I reckon there is software around which has been crafted just for this purpose. But anyway .. a bit of trivia on human proportions ..
The great italian masters of the renaissance (Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci et al.) researched not only the construction of perspective but also the construction of humans. Both discoveries were immense breaktroughs in art. It is easy to tell pre-renaissance paintings from renaissance paintings by their sheer dullness (as a side point, early renaissance paintings are sometimes quite funny, as when a painter has noticeably attempted to construct perspective but has somehow messed up the rules).
Anyway, any art school book on human proportions will tell you how to construct a human. Essentially, we are made of simple geometric objects, such as cylinders (leg and arm sections), boxes (torso, pelvis..) and spheres (skull). The sizes of these are interrelated, e.g. an adult would have a head comprising about 1/7 of his/her total height. There is plenty of detail but this is the big picture. An artist would use these geometric forms to construct a human (they are relatively easy to render in perspective, too), and then elaborate on the details. In the finished painting or comic book page the raw geometric "exoskeleton" is no longer visible. |