Notes on proportions and a look into lunacy

Hey all, I'm coming today with a bit of bonus art resource content. Being a self taught artist there are various issues / bad habits I have to deal with and something I feel I struggle with quite a bit is proportions. If I were to guess it was exacerbated from learning off artists without knowing why they were making the design choices they were as well as just being too stubborn myself to learn lol. 

Anyway, in an attempt to combat this and stop wasting so much time overthinking, I drew up 4 proportion models for the female form and added a bunch of notes. I figured they might be of interest to some of you so felt I'd share. The last image is specifically a model from my observations / preferences but my biases may be present throughout!

Now the lesson from all this is not "Here's four types of proportions. They correspond to these heights... memorize them." Not only is that not a feasible way to draw, it's not how the body works. Some people have longer necks, others have stubby legs, larger breasts, more fat etc. etc.

On top of that, the given heights are more just suggestions. I've seen eight heads proportions used to represent 5'6" women, and you could totally draw a character with a 1:7 heads ratio and say she's 6'7". The art police won't come knocking on your door.

So the actual lesson here, if there is one, is to note the similarities between all the idealized models and how small changes create a big impact. In all the models, the femur (the upper leg bone and largest in the body) is roughly 2 heads tall. Narrowing the shoulders can look more appealing/feminine. Longer legs are idealized and worth lengthening over the upper body. Also as noted, another nice quickhand is that the waist is 2/3rds the width of the shoulder distance (but often made smaller!)

There is another important lesson here which is that thinking about this to the extent of mapping in numbers is kind of... lunacy. Art isn't a science and if you always try to get perfect proportions you'll always draw the same body type (or at best a few if you make use of different models). Additionally, think about the difference between "1 and 2/3rd of a head" vs "1 and a half head".  That's a difference of less than 0.2 of a head... are you really going to measure that out correctly? Even if you were measuring from a model, every measurement you make will always be a few mm off, even with your best efforts. And of course, all these models only work when the character is standing straight up, at even level with the camera, and experiencing no distortion from perspective.

Now, does this make these proportional models useless? No, it's still very valuable to have a general idea of how the figure looks as a sanity check and the idealized models give some insight on stylization. Plus, most anime characters fit the seven heads model so if that's what you want to draw then there's basically your answer key. However, I'd argue if you were to learn one then the average proportions is the only one you need. Knowing the general relationships presented there and then being able to modify the body in whatever way you want will grant you much more power as an artist than trying to remember and replicate set patterns.

That said, I will sorta shill my 7.5 alternative as handy for drawing from imagination. The even split of the body vertically is easier to work with and you can quickly map a figure down by determining the top and bottom, finding the midpoint for the crotch, and then finding the knees at the midpoint between the crotch and bottom :)

ANYWAY, I'll leave it at that. To be honest, most of this is me yelling at myself because being excessively anal about this is what I've been guilty of for a long while and has been slowing down my workflow. Hopefully it can be of some help to someone else though! Last thing I want to do is confuse people so if you have any questions just let me know.

Ciao!