hello strawpage anon my sketches literally look like this im not sure i can help you😭😭😭
but alr lol. as you can PROBABLY tell just by looking at these its mostly breaking the body down into shapes. Most artists tell you to draw boxes or whatever the fuck but we're not made of boxes we're made of stupid ovals and cirkels and rounded trapezoids and whatever tf. heres a basic runthrough
i just found this white guy on my pinterest and i think he's cool so let's try to draw him.
if i roughly trace guidelines over him, these are my shapes I end up with. For instance, for the torso i use this weird, curved trapezoid with a thing sticking out shape. Whether you're drawing a man or a woman the chest will protrude, and for women drawing the protrusion also helps me estimate where to place the breasts.
mostly what simplifying the form down like this does for me is it makes humans a LOT easier to imagine in perspective. if I want to draw the body in perspective, it's much easier to rearrange these basic shapes and work from there rather than trying to start with details
similarly, if i wanna draw this guy, it's much easier for me to construct him and redraw from the shapes that i see (especially when NOT tracing over the image, starting off with just shapes helps me nail a pose down pretty much 100% of the time, because i can easily move them around and i can easily get ratios and proportions correct). With a bit of studying the human body and a bit of anatomical knowledge (cant escape this one no matter how bad you wanna), i can easily draw the rest of his body from here within just a couple minutes
otherwise, a big thing i see people making mistakes in is proportions!! Keep in mind simple things like: eyes should be approximately the length of one eye apart from each other; upper arms and forearms (and upper legs and lower legs) are roughly the same length; the waist is the center of the body, dividing you into two equal halves that should be approximately the same length; your hands reach your mid-thigh when your arms are down; your hands are the same size as your face; etc, etc. Use references to practice this stuff! It probably sounds tiring as hell, but when I'm drawing i'm constantly thinking things like "oh, collarbones are this far apart and attach to here" or "shoulders protrude slightly, let me draw a line for that" or "the jaw should be lower, since this character has their mouth open" etcetera enzovoort enzovoort. Ultimate price to pay in order to understand anatomy
Keep in mind to draw organic shapes for the body, if not in your sketch/guidelines then at least in your final render. Depending on your style strong, sharp lines can look really good!! but regardless dynamicism is important, and these styles are typically harder to execute because they're working with stiff shapes. If you're drawing a form of semirealism/stylised realism, where i consider my own art to lie, then these rounded, soft shapes for the body are important.
i personally take note of naturally forming curves on the body and exaggerate them for the sake of stylisation, like this for the arms
or like this for the legs
(i also do this for the torso in order to make the pose more dynamic, which is harder to see with the finished piece through his clothes, but easier to see in my original sketch. The waist is an easy way to make a pose look more dynamic, and therefore a good target for stylisation)
Regardless of your endgoal or dream style, studying accurate, realistic anatomy first is most important, then finding a way to simplify it into basic shapes that make sense to you (i am probably in the minority for how i draw these shapes. I see many artists online using either boxes, cylinders, ovals, you name it. It doesn't matter what your sketch looks like so long as you can make sense out of it and add to it in your lineart fase, so any easy to rotate shapes that make the body simpler to draw works!), and then apply your learned anatomy on top of these shapes to draw accurate, proportionate bodies.
