Don't buy one of these things

I normally try to keep this blog focused on ink, paper, and digital from time to time, but enough cartoonists use guache and watercolor often enough for this to be a good topic.

The contraption above is one of the pieces of equipment I've owned over the years where the relationship started as a dazzling, starry-eyed honeymoon, but ended in tears and bitterness. If you don't recognize it, it is a Masterson Sta-Wet Palette, and if you have ever worked with tube watercolor or guache and had your perfectly mixed color dry onto the palette, never to be quite the same again after re-hydration, you are probably already ordering one online after reading the name.

Don't enter your credit card quite yet.

First of all, let me say for the record that this product does exactly what it says it will. It will keep guache and watercolor and acrylic wet, even in the thinnest of layers, for days to weeks. It's a sealing plastic box that comes in various sizes. Inside is a sponge pad and a sheet of acrylic coated paper that you use as a disposable palette surface. You soak the sponge and get the paper wet, put the paper on the sponge, blot off the excess water and you put your paint on that. Close the box when you're done, come back to still wet paint. I'm not panning their product because it doesn't work.

I'm panning it because they charge $obscenity.bullshit for it. The small palette costs ten bucks and the large one costs 15. The flimsy paper, which paint will often leak through and stain the sponge, costs 4-7 bucks for refills of 30. The sponges, which have to be replaced occasionally due to paint leaking through the paper, and which are prone to mold (evidently they have no antimicrobial treatment like many kitchen sponges do) are 7-10 bucks for three. It all works but it's all shitty and cheap, and you can do better for less money, and NOT have a mono-tasker tool taking up space in your studio to boot.

All you need is:

• A piece of cheap-as-you-can-find tupperware like Gladware, or whatever off brand gladware is, or a deli takeout containter, or anything that seals up watertight that's large enough to fit your paint mixing area into. (either use a large one or a bunch of small ones.)
• A piece of cotton fiber paper. Most watercolor papers and decent stationary paper are cotton. If you're an artist you probably have scraps of this lying all around. Those scraps can be put to good use as stay-wet palettes, and then you can doodle on them when you dry them out.
• A sponge or sponges.
• Water.

Here's what you do:

Below you can see I had a soaked sponge in my plastic tub. I chose a small one so the photos would come out better. The sponge is really wet, I did not wring it out.
Next I took a piece of light weight watercolor paper and soaked it till it was floppy, then blotted it so it wasn't slick with water on the surface.
On top of the sponge it went.

Then I took some red guache, because I figured it would photograph well. Left on it's lonesome this guache dries despair-inducingly fast.


I spread it around to show that even the thinnest skim will stay moist and workable.

Then I sealed it,

And out it in my closet:

That was Thursday night. Tonight I opened it, and voila- as you can see it is quite moist, yet it has not bled or been dilluted. It is exactly as I left it:



With some scrap paper and your tupperware you can have your own stay-wet palettes for cheap, and you can use them for food when you're done. Why buy one?


By the way, I want to say an odd sort of thank you to all my readers. It's common on the internet for people to develop a strong sense of entitlement to content they like, to the extent that people will harass bloggers and movie makers and comic artists about not updating their totally free whatever that they earn no money from and don't even get ad revenue from. As you've all undoubtedly noticed my updates have been less frequent lately, which is because I've been trying to get past a stage in my book for First Second and it is just a freaking slog, and, well...no one's given me shit about it. Not one single person. No one's even asked me the uncomfortable to answer question of what's been wrong, why am I not updating as often. I've gotten some very kind comments about people's appreciation for the blog, and that's been it.

So, thank you all, for not being self-entitled pricks and being really kind to me. I'm really pleased to see that's the kind of classy audience I attract. I'll tell you all this, the best of the blog is not behind me. Two of my biggest tutorials are still in the pipeline, as well as several requested topics, and I am always finding new stuff. I'm having a hard time finding time lately, and when that's over, I'll post weekly or maybe even more once again.

Thank you all again.

-Matt

So I have totally loved Jillian Tamaki's stuff since I first found a copy of the single issue of Skim in Giant Robot in like, 2005 or something, and the finished book totally lived up to the hype. And Matt's already posted to her before, but since then she's put up one of her handouts on keeping a sketchbook from her class at Parsons. There's also one on idea generation, both of them good reads.

