Here are some shots of the various revisions of Danni’s (lack of) hair, I thought you all might find them amusing.
On to women’s legs as promised:
One of the most common anatomical distortions in figures and indeed all representations of women is the length of their legs. So much is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever paused to think about it but we want a more thorough understanding of how much and in what way conventional representations depart from reality.
First I have a shocking revelation for all males out there. Women, according to the U.S. army who have taken a measuring tape to a rather large sample, have on average… proportionally shorter legs than men.
Oh the humanity! How is this possible you ask? Have men been blind. The answer is, shoes and confusion about where the waist is. You see a man’s waist, (though this may not be true of many gamers) is generally reckoned to be just above his hips because his ribcage is about as wide as his pelvic bone. A typical woman by contrast has a hipbone wider than her ribcage making the narrow point higher. Figure 1.
So, typically how long are women’s legs? The average for Europeans is a bit less than half overall height from hip-joint to sole of foot. Perhaps more interesting, the difference between extraordinarily long and extraordinarily short legs for two women of the same overall height is only about three inches (7.5cm).
But the problem of distortion doesn’t end there. When legs are extended many sculptors seem to be under the delusion arm length should follow torso length.. This seems to be the result of formulas they learned in art books saying the arms at the sides should fall to a certain point. The problem with such formulas is they only hold for the average. When lengthening women’s legs to a degree only one woman in a hundred shows in real life is a ‘normal’ distortion you can’t then apply a formula for arm length meant for a woman with real normal proportions.
In fact arm length in women with extremely long legs tends to follow leg length. The long bones tend to all be longer together. Just to show biological forms don’t follow neat abstract formulas (Leonardo take note), women with shorter legs do have arms which seem to follow torso length. (figure 2)
Next time, elbows and forearms.
