how to draw neck muscles

How to draw the neck and shoulders with Jake Spicer

Artist and tutor Jake Spicer takes an in-depth look at how to create anatomically accurate images

You don't need to know anything about anatomy to make a good life-drawing. When you first learn to draw, it is often best to be an unthinking eye – drawing what you see without filtering through your intellect. However, as you become more confident and competent, you might find a practical understanding of the body's major anatomical landmarks will help you to make clearer observations of the shapes you see on the skin's surface. Here we explore the aspects of anatomy that I find most useful to bear in mind when drawing the human figure.

Neck and shoulders
It is the relationship between head and shoulders that often sets the scale of the entire figure, with the neck bridging the gap between the face and the rest of the body. The drawings on the opposite page pick out some of the most useful shapes to notice in the neck and shoulders. Feel the shapes of your own body: the ropey muscles of the sternomastoid muscles, running from behind your ear to your collar bone; the mass of the trapezius – the muscles you might massage if you'd been drawing all day long; the deltoids – shoulder caps at the top of your arms. I've avoided drawing vertebrate into the spine or ribs into the ribcage so that you just notice their mass and position – it is the jaw, collar bones and shoulder blades that are close to the surfaces and can be most easily seen and felt below the skin.

Jake's materials
Charcoal pencil
Conte crayon
Cartridge Paper

draw neck
Things to note
The surface
Musculature
Bone structure

Top Tip - Think of the trapezius and collarbone as shaped like a coat hanger, they are shoulder shaped after all.

Putting knowledge into practice
A constructive approach to figure drawing nods directly to the anatomy of the body. Try starting a life drawing with a skeleton of quick, gestural lines that reference bone structure, followed by muscular masses that can be layered on to that internal scaffolding like clay on a wire armature.

Armature
Start simple, drawing in the mass of the skull - cranium and jaw – before finding an imagined line for centre the spine, bisected by a horizontal line from shoulder to shoulder to suggest the presence of the collar bone.

Masses
Add form to the wireframe of the body – look for the sterno-mastoid muscles running from ear to clavicle either side of the neck, framing the wedge of the throat. Draw in the coat-hanger triangle of the trapezius and the caps of the deltoids at the tops of the arms.

draw neck and shoulders

Surface
Rub your initial construction back and use a new, clean line to pick out the edges that you observe on the surface of the skin - notice how the contours of the body form themselves over the underlying musculature, supported by the bone structure.

neck

The Shoulder Girdle
The shoulder girdle, encompassing scapulae and collarbones, sits like a crown over the mass of the rib cage. Seen from above it creates a diamond-shaped form, supporting the arms at two corners and only attaching to the ribcage at the front, where the collar bones dip to a deeper V when the shoulders rise.

Tilts and turns
The ears, sitting at the top of the neck, provide a pivoting point as the head tilts back and forward. When the head is tilted back, the sterno-mastoid becomes taught and the neck is exposes – the distance between chin and clavicle increasing. As the head tilts down, that distance closes again, an imagined line from the ear to the underside of the nose suggesting the extremity of the tilt.

Images property of Jake Spicer. For more information visit http://www.jakespicerart.co.uk/

For more how to illustration guides click here, or click to find out how to draw eyes with Aine Divine.