Also, Eddie Campbell has been posting about his upcoming Alec book on his blog, which have always been my favorite of his comics. But I've had this link saved for two years now, the first of seven posts about paper he uses, though the others are image specific, and at times things that materialized somewhere in his studio that seemed to fit the purpose.

Part 2,, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6,Part 7

Rivkah Print Lesson 01:

Comic Tools Reader , cartoonist extraordinaire, and fellow online tutorialist Rivkah is starting a series of comics teaching about print. I know my pre-press pretty well, and I pride myself on sending files to my publishers that get compliments (scanning is an upcoming multi-part Comic Tools lesson, in fact), but I don't really have much knowledge of print. Rivkah ran a publishing company and knows this stuff inside and out, so I'll be posting her lessons here as they come out. I've already learned stuff I didn't know just in this introductory comic. These will get pretty intense, so strap in.

(click to see full-size version)

This week: I love my new ink bottle

No, Comic Tools isn't dormant again, and the posting schedule isn't changing, I just had lots going on and took an unannounced 2 week vacation.

During the first week Ma Fille visited me from out of state and while she was here, she bought me this lovely sumi ink bottle at Kinokuniya. Here's a good shot of the label, which is entirely in Japanese:


I didn't want the bottle for the ink, which I transferred into a bottle of totally useless and crappy fountain pen ink I've had lying around since I lived in Maine, but rather for the bottle itself. As anybody who's inked much knows, bottles are a royal pain in the ass.

Most ink bottles come thin necked and wide-bodied like this:

The result is you can only comfortably get your nib or brush in so far before you start accidentally getting ink from the edge on the tool and your fingers if you're not careful, and it can be very hard to see where the ink level is to avoid over dipping the brush.

This is actually a much fatter bottle than the ink I currently use. I don't have any fresh bottles of what I use now lying around, but here's their dropper caps, which will show you just how much smaller the bottles for my current ink are. I can barely fit my nib holder through the top of the bottle.
I tried solving the problem by using old film strip canisters as ink containers. It sort of worked- as you can see you can really reach the nib in their easy with no mess on yourself because of how wide and shallow they are:

But unlike a good ink bottle they didn't seal watertight and any little jostle would fuse the lid to the canister with solid ink:
Even worse they, allowed evaporation over time. Here's about four bucks worth of ink reduced to an eighth of an inch veneer that will never come off or be fully reconstituted the way it was ever again:
Which is why I got so excited about this sumi ink bottle. First of all, it's huge, which means you can put a lot of ink in. It's got a stable, wide bottom. It's got a wide mouth, and it even has a nifty brush holder groove:
See?
That groove looks more for show than action but I tell you, it's very stable. It actually works. And the best part? It has a cap that seals air and water tight:
Never ever ever take the styrofoam out of a bottle like that by the way, or you'll take away it's ability to seal.

This is the bottle open. Two things to notice here: see how they made the neck ridge low and prominent so you could wipe the excess of the brush without gunking up the top edge? And notice how even the thin film of ink on top of that ridge, away from all the other ink, is WET? That's how little moisture this bottle lets out- no dry ink forms inside.
I am so psyched to have this thing.

Also, Timothy Dempsey asked me to link him here, so here I am, doing that. Here is his blog where he posts things that he did. Perhaps you might like to have a look.

People who aren't me show you how they watercolor!

I have to attend a funeral this weekend, so this entry is made up a couple real gems that I've been saving for a rainy day.

There are a few illustrators whose blogs I'd follow just for their so-good-I-sometimes-want-to-cut-my-drawing-hand-off-and-mail-it-to-them-as-tribute art, but I have a special place in my heart for the illustrators that take the time to talk about their experience making art. Jillian Tamaki doesn't write very much on her blog, but when she does she often has something useful to say about what it takes to be an illustrator.

Recently illustrator Quentin Blake got a website, and I heard about it on Jillian's blog. You all know Quentin's work, even if, like I didn't, you don't recognize his name immediately. His wiggly line is what you picture when you imagine a Roald Dahl book. He illustrated Matilda, B.F.G., Willy Wonka, and literally hundreds of other children's books.

