#arms ref

sure anon! first off, i will say that learning the anatomy comes from practice, so drawing from life/pictures of real actual arms is the best thing you can do, so i would recommend doing some figure drawing and looking up some anatomy tutorials if you want specifics. trust me on this, it’s what i did, it’s what many artists do, and it really REALLY helps.

with that lil lecture out of the way, here’s some lil tips once you’ve got a better feel for what arms look like (what you were probably after from the beginning, right? <3)

1. PROPORTIONS - ok first off it’s a good idea to keep in mind the body type/size before you begin so you know how large/small to make the body part itself, so you can allow yourself enough room on the page/etc. notice how in the drawings below, both characters are ‘muscular’, but because their sizes and builds are a bit different (bulky vs lean in my example below), their arm sizes differ drastically. BUT, they still have the same base proportion so they both look convincing and accurate, despite being cartoony! just keep in mind that elbows will hit around the belly button, and wrists will usually lie at/a bit below the hips. of course, you can exaggerate and tweak as you feel necessary since every body is different, but if you wanna keep GENERALLY realistic proportions that’s the basic rule i use.

2. GENERAL SHAPE - for an arm, i usually use an elongated teardrop/pear shape for the forearm (skinnier at the wrist of course), and then a more tubular shape for the other half of the arm that connects to the shoulder.

as for connecting the parts, i think it’s important to involve the hand in this. in other words, draw the hands and the shoulder first. this can help you a lot with placement and making the pose look neater and less robotic. after all, that’s usually how you move your arms, right? you usually think to move your hands where you want them first, and your arms just happen to be there to help make that happen and to make sure you don’t fall apart along the way, structurally speaking.

in order to accomplish this, i do have a trick that i found that saves quite a bit of time and frustration! you may have seen the ‘right angle’ trick for drawing arms before, so I’ll just go over that quickly (i don have a link to a good tutorial that explains it in detail atm but you could probably google it). tl;dr the process goes like this:

draw hand and shoulder markers first (and one for about where you want the elbow to be if you’d like)

draw a straight line between them

find the middle and draw a line at a right angle towards where you want the elbow

finish the triangle and use those diagonal lines as guides to draw the rest of the arm!

…and that’s the quick and dirty version. in reality a bit more foreshortening happens but that’s an easy way to get placement out of the way quickly so you can focus on those other details without having to worry about as much.

3. FOREARM SHAPE, ETC. - ok this last part is less concrete and more examples of how the foreshortening works but basically what you ALWAYS wanna keep in mind is how the forearm tapers and foreshortens, and usually more dramatically than your biceps. this helps keep your arms looking lively and interesting!

when drawing/sketching your arm shapes over the framework shapes youve drawn, pay attention to what the hand will need to do, where the forearm needs to be positioned to let that happen, and how the arm needs to be anchored to the body so it doesnt look like the character’s arm is flying off, or dislocated, or something (unless that’s what you’re going for)

if it helps, you can simplify further and think of arms as two tubes stuck together at the ends like many drawing tutorials tell you, but i find this unhelpful for anything other than positioning, because arms are typically curvier than cylinders allow, so if i find myself HAVING to use tubes, i’ll end up cutting corners anyway to get the curvier shape of the arm that i want. if you rely too heavily on tubes (like i used to), your arms will end up looking rather limp and lifeless from all the rigid lines that cylinders and tubes encourage you to draw along their length, even if you have dynamic foreshortening or whatever.