I Rlly Love Your Art! I Like To Draw Too But I'm Having Trouble With Chubby/fat Characters. Is There

I rlly love your art! I like to draw too but I'm having trouble with chubby/fat characters. Is there any advice you could give? (Sorry if this is weird or annoying, if so you don't gotta answer it.)

I get this question a lot, and for once I’m going to try to give a proper answer. 

I what most people get wrong is how to distribute fat. People gain fat in different parts of their body, but no one gains fat in only one part. I often see people draw “fat” characters by just drawing a skinny character and making their belly stick out, like in the picture below.

as you can see, the first drawing  looks kinda weird and unnatural, and it certainly does not look “fat”. in the second drawing the fat distribution is more natural, with fat on the characters’ sides and chest as well as the belly. if you want to get better at drawing fat you should practice adding fat to those areas, as well as the arms, face and neck. another thing that makes the first one look strange is how “hard” the fat looks. there’s a really visible border between the “skinny” part of the body and the “fat” part. fat doesn’t work the same way as muscle. fat is soft and doesn’t have any strenght - meaning that unless you physically lift it up its going to hang and sag. a lot of people are afraid of drawing fat that looks fat - as in fat that bulges, sags and gathers in rolls. that is a shame, because you can’t really skip that stuff if you want to draw natural looking fat.

like you see in the drawing above, adding rolls and visible sagging makes the fat look, well, fatter. all I can say is; don’t be afraid of making your fat look like real fat!

Imagine actually being so evil that you'd rather make sure your writers suffer financially instead of just paying them the pay they deserve. Hell truly has some seats reserved already, holy shit.

Some things never change.

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.