I'm sure someone has asked already but there's no harm in asking this question again, I was wondering how do you plot out your drawings? Like your proportions and stuff? Because I have never been able to get proportions done very easily, the head is always too small for the shoulders, arms aren't the right length, torso is too long/short, ect ect. Do you have any advice to help with this? Thank you :) 💜
Hey! Okay, I'll start with saying that I'm not a qualified art teacher and everything I say are just things I've noticed over the years of drawing myself and thus can only share things that worked for me personally ✌️✨
I use head to measure the height of everything and make the width whatever I feel looks good 😅 The classic art anatomy teaches us that perfect human's height is 8 heads and legs take exactly half of it. I rarely stick to that model tbh, I prefer to draw in an even more stylized way, so I usually make legs a bit longer (making it 8.5 or even 9+ heads total) and head just a biiit bigger. Still, I started from classics and I believe it's much easier to learn it first, so I drew the 8 heads model for a better demonstration:
I've developed a little checklist of the most important proportions; usually if those conditions are met, the whole figure looks convincing enough to me.
Elbows and waist are relatively on the same line;
Open palm is the same length as the face (head minus hairline);
Arm length ends a bit higher than half of the hip;
Knees are located at the middle of legs length minus feet.
Okay, it looks really easy for a frontal view of a standing still figure, but what about more complicated poses? My suggestion is to measure the stick figure inside the body (not forgetting about the perspective distortion though). Take the "spine" and the least bent leg to check everything, then make sure both legs are the same length.
Note that these measurements don't need to be exact as if made with a ruler! We aren't doing blueprints here. If you don't trust your eye, then try training it, whenever you have a free minute: just draw a long line and try to divide it into equal parts. Or draw a long line with many short lines of the same length; kinda like a dashline, but with no gaps.
Also, I think it's important to remember that measurements and proportions are cool, useful and make your life a lot easier, but often you may need to bend them for the final drawing to look good. And obviously, people come in many shapes and heights, so I suggest taking these classical measurements as a cheatsheet to draw a good standard stick figure, which you can shape into whatever you want later. The 8 heads canon isn't realistic anyway, it originated in Ancient Egypt and Greece and was used for art needs specifically (mainly sculpture iirc). It represents an idealized view of a human figure already, so no harm in changing it a bit further I think!
Art doesn't really need to be anatomically correct, it just has to look like it is.
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