Body Details: Techniques of Drawing Female Arms!

The advantage of drawing female arms over male arms is the lack of extreme muscular details. That is not to say you can ignore muscle structure completely, however.

You still need to know where the muscles are to understand the transformation of the arm in various different positions. On top of that, you will need to consider the skeletal structure underneath to make your drawing believable.

Hence, you will need to make you own judgment calls for balancing the amount of muscles on your character with the skeletal frame underneath.

Without further ado, we will start this lesson off with learning the major muscle groups in the arm. Then, we will look into how bits of the skeletal system will protrude from the skin.

1. The front muscle groups

On average, the female frame is about 10% smaller than the male frame. Your goal is to reduce the width and circumference of the female arms accordingly while fitting in the muscle groups.

Just like the male arms, your female arms will show: the deltoid; triceps long head; biceps; triceps outer head; triceps inner head; brachialis anticus; pronator teres; brachioradialis; flexor carpi radialis; palmaris longus; and the flexor carpi ulnaris.

Do not worry about emphasizing muscles groups. Instead, focus on how the muscles subtlety creates the entire shape of the arm from the shoulders all the way to the wrists.

Pay extra attention to the types of plane created around the elbow region. It is fairly flat in comparison to the dent created in the male arm from the emphasized biceps.

2. The back muscle groups

The back of the arms contains just as many muscles as there are in the front. At this view, you should start looking at bone structures as the muscles are not as apparent like the male arms.

From left to right, the muscles here are: the deltoid; triceps outer head; triceps long head; triceps tendon; brachioradialis; extensor carpi radialis; anconeus; extensor communis; extensor carpi ulnaris; flexor carpi ulnaris; and the extensor of the thumb.

Pay careful note to the forearm muscles and how it wraps around the forearm. Also, note the flatness of the triceps. Despite where the triceps end and where the triceps tendon is, that particular area is merged together in a relatively smooth plane.

Overall, drawing female arms is fairly straight forward if you concentrate on smoothing out the musculature.

3. The arm flow points

Here is where we can get to know the importance of learning the position of the muscles. If you have noticed, the muscles create a natural twisting flow from the top to the bottom just like the male arm in the previous lesson.

Specifically, from the shoulder to the elbow, the arm rotates 45 degrees inwards. From the elbows to the wrists, it rotates 45 degrees inwards again.

However, this is only half of what you need to know. As mentioned numerous times, you need to pay attention to bone structure as well.

For the female arm, where the collar bone connects to the main humerus bone, you will see a hard flat surface where the shoulder is where, normally, this will be covered by the deltoid muscle mass. You need to draw in light to show just how much the bone stick out.

As for the main surface of the arm that runs from the biceps to the wrists, it is a fairly flat surface with some suggestion of muscle mass rotation. Pay close attention to the forearms as it will help you the most with showcasing this twisting motion.

In any case, so long as you lightly hint at how the muscles rotate, your arm drawing becomes more believable. What’s more, with the flow points created from the muscle mass, it will help you with drawing female arms without any references as you use it to fill in missing muscle information.

4. The elbows

Any time you bend the arms, the elbows will stick out the furthest. When it does that, the forearm muscle groups will get compressed.

The type of arm topology you will get is a hump of muscles that cover the upper forearm. Around the lower section of the bent arm, you will also see that the hump will reveal the lower forearm bone (the ulna) as it travels from the elbow region to the wrists.

As the arm relaxes, the triceps tendon and the forearm muscles create a dent around the elbows. At the same time, do not forget about the muscle flow points. Always keep in mind that rotation from the top to the bottom.

Drawing female arms with all these little subtle changes will help you understand how muscles and bones work together.

With your digital brushes, continue to create shadows for indentations and shading while filling in light areas to show protrusions outwards. Use the smudge brushes to get better shading gradients.

Combined with what you know about the male arm in the previous lesson, you should be able to do many different variations of the arm as you balance between muscle and bone mass.

Good luck and have fun not only drawing female arms, but arms in general!

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