hey everyone cynics here and I'm back with another Anatomy quick tips video I decided to go with my gut on this one and make it all about the abdominals you know those muscles that live deep inside your stomach and most of us will never see nonetheless I think a good mastery of ABS can go a long way in making your figures more appealing but before you can go all tsukimi chant on us we're going to have to make sure we understand the basic structure and a small disclaimer this series is meant to give you a quick and dirty reference for drawing from imagination so I will be glossing over a lot of the scientific names and more complex aspects of the anatomical structure anyway here we go so in order to show the structure of the abdomen I'm just going to make a couple quick basic poses one from the front and one from 3/4 luckily unlike most episodes of anatomy quicktips we don't have to worry about seeing things from every possible angle the most important guideline we're going to need is just a centerline and once that's been established we can get to work it's good to start any abdominal drawing by putting in the belly button it is the anchor points we're going to structure everything around and it will go directly between the pelvic structure and the rib structure as a side note the gap between these structures shouldn't be supergiant a lot of people coming from an anime background tend to elongate space between the ribs and the pelvis pretty wildly I certainly know I used to the ABS themselves are actually super straightforward you can roughly just put them in a rectangular strip that hangs from the chest all the way down around the gut the muscles can be seen most prominently around the middle of the rectangle which makes logical sense so that 4-pack of muscles starting right above the belly button are going to be the first ones to capture any definition that just means you're most likely to see them which of course means you should probably learn these ones if nothing else there are then further divisions above these which are mainly visible on bulkier males on females and leaner figures the of those upper abs will usually be ignored by the more prominent skeletal structure of things on the other ends the lower abs are usually a bit more subtle as well although definitely visible on skinny people because there are no pesky bones to get in the way as always the lines you use the shell all these things should be strongly determined by the angle and lighting at which you're viewing things remember it's that whole drawing like a painter thing that I like to mention always do lines with a consciousness for lighting and abs are potentially the greatest argument for this next I just want to touch on the profile view of the abdomen and I wrote a little note just to make it sink in but always worry about the skeletal structure first and then all the muscle stuff it will always take priority in the lines you choose to show and not show anyway when you're doing the profile view it's incredibly important to make sure that you let the abdomen actually take up some space it needs to extend forward and down under those upper hip bones always try to visualize it looping around into the but with a nice swooping line it should form that wonderfully organic beam shape that all of us artists love so much and I don't know why but I'm going to keep emphasizing the interaction between skeletal forms and muscle forms when drawing I drew a quick example of a very slender form from a 3/4 view and you may notice that the line flows from the ribcage right into the lower abs in a fairly graceful way it's great to know all of your Anatomy lessons but don't forget that everything gets wrapped up in skin and presented in a very flowing and organic way there's also another reminder here that the middle abs are important I guess I kind of already went over that um oh well just one more little tangent here on structure I'm going to make super cartoony looking body shapes to emphasize potential body differences so females tend to have a much more narrow ribcage and wider hips while males can represent the other extreme this can definitely affect the look of different muscles and this is also a great time to go over some of the other art worthy located around the abdomen that I haven't gone over yet surrounding the sides of the ribs we have thus aratus muscles which I have rendered out horribly for you guys don't worry I'll actually understand them before the video ends hopefully you can simplify these muscles with a couple curved lines traveling quite horizontally along the further exterior and being woven into some curved lines closer toward the interior that are angled downwards slightly toward the center that was a mouthful hopefully that made sense next up we have the obliques which are generally more visible on males due to the narrower pelvis these muscles can hang out over the upper hip bone a little and are also responsible for making that famous v-shape that ladies seem to care about or something I'll quickly mention some of the most common mistakes one is of course simply ignoring the abdomen from the profile view it's never a good sign if your silhouette lines are going perfectly vertical on an organic form I see this a lot to be honest the next mistake might sound super silly but I assure you I see it sometimes and I've even been guilty of it a few times and that is folding the human form somewhere in the middle of the AB area we sometimes see skin folds and chub flaps and think that that structure is actually bending but of course that's silly and their spines don't Bend like that unless you're in the Beijing circus or something our hip joints are of course our main axis for bending over and just a further drill this point home I want to show you the maximum range that people can bend their spine forward and backward because it's generally not very far and this is actually relevant to our AB knowledge because you might notice that aside from being a little bit saggy or flabby when we bend forward our ABS pretty much always maintain a fairly straight line this is what the ABS are there for anyway in combination with your back muscles they just contract slightly here and there to flex your upper torso and spine in different directions if you are able to magically make your abs a hundred times stronger for a moment you could probably snap your spine right in half that'd be exciting let's see what other amazing tips do I have for you guys the location of the belly button is a little bit amusing aside from that standard positioning I mentioned at the start of the video it can actually be located slightly higher into the middle ab area or farther lower into those lower abs this is definitely not a useful art tip though you should probably just pick a spot for all of your drawings and stick with it but don't feel like a freak if your belly buttons not where I make it I do actually have a useful tip for the belly button know I think it's aesthetically pleasing to simplify it into more of a diamond shape that way you can focus on one angle of the diamond to emphasize the pose or lighting of any given figure they can actually have a lot of personality to them like a little I in the