And on Quentin's site is a very well-produced TEN MINUTE video of Quentin walking you through his well-honed working process from beginning to end. Look at this still image! This is what I wish Comic Tools COULD be, video-documenting masters using their tools and explaining their process:

It Looks like one of my process photos, right?!

Just for posting this link to alert us of it's existence we all owe Jillian a kidney. But she went further than that, and she talked about some of Quentin's work habits and what makes them as effective as they are, and how they apply to everyone who makes art professionally:

A few things I thought were really interesting about the video:

1. While inking the final image on the light-table (with what looks like an upside down nib?), he is NOT tracing. He is redrawing using the underlying image as a rough guide. Nathan Fox spoke a bit about this when he visited my class a few weeks ago, as he inked over a very loose drawing. I think it's really important you CONCENTRATE when you're drawing and stay very cognizant about what you are doing. You should never be on "autopilot" when you are drawing.

2. Please observe that he will often do a piece several times. I do this too. If something isn't working, sometimes the best thing to do is to throw it away and start over. This is particularly important if "freshness" and "simplicity" is a vital aspect of your work. In many ways, "simple" is the hardest thing to do because you have nowhere to hide.

3. I have noticed that many students do not like doing sketches. Quentin Blake's work looks so free and loose, but please note the amount of planning and roughs behind his pictures. The fact is that illustrators are collaborators and sketches are the way we communicate with designers, art directors, editors, or whoever we're working with. Part of your process development should be finding a way to fulfill this step while still keeping things interesting and fresh for the final stage.

And if that wasn't enough talent on video for you, here's Lucy Knisely doing a portrait of the cast of "The Nanny,", from beginning to end, in real time, explaining as she goes. It's around three hours of a great cartoonist doing her thing.

This week: Neck Muscles (and also hand resources)


It's not hard to see why the neck freaks so many people out. You look at it with the skin on and it's hard to see what's going on. Then you look at an anatomy diagram and you see what looks like dozens of tiny muscles in layers crisscrossing every which way, and you like eating the end of a shotgun.

The problem with looking at an anatomy text to see what's going on with the neck is that anatomy texts are there to each you anatomy, but they aren't prioritized for the artist, who more than likely just wants to know what muscle they're looking at, or trying to get those slanty lines in the neck right.

To actually draw a neck, any neck, you only need to know five muscles.

You heard me. Five. (Technically nine, but the first four are symmetrical, and if you can draw them on one side you can draw them on the other, just like if you can draw a left arm you can draw a right arm.)

If you're drawing more than five visible neck muscles, you're not drawing a human being. Seriously. ("But Matt, what about when I flex my neck and make all those muscles pop out? There's more than five of those!" No there actually aren't, but I'll explain later why it looks like there is.)

Five muscles. Here we go:

First, here's our plain skeleton. You'll note he has ears, and dots behind his ears (not on the jawbone, but in this drawing the jawbone covers up where they'd actually be.) Those are there to show where some of the muscles insert.
That tube in back of the muscles in the picture below is your windpipe. The cartilage of the trachea is larger and sticks out more in men than in women, although there are freakish examples like Ann Coulter. (No matter what I say, I cannot convince my mother that she actually is, and has always been, a biological woman.)

First two muscles: Sternohyoid comes up from the sternum and inserts in front of the trachea. Omohyoid comes from the bend 2/3rds out on the collar bone, attaches to the top rib, and then comes up and attaches in front of the trachea. These muscles are often mostly invisible, but they become prominent in very skinny people or in times of stress, anger, and fear.
3rd and 4th muscles: you all recognise trapezius, right? Trapezius covers up a looooooooooot of muscles underneath it, making them pretty much invisible and making this lesson much shorter. Also, see how there's not really anything in front of either side of it? That gap that's left is actually a prominent feature of the neck and shoulder area, and you can actually see it in all the photos below that accompany the illustrations. The muscle that has two forks coming up from the sternumm and collar bone and reaching up behind the ear is sternocleidomastoid (say that 3 times fast), the most prominent and most often mis-drawn muscle when people draw necks. A lot of folks draw a slanty line in the neck not knowing where it comes from or where it's going to.
Here's a good picture of the sternocleidomastoids from the side:

Here's what they all look like layered together.
In this fetching photo of my friend Hilary Florido, you can see all of these muscles clearly. Look closely and you can actually see where her omohyoid muscle bends into her top rib: Looks like Trixie from Speed Racer, doesn't she?

