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How To Draw Girl: Drawing Lessons for Students and Children
Female Body Proportions: How To Draw Girl
The main difference between a female and male body lies in the waist area. Females tend to have wider hips, for two reasons: they’re anatomically wider to make giving birth possible, and estrogen makes fat accumulate in this area. This makes the waist look thinner. Males have smaller hips and wider chest / shoulders, so the waist isn’t as noticeable.
So, to create a difference between a female and male body in cartoon style, put the focus on the waist in females and on the shoulders in males.
Body Shape Types
But it isn’t the end of it. The ratio between the shoulders, waist, and hips differs among females, creating four basic body types:
- Hourglass: the shoulders are as wide as the hips, and the waist is much smaller than this. Although this type is often considered the most feminine, research shows that only 8% of women have this type of silhouette.
- Rectangular: the shoulders and hips are equal, and the waist is only slightly smaller than them. This is the most popular type of silhouette for women.
- Inverted triangle: the shoulders are wider than hips. Although this is considered a masculine body shape, in reality it’s more common in women than hourglass!
- Triangle: the hips are wider than shoulders.
But this was just about the skeletal ratio. The fat accumulation affects the silhouette as well, and females tend to accumulate it more easily than males. In women, fat usually accumulates in the hips, buttocks, and thighs, but the skeletal proportions affect the final outcome:
- Low fat: when there’s little fat in the body, the skeletal proportions are more visible. The hips are angular, because it’s fat that makes them round. Although the waist is thin, it may not look small, because the hips without fat may look smaller as well, reducing the contrast.
- Medium fat: here, the skeletal proportions dominate the silhouette. The hips are rounded. It is possible to be fit with a medium level of fat, because women burn fat more slowly – especially in the hips area!
- High fat, diamond shape: when fat is accumulated in the stomach area, the waist can be lost. However, if the hips stay wider than that, it may appear as if the waist moved higher.
- High fat, apple shape: here, fat has been accumulated in the waist area, making it wider than the hips and shoulders. This is a popular type of silhouette for post-menopausal women because estrogen stops directing fat to the hips. It can occur in younger women as well, if they didn’t have wide hips or a narrow waist before gaining weight.
- High fat, pear shape: when the hip bones are wide, gaining weight around the waist may not affect the contrast that much. The triangle shape is kept—it just gets rounder.
Besides this, there can be other factors affecting the proportions:
- Some women are naturally built smaller: shorter, with lower measurements in shoulders, waist, and hips. They may have a normal level of fat and appear skinny regardless.
- It’s possible for the torso to be longer. This may make the waistline look shallower and the legs shorter.
- The legs are typically as long as the body over the hip line. But they can be longer!
- People with dwarfism will usually have a normally shaped upper body, with only the legs and/or arms being shorter.
