How to Draw a Female Body

The female body differs in shapes and sizes, each unique to one another. Before starting your drawing, think of what type of body you would like to draw. You can picture it or you can seek out a reference. For this drawing, we will be drawing an average young women's body, following a reference picture. By the end of it, you can expand your options while drawing different shapes and sizes.

Paper, pencil, and eraser.

For beginners, it is best to start off with a reference, whether that would be a picture of a person or a stock image on Google. A reference would help you understand how your finished product should look and works as a guide throughout the process.

Start of with your sketch lines. Figure out where the center of the female body will be its head, shoulders, and hips. Sketch lines would be used to keep the body proportional and will also be used as a guide for the rest of the process. Make sure to not press hard with your pencil, since these lines will be erased later.

Once you have your guidelines, you can start with normal geometric shapes. These shapes will consist of circles, rectangles, squares, trapezoids, and ovals. The body is made up of different shapes, and these shapes will help you understand the structure of the body. The female body consists of many shapes and sizes, but for this example, we will be using a rectangle to structure the torso.

A female body is riddled with curvature, so you need to start connecting lines and shaping the body. Do not be afraid to curve inwards or outwards, these lines determine the shape of the body. For a thinner look, lines would be less curvy and curving inwards, while a thicker look will use more curved lines that curve outwards. The female body has curves in the breast, hips, legs, and arms.

Once you have finished structuring the body, you can start adding detail, like muscles, bones, knees, elbows, neck. The body is a muscle and each of these muscles can be seen and drawn. For the arms drawing an elongated S can be used to structure out the muscles of the arms and legs. There would be lines that curve inwards and outwards.

The breast can differ in shape and sizes, but they would always have curves. Breasts are not circles located on the chest, but are rather, curved lines that do not exactly connect but form a shape. Breast sag and either face inwards or outwards, for this the breast would be facing outwards and will resemble the shape of and slanted egg. The breast should be where the armpits connect to the arms and should have spacing between the neck.

Once you have the basic body parts done, you focus on the neck. The neck would form more of a trapezoid shape on top of the shoulder. This muscle would be the trapezius. It will connect to the shoulders. The shoulders will also connect to the collarbones. The collarbones would be two straight lines coming from the shoulders that meet at the middle with a inward curve.

I understand hands are difficult and you are fully capable of leaving them out, though hands could be formed using shapes as guidelines as well. You can start with a rectangle and a triangle next to it (this will be the thumb). Then you can add your four fingers and the thumb (the four fingers do not have to be straight out and can be curved and hidden behind another finger) Add small curvature and you have hands.

This step is optional, but you can start adding smaller details like the outward curve of a hip bone, the pelvis, the nipples, the throat, muscle lines, kneecaps, bellybutton, shadows.

Finally, you erase the sketch lines and add ass much detail as you want.