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  • Writer's pictureElise Picard

Drawing Body Diversity

Updated: Sep 10, 2018

I try my best to make diverse art, but even I struggle with this sometimes. I create characters with too similar bodies, and it's an easy habit to create characters with your approximate body features because it's familiar. Almost all of my characters have big hips, and usually a big bust. Even when I'm drawing men I tend to overdraw the hip size just because it feels correct to me. And more recently in my art I've been trying to combat that by breaking down the body into a large general shape.





If we look at most of these body types they're dictated between the proportion of the hips, bust, and waist. For instance the pear figure and the strawberry figure are the inverses of each others ratios. The Hourglass figure is just the rectangle figure with a small waist. The one that is the least conforming to this standard is the beanpole figure, which has the ratio of a rectangle, but is extended to be taller and thinner. If a rectangle is a large bust, hip, and waist, the beanpole is small bust, hips, and waist.


So using these tools you can choose a body type for your character, and then add various levels of fat or muscle to create even more body variation.

If we look at these two figures we can see this in full color. The figure on the left is a rectangle shape with more fat added to her body. However her central body type remains, her bust, waist, and hips are all approximately the same size.


The figure to the left is one I would classify as a mix between an hourglass and a beanpole. With the waist distinction of an hourglass shape, but more elongated as a beanpole. This is an example of how you can easily play between two body types.


Body diversity is really just what all drawing is, breaking down the body into key shapes. And it can help your characters look distinct from one another. When you have a variety of characters you should be able to distinguish each one from the other even if they were wearing a hat and had identical clothes. I find that too often, and earlier even in my art most characters were only distinguished by hair color and skin tone. It's a good sign when you can tell who's who for the most part even when your characters are in silhouette.

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