How do you draw chubby male anatomy?
HI HELLO sorry I took so long to respond to this; I’ve been out of state for a few days and didn’t have the brain power to reply until now! This is a tough question to answer, but I will do my best!!
Disclaimer: I am not an anatomy expert and am self taught when it comes to character drawing; there’s a lot of stuff I’m learning and can improve on, this is just what I do in my art
First and foremost, observation and references are an artists’ best friends! If I didn’t like talking about myself and my thought process so much, I’d leave this answer here lmao! the more you see how real bodies sit and move, the easier it’ll be to translate to simpler styles. As a fat person, I live in a handy dandy reference for how to draw fat people already lol; but if you aren’t as blessed as I am, there’s always references online. There’s this website that you need a password for that looks promising. I haven’t started using it yet but I follow the person who runs it on twitter and they’re p cool
As for my personal experience, here’s the three things I try to remember:
1) muscle vs fat! Muscle, for lack of a better word, isn’t as droopy, so it sits differently. I like boobs so I’ll use some that I’ve drawn as an example lol
They’re both round shapes (and they’re both fat), but the pecs on the dude on the left aren’t as firm, so they sag. I tried to do the same with their arms. For the most part, there isn’t a huge difference between amab and afab fat bodies, but it’s in a couple of places where fat and muscle sit on the body. When talking about drawing amab bodies specifically, fat doesn’t collect as much on their hips and butt (generally) and it doesn’t sit on the chest quite the same because of all the mammary nonsense underneath. probably
2) gravity, babey! This is the one that’s on my mind the most when I draw chubby people. You won’t see me using many perfect circles in my sketches because of gravity and the sort of liquid way fat settles.
Teardrop shapes are the way to go if you don’t want your chubby dude to look like a balloon animal sidjsnbdhx (or do that if you’re into it! Art is subjective! I’m not your dad!)
3) details; or more specifically, definition and the lack of it! The easiest way to make your character look chubby is to not give him abs, lol (this also works in real life 💀) another example of this would be hiding things like jawlines:
but ALSO if you wanna enhance the shapes you’re drawing, I like to add body hair, stretch marks, dimples or a well placed roll or two:
I hope this is useful! I’m not an expert and idk if I answered your question fully but if you have follow ups, my inbox is open ✌️
