Less Tits n' Ass, More Kickin' Ass

Avengers Vs. X-Men, the broken spine and no pelvis edition.

At first glance of the thumbnail of this cover, I thought it was drawn by Greg Land, because he is an artist commonly known for making women’s hips and asses vanish. I know this isn’t the case, as this cover was drawn by Mike Deodato, so I have to wonder how this happened. 

I decided to deal with each character independently. The more obvious issue of spine breakage will be addressed first. The problems here aren’t just about the spine being broken sideways for the sake of dynamism and maybe showing some butt: as you can see from that second picture, the action of the body and the secondary action of the hair and cape are contradictory. This is a somewhat classic “jumping away from the thing I’m shooting at” and yet the hair and cape are being dragged towards the target of the shooting. The shoulders are way too wide, probably due to a bit of confusion of where everything should be with the guns hiding part of the body. As for the spine, yes, it can bend sideways, but as a curve, and not as much as it is here. The rib cage is vertical and the pelvis is horizontal, with a definite snap in the middle. A real person couldn’t bend that far, even if lying down on the floor sideways and pushing their torso up with their arms. In any case, there’s a whole issue of flesh folds that’s completely absent from this picture, too. Even a skin and bones woman will have flesh pinching because the skin will overlap itself in you press the hips towards the rib cage. The absence of this fold is not an indication of thinness, it is a mistake in drawing. Heck, it’s the kind of detail that often gets photoshopped off of models in fashion magazines.

So then I address the way the form should have been. I placed my line of action, the line of the shoulders and contraposto line of the hips, keeping in mind the direction of the action. Add rib cage and pelvis as basic shapes. With that in, I solidify my skeleton. I chose to have a leg extended and a leg bent here, it makes for a more dynamic silhouette and emphasizes the sideways movement. Could I have kept the bent legs? Sure, but not the way they were drawn, unless I changed the entire upper body. Another way this could have worked is switch which leg is bent and have the other extended, with the body turning away from the target of gunfire.

In fleshing out the body, I thoughts of the stretch and pinch, and I also changed the direction of the secondary action of the hair and cape.  

Spider-Man seemed odd to me, especially that weird big bulge below his thigh, so I had to go in and figure out where his pelvis was actually plotted. I realized in reworking the image that his thigh is actually way too long: if you continued the arc of rotation towards the shoulder, it would come up to his mouth when it should line up below his shoulder. I shortened it, and fixed the exaggerated butt and thigh muscle bulge and valley, as these muscles are actually relaxed, not flexed in this position. (Poor Spidey.)

Note, though, that the original Spidey DOES have that flesh pinch at the waist, the one that wasn’t drawn on the woman (sorry, I don’t read this comic, I don’t know who she is), because his spine, while shown as pretty flexible, actually follows a realistic curve, and his ribs and hips work. Hm.

And now for Hope Summers: a new pelvis, mostly. A little bit of a fix of the ribcage and breast placement, but that’s nitpicking, whereas the absent hips and straight line down from the ribs to the knee is really weird. It’s a fairly straightforward fix.  

Which brings me to this bit about behinds, and the seeming reluctance of artists to draw real bums. I keep seeing those illustrations in comics and in fantasy art, those weird crouching poses that have arched backs and butts sticking up and out, which make me think of fart jokes far more than I should. I also shake my head a lot at Greg Land-ish lack of butts and hips to go with them, and also Barbie-like legs that attach to a thong and show no butt, just a thigh that starts at the waist. To address this, have a little tutorial. 

eschergirls:

lesstitsnass:

Supergirl #1, huh?

[correction snipped]

That’s Ian Churchill… and unfortunately he has much experience drawing women (whether he draws them well however, is another question).  Also, that’s actually issue #0 not #1.  I was a HUGE HUGE HUGE Supergirl fan at the time and so psyched that they had brought Kara back to the DCU, and Ian Churchill (and the terrible writing by Loeb and Kelly) just ruined the entire thing for me.  If you look at my Supergirl comic reviews at the time you can read all about it. 

Churchill drew her REALLY thin (especially her arms and calves/ankles), and within the comic book, she was bra-less and underwear-less and her costume was vacuum sealed onto her breasts.  It was really annoying.  I avoid posting just every singe picture Churchill ever did of that series simply because a lot of the times the complaint would just be “Supergirl’s too thin and has muscles so therefore her bones must be pipe cleaners”.  He also can only draw one female face.

Ian Churchill’s art on Supergirl really is what started my realization about the ways artists were drawing women in comic books, and who they were drawing them for, that Supergirl, who, to me, is the heroic, female avatar representation of the Superman S symbol and all it represents, her reboot was not for me.  Having Turner and Churchill on the art and how they drew her made it pretty clear, it was meant for something else, and she wasn’t there to be heroic (and during the Turner/Loeb/Churchill/Kelly run, she wasn’t) she was there to be somebody’s blonde 16 year old fantasy girl. 

