Voided Mind

step 1: consider the type of muscular you want to portray!

(source: pinterest photos i pulled outta my cheeks)

not every body type you will see will have a similar composition when it comes to muscles and fat distribution! how they work out and carry themselves will determine better which one you want to portray and what kind of lifestyle they carry on narrative wise! some put on muscles to excel at a sports activity, some do it for the sheer aesthetics and to gain confidence, some are literally just built larger from the fields they take on because it's labor intensive and requires lots of mass!

this will be a huge determination to what you wanna pick, and if you're just doing it because it's for the rule of cool, that's also just as good! don't ever be afraid to use real life models, other drawings or renders that fit the vision that you have, because that's going to be important for...

step 2: break down their muscular components

(source images: [link]. Pinterest again. Cursed reverse image won't send the OG post.)

shapes, shapes, shapes. the fundamentals for an artist to understand WHY the silhouette looks good! but what if we don't know where it goes??? that's why some self-taught artists like to fragmentize those sections in bite sized portions to read the shape easier then stylize it later on!

since we want to focus on larger pals, here's how it looks when you break em down!

some beginners might want to start with way less shapes as they get used to it, but notice how soft and bulbous those shapes are! large, bulkier sizes always tend to get rounder to express more fat and weight to their frames. fat, in a way, works like a giant, heavy cloth and follows gravity, and its goal is to run down the body as far as it can get, but sometimes the shape of one's body can easily influence that! notice how their hip dips bulges out a bit of their side stomachs (obliques for you anatomy nerds). the less build than it would have, the more flabbier and layered it can get (potentially!)

(source: pinterest. again.)

people will leaner muscles will tend to be a bit more squarish than round, all depending on how lean they get. you'll also notice that on every spot the navel always sits on the second bottom row of the abs like a neat little cross.

with digital art, you have a lot of advantage by tracing over your reference photo to get a good feel on how you want to build your strokes. confidence is key, and the more you adjust and understand how these parts can be broken down, the faster you'll learn to get off those training wheels, which leads to...

step 3: freehand your reference!

yup! it's time to see if you can mimic what you traced and what you hand/eye coordination learned from this. if it doesn't look 100% like the one you did the first try, let me get you in on a secret little advice a lot of people don't tell ya enough;

that's okay. it's not supposed to be look look perfect. it just needs to look believable enough for people to get it, and for you to enjoy! it's your style, after all.

and for the TL;DR; fellers: reference image, trace then absorb patterns. then do it again without the training wheels. don't stress over perfection, you'll get better at it the more you do it.