Not sure if this is the right place to put this thread, but I thought it'd be cool if we could start a thread to share tips and help on drawing people. Not just because we're roleplayers and we'll often want to draw our characters, but also because the human form is a pretty freaking important thing in art.

Basically, post internet and real-life resources and tips from art class that have to do with drawing the human form. I've got a few here; feel free to add on. I'm by no means the best person at drawing at people - hell, I'm not that great at it at all, but that said, here's some things you might find helpful.

RESOURCES
Posemaniacs - Most useful thing on the internet ever, possibly. Basically, this is a site that has 3D, rotatable models of both genders in a variety of poses. It also has a 30-second drawing tool that flashes through quick poses at 30-second to 90-second intervals which is just pure awesome, but more on that later. It's free, and the only beef I have with this site is that it only has one body type for each gender, which isn't really accurate. But it's great for reference and keeps you from getting the dude-standing-in-the-middle-of-the-page blues.

Guide to Human Types 1
Guide to Human Types 2
Guide to Human Types 3

Okay, a wee bit politically incorrect at times. But these tutorials basically help you with different characteristics of ethnicities, so you don't end up just drawing white chicks.

The Sartorialist Kind of on a tangent, but now you're going to need to dress up your awesome Inuit woman who's doing some sort of weird leapy thing shot from below. Uh. Anyway, this site is basically a guy who walks around and takes pictures of people wearing cool clothes that are more interesting than your usual jeans and t-shirt combo. It can be a good place to get ideas for clothes your character might wear, and also it's not bad for looking at people with different ages and body types.

Photographic Height/Weight Chart This is also just really helpful for coming up with heights and weights for your characters. Basically, this is a site where average people (yes, average people - not celebrities who've been under the knife a million times) upload photos of themselves at their corresponding heights and weights. So let's say your character's five foot ten and one fifty pounds - you can find out what a normal guy who's that height and weight looks like; sometimes even more than one, which lets you account for difference in body type and composition. Or maybe you know that your girl character is short and stocky, and you're not entirely sure what she should weigh.

Human Body 101 General guide that has some helpful proportion tips and stuff - really, any tutorial from this woman's dA account is pretty helpful. It's a little cartoonish, but it does give you some really good common-sense tips. Keep in mind that the 8 heads tall for men/7.5 heads tall for women thing is really just a guideline. I've drawn adult people who were only 6.5 heads high.

Flexibility 101 This is especially useful if your subject is a ninja.

Colr.org Creates palettes out of photos and puts them into hexadecimal values. Useful if you're colouring on a computer, or if you don't quite know what colour to make someone's skin tone (please, for the love of god, don't use straight peach). You can load your own image of a photo of someone who's similar to your character or in the same lighting situation, etc., and it'll come up with all the colours in that image for your perusal. Also useful for web design, but anyway.

Art Tutorials Random tips and tricks, mostly for colouring in Photoshop.

Sporting Heroes Awesome site with quadrillions of sports photos. Good for getting references of muscular people, or people doing really action-y things.

SWORDFIGHT REFERENCE PHOTOS 'Nuff said.

Ashtanga Yoga poses So maybe you want to draw an insanely flexible person. Here you go.

LIFE DRAWING - Don't just draw from photos. Those are already compressed down from 3D to 2D, and that takes half the work out of drawing something. It's a lot harder to draw from life, but in the long run it'll make you a better artist. Lots of places offer drop-in life drawing classes for about $10 to $15 bucks, but if you can't find a place to go or can't stand the nudity, ask your friends and family to sit around for you. They don't have to stay in the poses for very long - actually, in some cases, the shorter, the better.Go to Starbucks and draw people as they order their drinks and come in (I do this a lot. It's not as creepy as it sounds). I used to keep a small pocket notebook in my wallet so I could draw people on the bus when I went to school. You are probably surrounded by people in your day to day life. Draw them.

Tips for life drawing from art class:
1. Bring lots of paper. You will be wasting a lot of it; there's no other way to put it. You aren't going to get everything perfect from the get-go.

2. Stay relaxed. Don't tense up. Try not to do everything in one line - it doesn't have to be perfect. You can go over lines several times before you finally get the outline of a shape. Keep your hand loose and your pencil at an acute angle to the page (as opposed to straight down, as if you were writing with it). You want to use the side of your pencil as much as you can. Pastels, charcoal, and conte are also pretty good for life drawing.

3. Warm up. 30-second to 90-second poses are probably the best thing you can do for your drawing skills. Try to depict the whole body - even the feet and hands - and do not try to make it perfect. The reason why these are so good is because you don't have time to do anything but look at the model, meaning that you can't just go and make shit up that isn't there. Basically, your eyes should be directly connected to your hand. Keep your brain out of it.

4. As an extension of number 3 - LOOK AT THE MODEL. NOT AT THE PAGE. Whenever you look at the page, you're making stuff up.

5. Zoom in. Get as much of the figure as you can, but don't make them two inches tall splat in the middle of a giant sheet of paper. If there are interesting folds in the flesh of the back, for instance, or the way the arm's bending looks really cool, zoom into that.

6. Work with the negative space. You can try drawing around your model - use the side of a stick of charcoal or graphite, for instance, to shade in everything around the person.

7. Gestural drawings are your friends. Basically these are like bendy stick figures - draw the spine, the main sphere/oval/cube of the head, the trapezoidal-squished-oval of the torso, the hips, and the flat part of the joints, hands, and feet. These basically let you depict a pose that's happening really quickly and get all the information you need down into one simple line.

8. Figure out where the person's putting all their weight. You can draw arrows to help indicate motion and weight so that you don't forget. Also, for weird lighting situations, where the light's coming in from the side - sometimes it helps to draw a little sun where the light source is or little lines coming out of it to help figure out what's dark and in the light.

9. Try not to outline things. Build up shapes through blocks of shading and tone, rather than just drawing a contour around them. Try to think of a person as a sum of a bunch of 3-D shapes, rather than a 2-D outline. Some people do this by sketching a bunch of spheres, cones, and cubes, and then kind of working them down (so, for example, a nose is a triangular prism with two spheres jammed against it).

10. Breasts don't stick out at twelve o' clock all the time, unless they're plastic. They don't look like half-grapefruits with nails stuck in them. They can be big, small, tubular, oval, almost flat, round, whatever. This goes for nipples too. Gravity is going to affect them, so if your girl's leaning, then one boob is going to be lower and look bigger than the other; if she's lying down, they sort of creep up towards your armpits. Also? Skinny girls rarely have triple D cups. Sorry, this is a huge pet peeve of mine.

11. Eyeballs are called eye balls for a reason. They're spheres, with two flaps of flesh covering them. Your eyelids cast shadows on this ball, and the edge of the eye white, towards the corners of the eyes, is going to be darker where the sphere recedes backwards into space. Eyelashes are actual, individual hairs that anchor below the edge of the eyelid, not on it. Tear ducts are three-dimensional. Also, just for kicks, stare at someone's eyebrows for a while before you draw them. It's really, really weird.

12. Hair casts shadows on the face and neck. It doesn't lie flat in one sheet - it can curve around, in front, and move behind. Also, ponytails will kind of slightly pull at the skin of the face and make the crown of the head look a little more raised, when you're looking at someone wearing one head-on.


That's it for now, folks?
Go ahead and add your own stuff. And, uh, I'm sorry if this isn't the right forum for this. Or if this is totally and completely useless. But, uh, here it is!