Q&A for How to Draw Basic Human Figures

No. For females it should have more curves. For males it should be more squared. If you're doing fuller figures, it's the same thing for males and females, just fuller.

You might want to draw references of people of a variety of genders/ethnicities, because then you'll start to notice all the minor differences. Don't just go for people that you personally view as attractive, go for people you wouldn't normally consider drawing.

Start with an hourglass shape. From there, draw the base of the head, the arms and the legs and add details.

If you're drawing a male, try using slightly more rigid shapes, such as triangles and rectangles; if you're drawing a female, curvier shapes like ovals may work better.

You should draw them as large or as small as you would like to. Make sure that they are proportionate to the rest of the body.

Study photos of people. This will help you to find shapes on your own so that you understand figures suitable to your own style of drawing from real women and men. This will help you when creating your own characters. It also helps studying human anatomy or anatomy in general.

After puberty, hips become narrower and more curved, the chest size increases, again, curved, the pelvis area also gets rounder, the shoulders are already narrow.

Try taking a reference, or a person, and seeing how large or small the different parts of the body are. If that doesn’t work, then just try drawing it any way, then you can look at your mistakes and disproportions and redraw it to fix those. And if it still doesn’t look right after that, try it again. If you don't try you never fail and learn from that failure. But, if you don’t fail, you never learn how to become better.

You should pay attention to the material of the clothing. Is it tight? Is it see-through? Is it thick? The looser the material is, the more wrinkles you should draw. Either way, it is probably better to draw at least a few wrinkles to make it look more realistic.