Steddie Upside-Down AU Part 77
Part 1 Part 76
He’s growing – Steve can feel it eating away at the pathways in his brain. He can almost feel the way the connections drop, making way from something else, something more. It’s like he wants Steve to be able to see the paths he’s carving out of his brain so he can.
They’re dark, and winding, and there’s nothing in there at all. Steve’s being hollowed out, for a holy purpose he can’t quite grasp, but he can feel it, coiled cold and hard in the back of his skull, waiting to give him his own divine prophecy. When the time’s right.
But the time’s not right, and he’s lost in the tunnels of his mind, winding fast, fast, fast through corridors he doesn’t recognize.
It’s like, double vision. He’s looking at Eddie sitting beside him, twirling his frizzy hair in front of his mouth, but it’s dark, too, and the tunnels are winding. Winding, and empty until they’re not.
It’s not until he sees the man that Steve wonders if he’s looking at something internal at all. Because there’s a man he doesn’t recognize walking inside them. He watches him stumble, he watches him fall.
Steve doesn’t recognize the man. But, still. Something twists inside as he watches him collapse, He’s supposed to collapse. Steve knows, he can feel it.
But there’s still something pulling in his sternum. He can feel it, sometimes, when Eddie’s looking at him with big, sad eyes. He wants to wring the sadness straight out of him but can’t – he doesn’t know what’s wrong.
“Something’s wrong.” he says, but he’s not sure if he means the man or the look in Eddie’s eyes, or the way he’s not sure where he is right now.
“What is it, honey?”
The woman who says it looks frazzled from where she’s kneeling in front of him. He doesn’t know her, but she’s holding Will’s hand. He looks at Will, and his eyes match hers – both wide and worried and trained on him.
“There’s a man,” he says. There are vines circling the man’s wrists, legs, trailing up his neck. Steve rubs his own throat, esophagus convulsing in sympathy pain. And just for a second, there’s a flicker of that same man smiling down at him, settling something over his face, letting him breathe.
“Where?” the woman asks, at the same moment Eddie asks, “who?” and reaches out his burning palm to clutch Steve’s knee.
He turns back to Eddie. Eddie who’s touch burns straight through him, who he can feel pulling pulling pulling him in like he wants to incinerate him whole. Steve would let him.
So, he ignores the woman’s question and focuses on the man. “I don’t know him,” Steve whispers. He’s not sure it’s true, he can still feel the way his warm hand had cradled Steve’s jaw as he breathed life back into him.
Eddie’s boring his gaze into him, like maybe he can scoop out the images and muddle through them on his own. “But he’s in trouble?”
Steve nods.
The woman stands up with a grunt, hands braced on knees as hauls herself up. “I’ll try Hop again.”
The name twinges. “Hop, Hop, Hopper,” Steve murmurs, looking back down at Eddie’s hand on his knee like it’ll tell him what he’s thinking. Like it’ll make his brain work better.
“What about him?” Will asks quietly. He’s watching the woman pick up the phone, turning the numbers by rote.
Steve doesn’t know Hopper, but there’s a man with a dirty name plate attached to his dirty chest that reads the same name. “The vines,” he starts, before stalling out, unsure of what to say. “They’ve– they’ve got him.”
Eddie sits up, squeezing Steve’s knee tight, the bite of his fingernails into burnt flesh aching. “Hopper’s who’s in trouble?”
He nods, and sits, watching Hopper struggle, watching Will and Eddie trade looks around him, watching the woman hang up the phone with a sigh.
“Where?” Eddie asks.
Steve doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, but it’s Eddie who’s asking, so he closes his eyes. He closes his eyes and focuses. “There’s dirt,” he says, “and vines, and—”
There’s nothing else. No discernable features of the landscape he both can and cannot see, but he’s squinting into his own mind hard enough that the back of his skull starts aching like it’s splitting open and that’s when he feels it: a pull.
It’s coming from the back of his head, like a migraine, aching at the join between his neck and skull. He lets his head sway with it, then points with the sway.
He closes his eyes, focuses on the man, and lets the pull take him.
It’s like walking through purgatory – following the lines in his mind. He’s going the right way, can feel it just as surely as he can feel Eddie’s burning hand on his elbow and Will’s burning fingers on his ankles.
He doesn’t open his eyes, just walks, and walks, until there’s nowhere to walk anymore.
It’s not until he stops that the implications of the pull yanking him down sink in. He wants to drop to his knees and scrabble at the ground with his nails. But he’s down too deep, and time’s running out.
He opens his eyes and looks down. There’s a rotten pumpkin under his shoe, foot turning it to mush. Beneath that, there’s dirt. Dirt and vines. Steve points down to it, and looks up to meet Eddie’s worried eyes.
“He’s running out of time,” Steve says, watching both Eddie’s eyebrows furrow, and the way the man’s fingers are still flexing on the vine around his throat, keeping it at bay.
