Basically, with all of this I’m going to extend this a little bit, and there is a reason why.
And then this little thing called the xiphoid process like this.
And then this is the manubrium of the sternum, the body. I’m trying to see if I made them somewhat symmetrical. Like if you have an old 3-speed kind of like this. I usually draw them as if I’m drawing a bicycle handlebars. The important part here will be the clavicles. I’m going to make this kind of blurry because a lot of this stuff we’re going to just kick out of the way. This will be a little bit easier just to make sure that we have all of this out of the way. The ear is like over here and you have this kind of configuration. I’m going to kind of kick this out of the way. Okay, so we have a body, and what I want to do is I want to kick the head out of the way just a little bit just because it’s not quite as important in today’s lecture as in later lectures. Where am I going to go? Let’s just start with something like this. And guess what? We’ve already had this nature. So by opposing them it makes us stronger. What makes plywood really strong is that we took a natural product, which is wood, and it was beautiful to begin with, but we made it even better by opposing the direction of the fibers of the-or the grain, the fibers of the muscles or the fibers, in this case, of the grain of the wood. So you have a layer like this, a layer like this. You have this stuff, but underneath you have layers that oppose all of that. You have external oblique muscles which are almost like you’re putting your hands in your pockets. You have muscles that go like this, like the rectus abdominis. They’re basically designed kind of like a piece of plywood. But many layers that you need for us to be alive and to move around and to dance and to do the hula and walk around and jump and reach up and all this. The tricky thing about that is that there are many more layers than we need to know as artists. When I look at a cadaver there are layers and layers like an onion. That is not to make the front torso seem simple because it’s not. Now, one of the things that you’re going to notice is that there are very few muscles that I’m going to talk about today. Anyway, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to start with just a few muscles. It’s so complicated a lot of artists just don’t know what’s going on. Conversely, when I lecture about the back it’s the other way around. There is something funny going on with that front.
It’s that because it’s so highly recognizable for us artists, if we don’t depict it correctly anybody and everybody can tell there is something not quite right about that body that you just drew, whether it’s like a superhero or you’re just trying to draw a figure from one of your workshops or something like that. You know, the pectoralis majors, the abs, you know, the six-pack muscles, etc., etc. You’ll notice it’s like, oh, I recognize that. So, if you see somebody like in an ad or something, and it’s a guy and he doesn’t have his shirt on, and you look at the front of his body. The good thing is everybody has a really good memory of what the front is. Now, there are good things about that and bad things about that. Okay, so we’re going to be talking about the front and torso muscles.