The fifth and last muscles you need to know to draw the neck is platysma, a thin muscle that makes up the front of your neck. It's the muscle that sticks out and makes all those strainy lines when you try to make your "neck muscles" pop out. What looks like a lot of muscles is actually just the fibers of this one muscle.

Try not to overuse this one superhero artists, okay? Pay attention and you'll notice that even if you're straining or yelling you don't flex this muscle very often at all. Only in certain kinds of grimaces and yells.
Here's someone flexing their platysma: Also for the superhero folk, note that platysma lays on either side of the trachia but not actually over it, and that it DOES NOT CIRCLE ALL THE WAY AROUND THE NECK, no matter what Rob Liefeld says. See how it only goes back so far? Yeah, keep that in mind, will you, superhero artists drawing necks?

You'd think that the neck muscles would stick out more in musclebound folk, but the opposite is actually the case: skinny people tend to have strand-like, very clear neck muscles whereas bulk tens to obscure them, as in this example: Looks like he's hiding a pineapple in there, doesn't he?

Okay, now, in the comments section a reader was begging me for a hand tutorial.

But there's no point in me doing one, because MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond already did a tutorial on hands that's better than the one I might have done by like a million billion times.

Tom has several other really intensive tutorials on his site, which can all be found at this link: http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/tag/tutorial/ I'm gonna make that link a part of this blog's sidebar, too, it's such a great resource.

This is the last of my entries on anatomy for cartoonists, and I leave you with some hands drawn by Farel Darymple, who draws some of my favorite hands of anybody, ever: (click on them to read the comic they're from)



Next week: I'll actually be away at a funeral, but I have something up my sleeve that I've been saving for a rainy day.

Matt Madden and Jessica Abel's pre-MOCCA comic making class

From Matt's blog:

"Starting the day after Memorial Day, Jessica and I are offering an intensive 2-week class at SVA, the goal of which is to learn how to make comics by writing, drawing, and printing a minicomic in time for the MoCCA Art Festival the weekend of June 6-7. We'll teach in the mornings and afternoons will alternate between open studio time and visits from a group of stellar guest cartoonists: David Mazzucchelli, Becky Cloonan, Tom Hart, Gary Panter, and Kim Deitch! Each will have a three hour session that will be a combination workshop/craft talk/crit.

The roster's filling up fast so sign up sooner rather than later. Info below, registration info here.

Summer Intensive Comics Workshop
CIC-3012-A
Mon.–Fri., May 26–June 5
(begins Tuesday, May 26)
Instructional Hours: Mon.—Fri., 10:00 am–5:00 pm
Studio Hours: Mon.–Fri., 5:00 pm–10:00 pm;
Sat., May 30, 9:00 am–10:00 pm
9 sessions; 6 CEUs; $950

Comics, graphic novels, manga: it seems everyone wants to be a cartoonist these days. Yet comics is a complex medium that requires a grasp of drawing and storytelling as well as an understanding of the various tools and technology to prepare artwork for print. A great way to learn how to make comics is to jump in and make a short, printed comic in only two weeks. This intensive comics workshop is geared toward those intrepid students ready to make the plunge. In daily sessions, we will guide students through the process of making a comic, by presenting activities and short assignments on the basics of cartooning and storytelling as well as advanced topics like inking and reproduction. In addition, several afternoons will feature lectures and critiques with visiting professional cartoonists. The workshop will also include participation in the annual art festival of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) held June 6–7; students will have the opportunity to sell and trade their comics at the premier gathering of independent comic artists and small publishers, literally the day after their comics are finished."

