Okay so I keep seeing people unironically posting this on my timeline all the time
I just wanna clear something up about it
1)It is an undoubtedly bad drawing, yes, the rule of art is generally “it’s wrong if it looks wrong” and this clearly looks wrong
2) The person who did that draw-over doesn’t have a much better grasp of anatomy and, I’m going to assume, isn’t very familiar with what bodybuilders look like
The Liefeld drawing was referenced from this photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger;
this is a pretty common bodybuilding pose and photography technique, to do these slight upshots to emphasize the size of the chest as much as possible. You can find a million photos of even just Arnie striking this exact pose in different situations;
The thing about competitive bodybuilders is that their dimensions are so outside the realm of what the average person is accustomed to that they can look “out of proportion” in real life. Parts of the body that can’t change size like the head and hands appear comparatively small, and the girth of limbs can make them appear shorter than they really are
(In order these guys are Ronnie Coleman, Moustafa Ismail, Daniele Seccarecci, and Jay Cutler if you want a source) side note, comments about the body type being “unattractive” aren’t necessary in this conversation, bodybuilding on this scale is a form of body modification, akin to being heavily pierced or tattooed. In other words, they aren’t doing it for you.
The problem is, if you make art referencing a body type that appears out-of-proportion to the layman and don’t fudge the scale of individual elements to make it seem stylistically balanced, it will look wrong to the audience. You can show someone a tracing of a body like this and it will more than likely appear more “wrong” to them than a version taking artistic license to enlarge the hands and feet and enlongate the limbs to something the contextually feels correct.
Honestly, it is technically possibly to fit a fairly correctly proportioned human arm behind that shield;
The wrist on a human body is about even with the groin when the arm is out straight, there’s room to fit a limb that long behind the shield. But the arm looks incorrect for a number of reasons; The chest wouldn’t appear at that angle if his far arm wasn’t wrapped around to hold his wrist like it was in the reference, the shield obscures line of his spine which causes his midriff to look massively thick, hiding the forearm behind the shield emphasizes how comparatively short the limb would feel even if the proportions were perfectly accurate, and the star on the shield causes viewers to assume at a glance that his arm is bent (if you look at the shield assuming the first point clockwise from the top is the actual top of the star it looks more in-proportion, but you have to stop and think about it so the drawing has already failed)
If you were to dump the shield and put the arms in a position that matches the way the chest is flexed, it makes a lot more sense what he was going for;
Which honestly isn’t even outside the realm of what actual human bodies can potentially look like;
I know this drawing is a long dead horse that everyone is sick of seeing beaten, but I wanted to throw this out there because hey, it’s a good example of what liberties to be mindful of taking when you work from references.
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