea I came up with to correspond with the launch of a little movie called The Avengers, anyone ever heard of it? I thought super hero teams might become a hot commodity.

I actually do most of my drawing these days with markers and pens and clean the line work up in Photoshop. I love the clean black and line marks, but the downside is there is no erasing.

start simple

 warming up trying to get proportions correct and just laying out figures with simplified muscles

This guy is pretty cut, you can see his muscles clearly, but to get to this stage, you need to start with a basic understanding of human anatomy. So one of our first tasks will be helping you identify some key muscle groups.

I will be uploading some illustration work from my book Brutes! How To Draw Massively Muscled Characters.

This first illustration is an example of how all muscled characters share the same basic muscles, just the proportions will vary from character to character. See if you can identity the key muscles in each differently colored example.

how to draw super hero video