In many ways, you can thank Ian Churchill, more than any other artist (even Rob Liefeld) for starting the thought process which eventually led to me creating this blog. xD

 Anyway, sorry for the tangent, I just wanted to fill you in on the artist that you were re-drawing.  I agree with you that there’s nothing really “wrong” to redraw, but what you did made me smile huge because it’s Supergirl and I think you made her look awesome, so I wanted to reblog it and tell you. :)

Holy crap, and there I was thinking this was just a bad drawing due to inexperience… Well, I was partly right: it’s due to inexperience at drawing real women. 

And thanks Ami! I’m glad you like my (messy) redraw!

Part of me thought I should be looking up WHO drew the image before I decided whether this was a T&A case or not, but then I thought knowing who did the art (and whether they already have a history of liberally bending the rules of anatomy in order to cater to horny straight males) might make me biased against them. That, or it was so late in the evening and I was tired. Or something.

Knowing now what Churchill’s been up to (and recognising the art you’ve linked as things I’ve been shocked by before, eek, ow, and on my list of possible corrections), I’m definitely seeing the pattern here. This illustration above is weak, as I’d stated before, because of its poor construction, and because of the bad habits Churchill’s taken, like putting the belt on Supergirl pretty much at the pubic bone, if not lower, while the hem of the skirt barely covers the buttocks; like making the torso way too skinny and super long; like making the arms and legs unrealistically thin, likely because he has learned drawing from looking at other comics rather than drawing from life. It’s a pattern, it’s bad habits he would need to break. 

When I see patterns like that, it makes me wonder if anyone mentions these things (or make similar comments) to artists. I’m of the opinion that unless you are told there’s a problem., chances are you won’t know about it, or that you have to fix it. If no one’s edited Churchill’s work or told him, “Put some flesh on that woman, man, she’s too skinny to look good”, or even mentioned something like, “Are you sure this is right?”, how can he possibly change the way he works? If he’s getting hired to draw books, maybe he doesn’t see that he can up his game and how he can become better. Maybe doing the same old thing keeps him employed, and that’s enough for him. 

Too bad it’s not enough for us. 

Supergirl #1, huh?

So I received this question, and I went to look up the picture. And for the first time, I’m actually conflicted. 

And by conflicted, I mean that I couldn’t decide whether I should or shouldn’t be editing this drawing. Because as odd as it seems anatomically, it’s not due to the desire of the artist to show as much T&A as possible. In this case… it’s just a weak drawing, done by someone who’s possibly not used to drawing women. 

If I just focus on the line quality, the muscular definition is way too detailed on Supergirl. I can understand that she’s Super Strong and all that, but she’s still a teenager (especially in the reboot) and women naturally have more body fat between muscle and skin, so unless Supergirl has been on a major fat burning diet in order to compete in a body building competition, she shouldn’t be showing every single bump in the abs and arms and legs. 

The movement should show that she’s flying up and tilting back as she’s doing it. That’s what her body’s telling me; however, her hair, skirt and cape are going all over the place, no direction to their action, which makes the actual action really hard to determine. And yes, anatomy-wise, there are things wrong, like the ribs being way too far apart from the pelvis. Also it’s pretty skewed, which you can see when you flip the image like a mirror. But again… I can’t see this drawing as being a candidate for this blog. 

However… Well, I’d worked on it, so I decided to just keep going. 

One of the problems is detailed in the caption here: 

I suspect, however, that the artist wasn’t thinking of a sideways bend as much as a backwards bend, like she flew up and is about to curve back and maybe do a flip. That made me go and fix the perspective to what it should have been, with the horizon line higher above her (as opposed to the one on the city below, but this cover is a composite rather than an ensemble). So what makes the previous perspective wrong? Simply that parallel lines, when seen in perspective, are farther apart from each other when they’re close, and closer together when they’re far. The points on the side of her body that’s closest to the viewer should be further apart than the ones on the opposite side: shoulder to hip to knee to ankle. 

So I now get this: 

Please note that the pose is different a bit, because trying to redraw it on top of the existing pose meant that I was following the old drawing as a template and making the same mistakes. Plus it gave me a really stiff drawing. Anyways, please forgive how messy this is, I realized I needed it because it shows the perspective lines. 

With the sketch tightened, we get this: 

Note as well the placement of the cape and hair. I’m following the flow of the action by having the cape drag behind her, her hair pulled back a bit like the cape; Superman in the BG has a similarly weirdly posed cape, simply for the pinup aspect of the piece rather than following a narrative flow. Basically, capes don’t move that way.

So there you go, eldritch48, my thoughts on Supergirl #1. 

Catwoman, why does your butt stick out like that? 