This week: Leg Muscles

If for this week's post about the legs I had done nothing but write "The femurs tilt in.", I'd have still improved the figure drawing of many people reading this immeasurably. Drawing the legs as two straight lines coming down from the torso has led to more frustration than just about anything except maybe feet and hands for just about every cartoonist. Drawing the legs straight when you stick-figure in your figure works for standing poses okay, assuming your figure is really cartoony or is wearing pants. But when you try to make that figure run, or get into an odd pose, things get pretty hairy and you start doing that re-draw-it-20-times-and-it-still-looks-funny thing. God help you if you tried drawing realistic muscles on a figure using straight legs as the basic shapes. It looks lumpy and wrong and you sink into confusion, frustration, drinking and suicide.

This week, I'll show you what's going on inside the legs, and what gives them that weird effect where they seem to form a straight line and yet aren't straight at all.
Let's start with the bones. Here's the pelvis we learned how to draw, remember? Now, pick where your knees are gonna go for your character. in a stock-straight standing position they'll be under those loops of bone at the bottom of the pelvis called the ischiums. The knees are pretty thick, so draw something thick where the end of the knee bone's gonna be. In this position the feet will come below those, so mark them off. These 3 points, the ischiums, the knees, and the feet, form the "straight" line of the leg, and are what make all the crazy curves the leg takes seem straight while being very obviously curved. The leg does NOT form a straight line from the hip joints, like you might think.
Now, to get the angle of the femur, draw your dots representing the greater trochanters, which is where your femur stops going slant-ways out from the joint and heads down. (draw them somewhere wider than the pelvis is wide and somewhere in the neighborhood of the ischiums in height.) Then draw a line from there to the INSIDE of the knee. Now you have your slant.
Now draw slightly bowed-out lines from the inside of the knee down to the foot dots. These are actually too curved, I'm exaggerating a bit for effect. (although I like to curve them when drawing a figure because it makes the shape of the lower leg easier to draw)
Now that's all you really need if you're just using these as guidelines for your figure drawing, but if you want to make bones, add the crested caps to the bend in the femurs (important for muscle attachment) and fill in the tibia at he knee joint. It should be about as wide as the corresponding part of the femur above.
Now fill in the fibulas under the overhang of the tibias, and fill out the femurs, and change your dots into heel bones. Now you have bones!
Now, the curves the bones take can seem pretty crazy, and it's hard to see how they come out to looking like a straight leg. When you draw a leg wrong with straight bones and then try to add muscles the muscles bulge out horribly. But when you draw muscles into the spaces of the crooked looking leg bones of a real skeleton they even everything out and make it appear straight and natural.

First, we start with the bones: (click on these to see them larger)
Deep in your legs, coming from the ischiums, is a sort of fan of muscles that attaches up the entire inside length of the femur. (There are a LOT more than this, but unless you're drawing very realistic groins you only need to know these as a packet of muscles to get the shape of the leg right.) It's amazing how much more leg-like the skeleton gets just adding these isn't it?
The next layer of muscles:

Front- Vastus lateralis on the outside and vastus medialis on the inside are the two quad muscles that make muscle men's legs seem creepy and lumpy above the knee. Nomuscles pass through the knee, only tendons of muscles, and so muscle bulges around the joint while the joint stays looking pretty much the same. They attach on the greater trochanter.

Back- Semi Tendinosus on the inside and Biceps femoris on the outside form the two muscles whose tendons shape the back of your knee and the back of the thigh. See how just with them there it looks like an almost complete knee joint? There you go. They originate from the ischiums, pass as tendon over the the back sides of the knee and then insert below the joint. These muscles act like the bicep muscle in your arm, bending the knee. It even has two parts just like the biceps. Hmm.
Next layer:

Front- Completing the quad muscles and the front of the thigh muscles are rectus femoris and satorius. They both come from the crest of the pelvis. Rectus femoris keeps the other two quad muscles visually separate and turns into the huge tendon that houses your patella (knee cap) and goes down over the front of the knee joint, basically defining the shape of the entire front of the knee joint. Satorius curves around the quad packet and curves along the inside of the knee, adding a little curve where you'd otherwise see bone. For clarity I colored it red as it passes down the side of the knee, but in fact it turns to tendon as it passes over the knee like everything else. The quads act a lot like the triceps muscle in your arm, straightening the leg out or pulling it up from the hip. Also, it has a huge tendon like the triceps and has 3 parts like the triceps. Hmm.

