how to draw female comic characters (according to Wizard)...

[ratcreature]

brown_betty asked for examples "to illustrate the exactly how and why female comic characters are illustrated differently than the male." And I thought, really, what's better to illustrate these things than the books teaching the style in the first place?

A while ago I posted some scans from Wizard How To Draw series on drawing female superheroes (here and here), and I thought I'd post a bunch more from the first book of the series on "How To Draw: Heroic Anatomy".


As everything, it starts with the basics, i.e. proportions. First the male superhero


The female example is similar, but slightly different, notice how he stands firm and straight, wheras she stands with her hips cocked a little and the leg thrust forward?


Also notice in the direct torso comparison below, how the male one is ramrod straight, but she curves and leans just a little bit in the same pose?


Now onwards to the chapter "Sultry Women". It even cautions you against overposing! Yes, it's not as if Wizard wasn't aware of the problems! (Their definition and mine of which poses are already overposed might differ slightly though, heh.)





Next, Michael Turner explains "Sex Appeal". (Or what he thinks sex appeal is.) Incidentally it also illustrates the meaning of "overposed" that was brought up in the previous chapter very effectively...





Finally for compare and contrast purpuses the chapters on "Superheroic Men" and "Superheroic Women". For the male superhero it is all about more or less ridiculously enlarged muscles as we learn:





Female superheroes don't have it that easy, they need to worry about tilting their shoulder, nipple and pubic lines attractively at all times, not to mention legs, breast size, eye make-up and hair:

Comments

why beat down the great artists?

[(Anonymous)]

are you guys honestly enraged by this book because its not showing REALITY? if we drew our comic books and heroes depicting real life, and the way that actual humans looked like..... LOL *(heres a lil fun fact for you, Percent of noninstitutionalized adults age 20 years and over who are overweight or obese: 67% (2005-2006)*

so going off that statistic almost 7 out of 10 comic heroes would be overweight, and that does not mean muscle mass by the way lol, who wants to read about a couple of chunckers dueling it out?

my gratitude to you boys who have enough sense to understand that comic books are not supposed to portray real life, duh

(statistics found at:http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/overwt.htm)

Re: why beat down the great artists?

[ratcreature]

Hi there sockpuppet. Yes, I can see that the comment directly above is also from you even though you did not bother to sign it, since I log IP addresses of anon comments and the two have the same posted a few minutes apart.