Original Using the top half of the
Original
Using the top half of the body...
... then trying to use the bottom half
A note about boobs
The Death of Star Sapphire, this week on Green Lantern: New Guardians! Blasted at by a villain, her spine gets severed at—
Wait, what?
She’s not dead? B-but her back, there… Didn’t it…
Oh. Huh. So it… Okay. Basically, there was such a need for this image to show boobs and butt at the same time that the spine was bent halfway into the ribcage (which also seemed to bend the ribcage itself). What we have here is two halves that should be independent from each other. To demonstrate that, I decided to complete the body for each half.
Using the top half, I worked with the fact that the blast pushed at the more flexible part of her body, and yes, that does mean arching her spine like she got shoved in the kidneys. Her hips drag the thighs forward, and the lower legs dangle back, because the main dragging point (that which pulls on the rest of the body) is in the middle of her core. I also figured her hair would be blasting in the direction of the force beam thing, as it offers less resistance to it than the rest of the body.
I have to say the correction of the body using the top half was much easier than the one using the bottom half. The reason for this is simple: the legs as drawn in the original made no sense in how they were positioned considering there’s a big blast of energy throwing the characters away, so I ended up only keeping the hips in the current position. I did bend the spine back as far as it should go, and this means the push from the chest-laser-beam targets her back upper chest, which snaps the neck back, the arms up and back as far as they can go and the legs kinda dangle back… which doesn’t work as well as an impact pose as the first one considering the blast’s origin and trajectory. If the beam were coming from further left and hit her between the shoulder blades, maybe that would work, but as it is, the first pose makes more sense. Also, its silhouette is easier to read: I had the hardest time figuring out how to place her near arm in the second pose and no model around to refer on (my husband’s just not the right body type for this kind of thing), and no matter what I did it had to overlap the body, effectively making us lose the view of the body’s action.
As you can see, though, the original drawing was of two halves of women on the same character.
The last drawing is to show another note on breast anatomy. Breasts are basically fat and mammary tissue on top of pectorals. The pectoral muscle attaches from the clavicle and the sternum to the top of the humerus (upper arm bone) and the deltoids overlap the pecs to attach from the clavicle to the side of the humerus. When you raise your arms, the pecs are pulled up and stretched from the sternum, leaving the muscle gap under the arm visible, and it often looks as if the pec and deltoid are just one muscle group working together instead of two distinct muscles. Just as the pecs get spread apart and pulled up, breasts get pulled apart and up. See that last couple of drawings up there, where I point out how the breasts get pulled up. Don’t forget to think of this even if the arms are down, but pulled back: unless your character’s wearing a really tight push-up bra, her breasts will be pulled away from each other by the arms, unlike on the original picture where she’s got the breasts together despite the clear lack of bra (yet another zipper down to navel, sigh).
Now, a last note, just because I can’t resist a comment on the male anatomy… Kyle has a reaaaaally long torso on this picture. That’s because the ribcage and the hips are too far apart. Try it, how many fingers can you fit between your floating ribs and your hip bone? Also his pecs are too long
and he seems to have one thigh twice as wide as the other…But at this point, I’m nitpicking.
Meant to reblog this a while ago, so here you go. :) I REALLY love this breakdown and showing where the lines of action are coming from, and that there a couple pose options for where she could be.