Muscle Memory: Mastery in Character Design Through Anatomy
Anatomy is a powerful tool thats gives artists fluent in its features the ability to reference and draw figures from imagination. Here are 4 easy ways to channel a solid sense of anatomy into better character design.
1. Try constructing from the outside in
Design your characters with directed intent on its silhouette and form — then, for functional anatomy, work your way inwards. This offers more control than simply building mass in layers outwards from an approximate skeletal figure. Silhouette design accounts for the majority of what our eyes register in a design at a glance. Limiting yourself to a pre-decided form can deliver really interesting results in anatomy and skeletal structure once you start exploring beneath the constraint mass.
2. Less is more for larger figures
Leaning further into the above theory, designing anatomy within the constraint of simpler forms results in more stylistic and dynamic anatomy designs. In reality, large figures are less bulgy than we think, even if a character is designed to have less than 10% body fat. If you think about it, it’s not so much enlarging the character’s skeletal frame, but rather packing as much as you can onto a smaller frame that makes a character really stand out and appear dense and heavy.
Capcom Japan discovered this in the early ‘90s with a few seminal character designs, creating some of the most fluid and dynamic anatomy in large characters to date.
3. Skip the S-curves!
The overuse of S-curve lines to build up a figure is a cardinal sin of anatomy design. This error is often caused by artists over-analysing their subject matter, resulting in figures floaty in mass, with large gaps at joints and without geometric structure.
Here’s a masterful example of how legendary artist Bruce Timm instead uses tightly knitted convex shapes to logically construct stylised figures. At a glance, his works look deceptively like they are built up with S-curves. However, look closely at his line art: it’s ridden with convex directions.
4. Anatomy layout has a rhythmic flow
For artists, lots of memorising goes into learning anatomy, and this can be overwhelming. Many of us spend hours poring over anatomy charts very similar to what doctors use. While this is useful for remembering the different parts of a body’s musculature, the question is can we effectively apply this knowledge to produce more natural-looking figures? Often this knowledge blinkers us, shifting our focus to over-rendering muscles and ignoring other components that make a figure drawing feel natural.
To properly draw a great-looking figure without need of too many tearful study sessions, you should aim to display all of the following:
- Skin tension
- Sinew
- Fat
- Musculature
- Pose
Is there a formula that could encompass all the above, applying anatomy as an aesthetic bonus without it being overly distracting and preventing quick execution? Let’s look at the volumes on the body surface and start drawing lines along the curvatures.
Observing the lines, a corkscrew pattern reveals itself on the skin’s surface and seems to emanate from the back, wrapping around to the front-centre of the body. I like to call this pattern the anatomic rhythmic flow.
Using anatomic rhythmic flow as a drawing template, combined with a working knowledge of muscle groups, you’ll have a much easier time laying out the muscles in their superficial wrapping order on the human figure. It works because the pathway automatically plots muscle positions in as you draw, even for characters in challenging poses. This is a formula that can be used on any body type and size, as the anatomic rhythmic flow moves in a standard direction, starting from the back of the spine and wrapping around to the front of the body.
Another common use of the anatomic rhythmic flow is applying it to armour designs. Above are some instances of the technique in a few existing IPs.
Conclusion
Applying anatomy well in character designs is hard but not impossible. Don’t let the sheer volume of information overwhelm you — mastery can take anything from months to years, and a lot of it depends on your analytical skills. In the end, it’s definitely worth the effort and will greatly improve your workflow as an artist! I hope that you’ve enjoyed and benefited from this article! If you’d like to read more from me, here are 2 other posts I’ve written on the subject of artist development!
For further reading on anatomy and character design, here are some other useful links!