“He’s down there?” the woman asks, unhelpful in her hysteria.
Steve watches the reality unfurl in Eddie’s eyes and then looks down at the dirt beneath his feet and watches the man struggle.
People flit around him like ants. He doesn’t pay it any mind. Will and Eddie are here, and everything else is just killing time.
Part 78
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Hi, how did you learn to draw Steve's physique?
Ohh what a complicated thing to answer...
When it comes to how I learned to draw anything, it's hard to say anything too specific since it's always a culmination of many years of assorted study and practice... but I can try to do my best to explain some of the biggest things that helped me learn, some tips I keep in mind, and maybe at least some places to start/delve further.
(just a little disclaimer it's not like my drawings here are going to be 100% medically accurate.. they're just to illustrate concepts!)
The main thing about learning various physiques is understanding anatomy. Which feels obvious, but I don't mean proportions; these are important, but perhaps more important is understanding the skeleton and how it moves and learning where muscles connect to bones and where fat grows on the body. When you understand how these function on a more mechanical level, depicting form and movement in a way that feels natural comes in tow.
For instance, understanding things like the pronation and supination of the radius and ulna, as well as the fact that muscles can ONLY contract or relax, will help you understand a bit better which muscles will be flexed and which will not while someone moves. It's inherent to the positioning based on the structural makeup of the body... It's not like you NEED to memorize all the muscles and bones, of course, but understanding and gaining at least a passive familiarity with the concepts really helps.
In tandem with this concept is the way parts of the body flow into eachother. Muscles ALWAYS come in groups because they can only contract. Whatever muscle is there to lift something, there is a muscle on the other side to pull that bone back down. What this results in is a series of straight edges next to curves, which gives us a lot of really lovely "s curves" and dents and folds and so on and so forth just naturally occurring.
I would suggest at least learning the "bony landmarks", which are bones (usually) visible on the surface of the body. things like the iliac crest, the great trochanter, the 7th vertabrae, the acromion process... These can be used to help you understand the parts of the body as angles and relationships, rather than trying to remember lengths and sizes, which vary immensely... (since you asked about steve, he can be our model... also study these on your own don't just take my word for it haha, these are the ones I personally keep in mind)
I've done the same thing with body hair... learning where it grows and in which directions... It helps me make up variations without needing reference, because I have a set of rules I can follow.
The biggest thing that helped me understand all this on a much deeper level was my ecorche course. I sculpted this guy. We started by sculpting the entire skeleton to understand the bones, and then we added muscles on top. Not every single muscle, of course, but the "artistic muscles" AKA the ones which directly affect the surface of the body. Doing this let us see where muscles connect, because we would make a shape, put it on the bone where it actually goes, and then you get to see how other muscles overlap that.
This helped me, perhaps, more than anything else. But I also didn't just start with this course, I had been drawing for years before I even took it. I had been in school for years before I took it. Not that I think it wouldn't be helpful to someone just starting out, but I do think that the more you know going in, the better an in-depth course like this will help you and stick with you. Classes are also expensive, though so I'm not really like... recommending you pay potentially thousands of dollars to take one... But it did help me a lot, personally.
I also, of course, have done many figure, gesture, and master studies...
These just help you quickly gain a stronger understanding of generalized anatomy, and gives you real life examples of and practice with of how people move and balance.
What all this does when combined, is gives me a very solid ability to depict movement and form in a way that feels relatively natural from my subconscious without the need for reference.
The rest of how I've learned to draw his physique is honestly mostly just stylization. I understand the body, and this is how I am depicting it for his level of musculature.
And as I move into depicting him in other ways, either moving in comics or in animation, realistically rendered, or extra stylized, these concepts inform every step of that process for me! When he keeps the same/similar relationships between parts, he gets to still look like himself.
It ALSO really helps when putting clothes on, because the way cloth falls and bunches and lifts is all directly related to the form it is on... So the more you understand that form, the more you can depict clothing and movement in a way that feels natural.
This is all, of course, true when I draw anyone, you asked about Steve so I'm trying to mostly show with him! But because I'm just drawing from raw information of general anatomy rather than trying to study one body type at a time, it allows a lot more "give," I think!
Like, here's most of the cast from TTA so far... actually, they're not as varied as I thought they were nevermind LMAO ignore this part
But, it also makes monster and alien design much easier! It's a lot easier to come up with non-human anatomy when I understand human anatomy, because I can manipulate the knowledge I have...
There is infinite more to study in the world of anatomy... The complexity of the human body goes extremely deep. For our purposes as artists, we need only depict a fraction of it, but more information rarely hurts the process.
I'm sure there's something in here that's wrong on a technical level, I'm mostly going off of memory. But that's kind of my point - I understand enough generally and conceptually that when I am missing something and need to find reference for it, I understand what I'm looking at. It's much easier than trying to learn AND draw at the same time.
I hope even one thing in here helped you! Sorry it's so long.
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