How To Draw Veins On An Arm

Okay, allow me preface this by saying that I am not terribly skilled at this yet. =Durge-Takanawa requested that I show how I did the veins in this piece, and I'thou happy to oblige

Before we get started, you should know that fifty-fifty if you're cartoon imaginary characters, you lot have to wait to reality. You are not drawing abstract art, so there are rules you have to follow. Drawing veins on muscular characters is no exception. Hither are some ground rules:

The veins yous see are not randomly placed. There are major veins that are in well-nigh the same place in everyone. Now, there is certainly a lot of individual variation in how those major veins branch off, fade out, coil upward, bulge etc. Just the fact is that yous need to go along the major veins in mind, or else the issue volition just look weird. Do some inquiry first. Practise google and wikipedia searches for "superficial veins." Gray'south Anatomy (the book, not the prove) has some pretty decent diagrams showing many of the superficial veins of the body.
Not every muscular guy has veins, and not every skinny guy lacks them. There is a lot of variation in how veiny peoples' muscles await. Some have a sort of "spiderweb" of little tiny veins criscrossing over their artillery; others have just 1 or ii really conspicuous large veins; yet others don't show veins at all. I haven't found any explicit information to dorsum the following up, but I get the impression that how veiny someone looks is tied to what body type they are. Ectomorphs (thin, wiry) and mesomorphs (average, beefy, like our t-rex dude here) seem to show more veins than endomorphs (large, thick, kinda similar Tank).
Veins are round and stand off from the skin. This has some important consequences for how they look when they fold, co-operative, curl, wrap around muscles, are shaded etc. If you just draw some squiggles on there it won't look right.

Okay. So let'southward get started. The steps hither correspond to the above image, obviously

I've finished inking the original drawing, and this is how his left arm looks right now. Beefy, but we demand more
Hither I've fatigued some guides on another layer. If you take a wait at some beefcake diagrams, yous'll meet this large vein starting on the deltoids (the shoulder), running downwardly the outside of the biceps, joining together with another vein on the inside of the elbow, so kind of branching out on the forearm. So I've fatigued the general track of that large vein hither. There are one or 2 smaller veins that co-operative out across the biceps as well.
I'1000 inking this in SAI, which has a vector-based ink layer. You might have to alter the steps for your program (Photoshop in particular..). But anyway I've grabbed the pen tool and inked the edges of the veins. I've decided that this guy would await good with a couple big veins, instead of a agglomeration of smaller ones. You'll detect some important things here. For one, the way they fade out at the ends. If you're using a tablet, this is much easier to achieve if y'all use a hard tip feel (look in your tablet'south settings). For two, observe the parts circled in cherry. Retrieve, veins are round, and so when they branch off, information technology'south not only going to exist a apartment curve. The petty hooks there give an impression of depth and roundness. This is important for all kinds of inking, only information technology's particularly important here, or else they'll wait more like a tattoo than a vein.
This is an extremely important stride! Find what'due south changed in the red circled areas? Right; the outer edges of the muscles now have niggling bumps where the vein wraps effectually them. This is another effect of veins being circular and continuing off of the skin. Compare the result of this stride to stride 3; looks a lot better, huh?
This is the last of the inking. What I've done here is come back with the pressure tool and lightened up the lines at semirandom intervals (marked by the carmine circles). I exercise this with all of my lines to aid intermission up the "bogus" look that comes from the vector inks, but it serves another purpose here. Remember that veins are underneath the pare, and the pare will sometimes flatten them out. This causes them to become a little more vaguely-defined, and the edges won't be so hard. In addition, I've as well lightened the overall pressure of the lines, since they were looking a bit thick in the last stride.
Okay, I figure you know how to color in a drawing, so I won't patronize yous past showing that footstep Here the colors are already down and I've moved on to shading. I've left the rest of the arm unshaded so you can see exactly what I'm doing with the vein. Once again, veins are round, so they volition have shadows and highlights just similar whatsoever other role of the trunk. If you lot put just shadows or just highlights, they'll expect odd. But as well don't make the shadows too dark or the highlights as well calorie-free; veins are small and don't catch or block that much lite. I adopt to shade with Sai's water brush tool; it lets you lay down some color and then blend it nicely, all just by changing how hard you press. This was washed on a Shade layer, btw, which is something similar a burn layer in Photoshop I remember.
At present for the highlights. Aforementioned bargain, except this time on a lumi layer, which is kind of like dodge. The highlights are kind of blobby-looking, to give an indication that the veins are a bit imperfect and bumpy (which they are). This is the point at which I stopped in the original piece, but in that location'southward another optional stride.
This is optional. Veins carry deoxygenated blood (which is actually dark red, not blue; the blue colour comes from something called Rayleigh Scattering which is also responsible for the color of the sky and for blue eyes). In short, veins look blueish So you tin can add a bit of a blue cast to them similar this. I decided to skip this pace in the original because typically the bluish doesn't show through on darker skin, and equally a result it looked a chip odd.