Torsos… You know, when I began this whole art shebang, I didn’t realize something so integral to the figure would be this difficult to wrap my head around. Usually, people recommend rendering boxes in space first and then sort of carving the chest and hips out like they’re blocks of cheese and somehow that makes the situation even more obnoxious.

See, I totally understand the the rib cage is a fairly rigid part of the body and, therefore, a good place to start from when you’re doing figures after the head, but trying to start with just a rectangular prism means a lot of intricacies are lost. I mean, I totally get how it’s meant to look from one face, but how do you handle the dimensionality of it? Curves, of course – but to what degree? It’s safe to say that I’m not the biggest fan of how these attempts came out – but they all lacked photo references so I shouldn’t be too surprised. What comes next is a method that artist Akihito Yoshitomi uses that I’m just going to call the 火 or Ka method because it takes the torso and breaks it down into an egg with a symbol very reminiscent of the kanji for ‘fire’.

To say that I had more success with this method would be a hilarious understatement. Even without photo references, I was able to get somewhat proportionate chests at different orientations, but I did notice that I lacked the consistency to call this a sure fire way of implementing the first half of the torso. Though, I am starting to notice something about all this!

I should…probably start with the neck, yeah?

The neck is definitely what would help house the pectoral muscles a bit more, seeing as the trapezius is very important to the overall structure regardless of physiology. You tend to forget it because, like, you just assume the neck is just this cylinder that you can fasten on later but the further I got into trying any sort of method, the more I realized just how imperative it was – so I’ll probably set something up tomorrow and draw heads with necks and shoulders as opposed to them just floating in space.

If it wasn’t obvious, I definitely recommend Akihito’s YouTube channel of the same name. His tutorials are entirely bereft of commentary, which is both a good and a bad thing, but it’s uniquely succinct in how it presents itself. There’s not even an intro, he just gets straight to the meat of things! Very refreshing if you, like me, are often tapping the Skip 30 Second button on art tutorials like a QTE so that you can skip the five or so minutes of SEO that most channels make you suffer through.