Oh HAI tumblr! I apologize for my prolonged absence from this part of the interwebz, which was mostly due to being in pre-convention mode (art show and commissions and art for the con itself and being GOH and all that) and job finding (woohoo! Back to storyboards in August!), which all gets in the way of sitting down and finding + correcting bad T&A comic book art. I’ve received some questions and submissions from you guys, and I will get to them, thanks a lot for sending them my way!

Okay, back to … well, this thing.

It was tweeted to me by Lar de Souza who found it from Faith Erin Hicks. This is an extremely clear example of hypersexualised art, complete with requisite both breasts and both butt cheeks be not only visible, but highlighted, the spine twisted in such a way to accomplish the previous demonstration, and unfortunately no thought whatsoever in the logic of the pose as to how possible it is to perform. 

That said, overhead views are extremely difficult to draw because we are not used to seeing people from above. They take a lot of work to figure out if you don’t have a model (and even if you do, but it is easier). I didn’t have a model and there are things I know are wrong in what I did, but I don’t know how to fix them since I lack reference. 

Anyways… The original drawing, aside from being a big squashed bubble of butt and boobs, also has the head really off center, and the side of the face squished in while the right shoulder is elongated out, which exaggerates that off-center state even more. Artists, flip your drawings over once in a while when you draw. Things that seem okay in one direction may be skewed, so by flipping the drawing (either using “flip horizontally” if you’re drawing digitally or turning your page over and light-boxing your drawing) will allow you to notice those skewed and crooked things, which you can fix in flipped mode and turn back to the original way to continue drawing. 

The original’s pose is also all squished up, and there’s foreshortening on the arms but not on the hips. I tried to place the structure underneath, but it didn’t fit. So I did a sideways pose to try and figure out where everything was. That box at the top is shorthand for a camera. I’ve put some notes on the drawing, as you can see. 

So what should that pose be? If she’s jumping, there should be some extension. If there’s extension, there should be some contraction. And for interest in the pose, a twist at the waist is not a bad thing (it is if it’s exaggerated, but by now you know what that means and looks like). Contra posto means counter position, a thing the body naturally does to keep its balance. One hip rises, the corresponding shoulder lowers to compensate so you don’t fall over. 

Translating this into an overhead shot means figuring out first the general body direction, then where the shoulder to hip relationship is. And that’s where the problem often lies, in drawing poses like this: how do I show a narrow waist if my character’s ribs and hips hide it? So we try to smudge things, shift things, move pieces of the body in order to show that small waist because otherwise she’s going to look fat, no? Yes, it’s hard. It’s hard to overlap shapes and show volume. I fought with this drawing and redid the lower half of the body about five or six times before I finally dropped the stylus and declared it good enough for this purpose. I wished several times I had a model. Yet… I managed to place the head right, include the shoulder blade on the left arm, take in account that the left breast is pushed forward while the right one is pulled back with the right shoulder (and thus is less round, more stretched sideways); I made the left butt cheek rounder because it is flexing to pull the leg back and is pushed up by the back of the thigh muscles, and the right butt cheek is flatter because the muscle is relaxed since the leg is forward. These are all things to think about when you’re drawing a character, even a simplistic, stylised or cartoony one. You want the curves on the flexing muscles, and the straight lines on the relaxed, extended muscles.

Anyways, enough from me for now. I still have a pile of commissions to finish; I’ll get to some of the questions and submissions later this afternoon or tonight. 

Stunner vs. Spider-Man. Taken originally from Eschergirls.

Okay, I know this is an old one. I don’t know where the skills of the artist are currently, but the picture was still in need of a redline and I decided it was worth doing. 

We all know about the fact that her organs are missing and her spine is like a snake’s, but the issue I’m mostly going to focus on is the overuse of the arched back that contradicts the intended action in this picture. It’s something I see happening a lot, and I redlined this in the Masochist redraw. It’s pretty much the same issue. 

The current line of action, on top of contradicting the secondary action of the arm holding Spider-Man up, is actually snapped at the pelvis in order to “enhance” the butt. That’s not how that works, artists. Nice round butts are round even when the leg’s back. Don’t be afraid to pose the legs back and draw that butt!

In this case, I changed the line of action to HELP the secondary action. And in order to convey that strength, she needs to have her legs well planted on the ground, and her body’s turned sideways to add to that stability. The contraposto of the hips to the shoulders works better now, and her arms actually convey strength as one holds up Spidey and the other is ready to punch. And, yeah, I roughly fixed Spider-Man’s proportions, because he was teeny-weenie, his arms were way too short and his neck way too long; I didn’t spend too much time on him as he gets chicken-scratchy towards the legs. 

But yeah, it all starts with the line of action, which will dictate a solid pose. Think it through, act it out, and THEN draw it.