So, other glaring anatomy problems aside… how do muscles in the torso work?
Ah, a very good question. This isn’t really yaoi but I’ll do it anyway since it’s such a good question. to be frank I’m not really an expert on the muscles specifically since I tend to focus more on the overall shape than interior detail things (plus I like drawing skinny guys so the my treatment of muscle is usually really subtle) so I’ll just show how I organize the male torso:
I break it into groups. Green is the pectorals, which sit on top of the ribcage (in red), which transitions into the abdominals (blue) aaaand yellow is kinda just “everything else”. oh and the blue dots are there to point out a subcutaneous landmark (meaning “below the skin”, a place where the bone comes very close to the surface that is good to help navigate the body) of the Iliac crest on the pelvis, just because I love that landmark it’s so useful. I googled “male torso” and did the same to a sculpture I found so you can, like, see it in action or something
Ok stuff:
it’s IMPORTANT to realize that the pectorals are on top of the ribcage. see on the line drawing on the left, the area around the left armpit, see how everything layers. there’s an overlapping indicated where the ribcage swells forward from underneath the thickness of the pectoral. emphasizing this line really pushes the skinniness of the body, though it is still good to put it there on guys who work out more (it keeps a rounder, bigger, pec from looking like a boob)
next, keep in mind that the torso has thickness as well as width:
it varies from person to person but I find it generally ideal to have the bellybutton here:
Also something I see a LOT in yaoi manga is people outlining all these muscles with solid lines; no :( Well I guess it’s kind of unavoidable if you’ve only got black and white to work with, so if you need to put lines on the interior, make sure they 1) don’t outline things and instead are placeholders for where a shadow would be, and 2) aren’t drawn with the same line quality/thickness as the outlines of the body. the point is to make soft contours look like soft contours with a softer line, right?
Honestly I’d avoid putting any lines to indicate abs altogether unless I was drawing the Hulk or something, but I wanted to see if I could do it in an acceptable way so I drew this. it looks fine I think. if it’s in a black and white line drawing sure, but if I were doing full color and shading on it then I would never leave those lines in, and instead let my rendering tell the viewer that there are abs there. I attempted to do that to the submitted drawing (it’s low res so it didn’t work out as well as it could have, but you can get the idea)
I tried my best :|;;;
anyway since the torso and shoulders are connected I have this post as suggested reading
