How to Draw a Mutant

Artist: KingTutorial / June 11, 2011

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Step 1.

Welcome to the "How to Draw a Mutant" tutorial :D To start off, we have a basic skeletal under drawing. It's just a stick figure with a couple of spheres for the head and chest. Notice how the character's hunched over and has its neck craned to the s

Step 2.

For this kind of human mutation, I wanted some exaggeration in the facial features. The bony ridges around the eye sockets are extremely pronounced, and even run back along the top of the head. The eyes will be sunken, and the character will be screa

Step 3.

When a human screams, the veins in their neck tend to pop out. That's going on to an extreme here, along with a lot of stretching, tearing skin. Notice how the wrinkles stretch away from the center line of the torso. In this step I also added a lot o

Step 4.

I thought it would be really cool to have his eyes pointing in different directions. I think it adds to the feeling of pain and agony this guy's going through. I also added the nose and cleaned up the jaw line at this point.

Step 5.

Before drawing the arms, I wanted to get the placement of the collar bones and pectoral (chest) muscles. You could really consider the collar bones to be the first part of the arm. If you point your arm to the ceiling, or shrug your shoulder, the col

Step 6.

With the collar bones in place, we can easily locate the deltoids. This is extremely important, especially since we're looking down on the shoulder. This will be a 3/4 shot of that arm, so I outlined the biceps and part of the triceps.

Step 7.

Here I finished up the forearm, but I left it open at the end with a couple of weird folds of skin. I debated turning this into a mutant hand, but it ultimately ended up fairly normal. At this point I also drew the outer edge of the ribcage and outli

Step 8.

Yeah, the hand ended up a bit gnarled, but it'll look downright pretty in comparison to what's coming. I drew in the ribs here. The guy looks very gaunt. The abs are defined, but don't have the shape of a body builder's abs. These are more like droop

Step 9.

Here I began drawing the pants. I decided to give him shorts because I wanted to draw some legs. That, and I actually hate drawing fabric. One detail I like to include is the fly. I try to draw seems whenever possible, but drawing the fly seems to co

Step 10.

The second pant leg. Not much to say here. Take a look at the gap between the leg and the pants. You basically have a ring of fabric wrapping around the leg, so at extreme angles you can't get away with just drawing a line across the bottom of a pair

Step 11.

Whoa, what happened? I decided to lay down some more guide lines so you can understand the shape of the legs. His right foot is obviously having some problems. I decided to totally mess around with the poor guy's toes and turn them into long, finger-

Step 12.

What a nice pair of human knees. Knees are actually pretty hard for me to draw. They look different from every angle, and in every position. Very annoying. I decided to keep them pretty simple here. There'll be enough detail further down the line to

Step 13.

I suppose if this was the full extent of the mutation, this guy wouldn't have it that bad. Still, that is an ugly foot. I drew the toes with different types of toenails just to mix it up and emphasize the fact that this guy is actively mutating in fr

Step 14.

I added lots of detail to the mutated foot, here. I love those lumps and crevices. You could think of it like having bubbles in the skin. First figure out the outline and then picture them bulging outward like a balloon. Ew and ouch at the same time.

Step 15.

What in the --?! *Ahem* More guide lines for you, so you can see where I'm headed. What we have here is a giant, mutated arm... not one... not two... but THREE shoulders. Yikes. Each of those additional shoulders will have an appendage growing from t

Step 16.

It was important to work on the transition from the neck to the shoulders. I kind of overdid it with those neck stretches, so rather than run into problems later I decided to tackle this area now. I just pictured lumpy flesh balls separated by a few

Step 17.

With the shoulder drawn, I moved into the upper arm, defining the biceps. Notice how the biceps are the same size on the mutated arm as on the regular arm. It's the other muscles that have bulked out around it. I took my time defining the armpit. You

Step 18.

This shape basically covers the extensor muscles on the forearm. While very lumpy and mutated, I still want to keep in mind what goes where under normal conditions. Those rounded shapes are exposed... bulbous... organs, I suppose. They could even be

Step 19.

Since I drew the guide lines, I decided to use them and skip ahead to the main fingers of this hand. The hand is pointed slightly toward us, so I wanted to draw the closest part first. It made it much easier deciding what kind of skin folds to add la

Step 20.

Yeah, this was much easier than the other way would have been. We have some nice shapes resembling the normal hand structure, and the perspective on the hand is pretty much just how I want it.

Step 21.

Without having it colored, this is really starting to look like a crab. Actually, that was my idea going into the arm. Each finger has a different style of tip, and I even drew a pseudo crab claw one what used to be his middle finger. Even with the e

Step 22.

I'm still thinking "crab" at this point, so the general shape of this limb resembles a crab leg. I added some shell-like panels to mix it up and differentiate this limb from the main arm. For the fingers, we have a normal thumb, a finger with more fi

Step 23.

The third appendage is still in the process of forming. See how we have a nice progression of mutation between the three arms? I liked the repeating shape of the arms and fingers curving out and downward to the right, so I continued that with a few a

Step 24.

And there you have it -- the finished line art. I had a lot of fun working on this, and I hope you had fun following along. The main thing is to really think for a moment about what you're going to draw before you draw it. Even with something as seem

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Artist: KingTutorial
Date Added: June 11, 2011
Steps: 24
Favorited: 1 (view)
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Tags: how to draw horror
Description: In this tutorial I'm going to talk about the thought process behind designing and drawing a mutant character.