Back: Gluteus maximus, your famous butt muscle. It originates on the pelvis along the iliac crest of the spine, all the way back and down the tailbone, and inserts along the back of the femur. How far? Well, I made this drawing extra see through so you could see the bones underneath. The gluteus maximus should totally cover the ischiums as it slants down to meet the femur.
Now the lower legs:

Front- over your fibula and on the side you have a bunch of tendons that operate the foot,, toes and ankles. No need to go into them, just think of them as a packet of muscle giving shape to that part of the leg.

Back- The calf muscle is two lobes that come from both sides of the knee joint, adding shape to the back of the knee, then down where they swell out, the inside lobe being thicker and lower, and then tapering into a single, powerful tendon called Achilles tendon that attaches to your heel bone to draw the foot back, like if you were to stand on tip-toe.


Here's what the front and back muscles look like with all the muscles filled in:
Looks like a leg now, right? One more thing to note while drawing the leg using bones, the leg has a lot more mass in back of the femur than in front of it. Much like with the arm, the quads/triceps aren't quite as massy and thick as the biceps/back of the legs.

Well there you have it, the leg!

Next week: The final part of these anatomy lessons, where I address the neck and other odds and ends I haven't touched on yet.

This week: The forearm

The forearm is an awful thing for the cartoonist who never learned anatomy really well and one day decides they want to draw an arm realistically. It's awful because it looks kind of okay almost no matter how wrong you get it. Unlike the back or upper arms, which look anywhere from awkward to painfully deformed if you don't know what you're doing, you can literally draw everything n the exact opposite place of where it's supposed to be in the forearms and still have it come out looking okay enough you might never know it was wrong.

Which, um, is kind of what I used to do. More recently than I'd care to admit.

I used to often draw my arms this way:

By the end of this lesson you'll see why those are all totally wrong, if you can't tell already.

So, the reason I never learned the forearm for so long was ,it just looks fucking complicated, doesn't it? All these tiny muscles and tendons going this way and that, who can remember all those?

Well, you don't actually have to know them all, unless you're planning on drawing a character with no skin in a realistic style. All you really need to know are 2 muscles (which you draw as one most of the time) and that the skin sticks close to the Ulna, and that's it.

Here's the two muscles you need to know:

You don't need to know their names, although I'll tell you that 1 is your extensor carpi radialis longus, and 2 is your brachioradialis. They make up that bulge of flesh that slants across your arm and elbow and pretty much defines the from of your whole arm from over the elbow to the wrist.

Here they are in an actual body: Bear in mind they're thin and dehydrated in this plastinated body.

The other structure you need to know is the patch of facsia that holds the skin close to the ulna, which is the arm bone that doesn't rotate around and makes up the pointy part of your elbow and the sticky-out part of your wrist. It looks like this:

This line not only shows where the bone will always be close to the skin (feel on yourself, it runs all the way down), it represents the separation of the packets of muscles that yanks your hand and fingers up or open and the packet that hanks them down or closed.

Those packets can be thought of as just that- two packs that you slip into the arm to fill it out and pretty much forget about unless you're drawing detailed muscle men. Like this: (animated)
The only visible features, even in fairly buff people, is going to be the 3 things I'm teaching you here.

(A note for the Rob Liefeld types, though: the forearm may look complicated, but it does not have an infinite amount of randomly placed muscles arranged like a lumpy teardrop. You have four fingers and a thumb and there are 2 tendons to pull each open and shut, plus a few other tendons that do some other stuff, and that's it. If you can see more than 20 muscles something is seriously wrong with your character. Even on very strong and cut bodybuilders it should really be more like 10 or less visible. And that's assuming someone with NO body fat at all.)

So let's look at how these affect your arm's shape:

First of all, 1 and 2 form a bulge coming from above the elbow on the back of the arm and twisting down to the wrist near the thumb. The bulge gets pretty big and distinctive as the muscles get bent like a garden hose.


On the right you can see the line leading from the elbow to the non-thumb side of the wrist. That's number 3, indicating where the ulna stays close to the skin. If you raise your arm up and bend it you can see the bulge formed by 1 and 2 and the line formed by 3 even better. Note how on the left the line of 1 and 2 twisting over from the back of the arm to the thumb is a different line entirely from the line formed by 3 as it goes from the joint to the bump of the wrist.
On the left you can see how 1 and 2 form the slant of the wrinkle in your elbow. In fact, with the bicep that runs underneath them to connect with the ulna, they form the crook of your elbow. Feel your flexed elbow you you'll feel 1 and 2 on one side of the nook and your bicep on the other.