stomach normally I like to go over reductions for all of these anatomy parts which is just my name for simplifying your drawings but in the case of ABS doing reductions really just means flattening things up so I think that's going to be it for the lesson side of things let's try putting it all into practice and doing some art I'm going to make some casual figures here it's a bit tricky to focus on abs without drawing the rest of the form but do your best to just ignore all those non relevant parts clearly I'm not taking my own advice because here I am drawing out legs and knees and everything else perhaps some well draped fabrics can provide some sneaky hiding of boobs and at least keep things more focused on ABS I made a couple female figures without much muscle definition so I feel like I need to at least include a male figure with all the muscle details thrown in now that I've made a few figures here the only downside is how terrible the composition is actually worse than that the abdomens of distant figures are just too small this is digital art though so it's easy enough to just blow those back figures up and bring them a lot closer and don't panic I didn't completely destroy the other figure we'll come back to it later it's time to lay in some colors though one again in order to pick some good skin tones we'll have to put in a nice mid value background color first this lets your eyes adjust away from that pure 100% digital white and I know I've been super boring with my skin colors in the past couple of episodes so let's take this chance to refresh ourselves on how to paint dark skin tones I think the key is to go with a more reddish tone and make sure the highlights are the main source of contrast instead of the shadows when you're drawing light skin tones it's usually the shadows that are providing all the contrast so it's a bit different the highlights here should also reflect the environment much more so with our slightly blue background I'm just going to bring that color directly into the skin tone for all the highlight areas and with both of these skin tones I'm still trying to keep moving the color wheel around and throwing it as many random hue variations as I can maybe just some cooler tones on areas that don't get as much Sun and some red tones on areas that get a lot more wear and tear just to recap I did my standard workflow of laying in a good base tone and color variety under the line art and then moving on to painting above the line art I am mainly using the acrylic dry brush in Corel Painter and just using it to sculpt away at the form cutting in sharp angles and then smoothing them into the other direction the key for painting nice realistic skin is subtlety and a lot of mid-tone values now I'm just making these colors up off the top of my head so I'm doing my best to just hint at all the anatomy structure we learned earlier there's definitely a little bit of nonsense and anatomical gibberish thrown in but hopefully the main forms are enough to make people not notice when it comes to the fabric I tried to focus on a lot of hard edges and geometric shapes sometimes it looks best when you approach fabric as if it was a hard surface rendering overall this one is looking okay but I think we should hop on over to that male figure and really flex our app painting skills so I've isolated the drawing onto its own canvas and I know what you're thinking but Sinag self-portrait day isn't until November believe it or not this isn't it's just another random figure from imagination like the rest I'm going to try and make this skintone a little darker than the lighter female one this figure has much stronger muscle definition so I'm going to do my best to build up the form I try to start without doing any strong highlights or shadows on the muscle it's important to get the form turning first with just the mid-tones I'm also spending a lot of time trying to decide which aspects of the anatomy should be well defined and which forms will just smooth into other forms when you're painting from imagination you often have to just paint something out first and then observe afterward whether it's right or not you'll see me going over the same spots often trying slightly different approaches once in a while I do like to go in with the airbrush tool to soften things up and blend everything together but I really don't like the texture of it so I'll usually color pick my way back into things with the dry brush overall you might notice I tried to make one side of the form slightly warmer and the other side slightly colder at this point I think I realized that I made the strattice muscles way too nonsensical and gone a bit too heavy with all that anatomical gibberish so it took me a few tries but once I simplified things out a lot more I think the result is more interesting I can tell it's definitely not perfect I think the horizontal strands were supposed to weave above the diagonal strands but oh well at least it feels more confident and you can't underestimate the importance of confidence when it comes to painting at this time it's pretty much finished but I wanted to walk you guys through a quick example of a blown-out secondary light source it's a technique that can add a much more dynamic field lighting and it's just pretty fun all it takes is a good understanding of the 3d form you've created so pick a very bright high value yet saturated color and just start drawing in a secondary light on whichever side was previously in the shadows I recommend a hard edge brush and just making it as chunky yet clean as you can once you're done you can just come back with the glow brush or color dodge if you're using Photoshop and glow out all the hard edge highlights that you just made using the same hue family of course the ending result will create a nice punch of contrast and really make the art stand out a lot more since it was such fun to do on that painting I just had to go back to the first painting and add some lighting effects there as well so a quickly implied window and some overly strong rim light effects brought a lot more interest to the overall light scheme then I went in and did some of my standard post-processing nonsense and this is the finished result it's not too bad for a painting trying to focus on just ABS I have been kind of worried about it we're almost at the end of the video there's just one more important piece of business to take care of if you've seen other episodes of Anatomy quick tips you know I like to end on a dumb animation to test what I've learned unfortunately I can't do too much crazy form rotation stuff with just ABS so instead you get a lazy animation of a guy building up his ab muscles that's kind of weird but if that's not amusing enough for you don't worry I managed to make some ridiculous animation as well so we got a little Star Fox reference mixed in with some Star Wars as nonsense all right that's it we're done with this episode I hope you learned something about ABS that will stick with you into the future feel free to let me know all the horrible mistakes I made in the comments below I would like to of course thank all of my wonderful patreon supporters for making these videos possible and thanks everyone for watching