From an artist's perspective, men and women are similar, but not the same. There's an old adage: men are like carrots, women are like hour-glasses. This is a slightly ridiculous comparison, but there's a truth to the idea that men and women should be drawn differently. Men have wider, more boxy shoulders and straighter hips. Women have more narrow shoulders, wide hips and a curvy profile that gives them their "hour-glass" appearance.
Instructions
1. Draw two ovals for the heads. Heads have a rounder top and a more pointed bottom. The head of the man should be slightly larger and a little boxy-with a wider, flatter top and a wider, flatter bottom than the head of the woman. The head of the woman should be slightly lower down on the page than the head of the man, since most women are slightly shorter than men.
2. Draw two lines extending on either side of the necks. The woman's neck should be comparatively more slender than the man's neck, which will fall more in line with the sides of the face.
3. Draw outward at the bottom of the neck, where the lines of the neck meet the shoulders. Extend the shoulders to the top of the arms. The shoulders on the man will be wider (comparatively) than the shoulders of the woman.
4. Draw downward at the arms, and end the arms with the outline of a large knot for a fist. The arms should be approximately as long as two and a half heads, end to end. Draw back upward inside the arms and stop drawing where the arms meet the body.
5. Turn the line around at the underarms and draw down the bodies on each side. The body of the woman will narrow more at the waist and then curve outward at the hips before curving back inward slightly down the thighs. The body of the man will proceed inward and downward, narrowing at the waist and curving outward at the hips, but in a much less pronounced way than the woman's. Draw all the way down to the feet--the average person is between 7 and 8 heads tall.
6. Draw the bulge of the feet at the bottom of the legs--pointing outward slightly, but not all the way, so the view of the feet is slightly fore-shortened.
7. Draw back up the inside of each leg to the area where the two legs meet. You have now completed the outlines of each body.
8. Draw the clothes and shoes on the body as needed. The woman is likely to wear more shapely or shape-hugging clothes, where as the man is more likely to wear loose-fitting garb. The clothes should fit over the outline of the body--in fact, drawing on the pants and the shirt may be as simple as widening the arms and legs, then drawing the seams at the wrists, waist, neck and ankles. Once you have drawn the shirt on the woman, draw the bulges of the breasts on each side, like parentheses, to indicate a womanly shape. For the shoes, enlarge the feet slightly and add shoe laces.
9. Fill in the facial features. Start with the eyes: almond shaped, and approximately 2/3 of the way up the face. The eyes should be spread apart with one eye width in between them. The nose should be drawn down the center line of the face, with the tip of the nose just below the midway mark. A simplified version of the nose looks like a thumb-tip pointing up--this indicates the presence of the nose without actually showing all the features of the nose. The mouth appears below the nose, with the height of one eye between the nose and mouth. The mouth should be a straight line that dips down slightly in the middle, then turns back up.
10. Draw the outline of the hair around the head--most women have longer hair than men--then fill in the individual hairs by shading them in with your pencil.