On the right, you can see how 1 and 2 twist as you turn your palm down.
Here you can see how 1 and 2 form the often confusing shape of the back of the elbow. The elbow, when the erm is extended, is defined by the bulge these form as they pass over, to the side, and then down from the elbow joint. The elbow joint itself is just a knob tha pokes out- all the complexity of the shadows of the elbow comes from these (and sometimes other) muscles running around it.

Note on the right how 3 forms a strong line when the arm is twisted, causing the flesh to twist and bulge over the close-to-the-skin bone.
My forearm is one of the only parts of me that's very well developed at all, so here are some photos I took to show you how these things look outside of a drawing:


If you understand these 3 defining features, you can draw very accurate and natural looking forearms on characters of any muscle mass or build. These features are visible on the very fat and very thin, and they look almost identical on all body types, on men and women. Draw them large to make someone seem brawny, make the bulges bulgier but the forms more obscured for a fat person, make all the shapes delicate and don't draw almost any internal lines for a wispy person.

Now go back to the top and look at those arms I used to draw again. Yeah, NOW you see it.

Next week: The legs

This week: Upper arms and Kirby dots

Drawing from life is an invaluable way to learn about the figure, and especially about variations between different people's bodies. But if you don't know the underlying anatomy, sometimes it can be pretty darn difficult to tell what's going on under there, even on very well-defined models.

Nowhere else have I had this problem so badly as in the arms, and the way those muscles are layered. Yes, like everyone else I could see that the bicep bulges in the middle of the arm and pulls on something below the elbow. Yeah, I could see the pectoral pulls sideways on the humerus somewhere, and the deltoid pulls up on it from somewhere on the shoulder. But the beginnings and ends of some of these muscles are hidden, and my observations of the model actually led me to some pretty severe misunderstandings about how these muscles were arranged, which made things difficult whenever I'd try to draw these muscles from my head.

For instance, take the bicep. I figured it looked kind of like the pistons on the terminator,

attaching somewhere on my humerus and pulling somewhere on my lower arm. It bulges out where the pectoral seems to go in, so I figured the pectoral went under it. But when I'd draw it it never looked right. I was all confused.

So let's clear all this upper arm muscle business up, and sort out what goes over what.

(click the image to see it large. I recommend opening it in a new window so you can look back and forth between it and the text.)

The dots you see in the drawing above indicate the origins and attachment points for the bicep and tricep muscles. I'll start with the bicep side:

The bicep originates at two points on the shoulder blade, and as you can see one of the heads curls up over the top of the humerus. The bicep attaches to your radius, which is the bone that rotates around your ulna and allows you to rotate your hand up and down. I've shown it twisted here to illustrate just that.

The bicep is covered at the top by two muscles, the pectoral and the deltoid. The pectoral muscle crosses over the bicep completely and attaches to the humerus. The front head of the deltoid that comes off the collarbone sweeps over the tippy-top of the bicep and attaches to the humerus about halfway down. Unlike the "Terminator" conception of the bicep I used to have, the bicep doesn't go straight up and down along the arm, but rather makes a diagonal curve from the shoulder, under the pectoral and down the the ulna on the outside of the arm.

The tricep, on the other hand, actually covers a muscle, the latissimus dorsi. (It actually covers more than that, but I'm sticking to the muscles I've taught you.) Latissimus inserts onto the humerus. Tricep originates on the humerus and from a point on the shoulder blade, indicated by the dots in the drawing. Tricep then inserts on the back of the ulna, the stationary bone of your forearm that forms the lower part of the elbow joint.

The back portion of deltoid covers the top of the triceps.

Oh, by the way, tool tip: To make nice, round dots in a comic, you can use a q-tip. Use the whole end, or for smaller dots,

cut off one end and clean up the edge.
This is actually how Jack Kirby made his famous "cosmic energy" Kirby dots.
Next week, the elbow and forearm.