How to Draw Interesting Poses

[Music] hi my name is cassin and in this uh video I'm going to show you how to uh make characters less boring if your problem is that you end up with poses that are stiff and your characters just look boring um hopefully this will give you some tips on how to make more Dynamic poses and uh make your uh characters more interesting to look at so let's uh deal with probably the worst most boring uh pose you could think of and then we'll go on and improve on it so just going to sketch in a character real quick and uh get the proportions [Music] down so there um let's say this is a woman character and here we have a very boring pose um I could flesh it out a bit just because it's a bit hard to see doing her in a bit of a cartoony Style but yeah so we have a character and she's just standing here and not doing much and everything is pretty much straight on so if you split lit down the middle she's pretty much symmetrical and added this thing with her hair that it's not symmetrical um but if we didn't have that she would pretty much be just a symmetrical boring character um and another boring pose would be a on side view so how do we make these more interesting well an easy way is to add variation and to get rid of symmetry um probably the thing that kills a good pose the fastest or an appealing image let's call it that an appealing image is symmetry when things just uh look the same on both sides so here there's less symmetry uh in the pure side view so it's already a tiny bit more interesting than this view which is straight on but we can take this View and work on it so that it's more interesting so I'm just going to copy and paste this and let's see what we can do to make this more interesting well an easy thing is to change the angle Les of the shoulders and the hips and you want to do it so if the shoulders are going at this angle the hips are going to counter them in that angle so that you end up with a balanced pose so let's go ahead and do that so I'm going to tilt the shoulders a bit and the hips and now that's going to change the legs a little bit and now this leg can't be the same length as uh this leg cuz the hip's raised and this hip's lowered so this leg's going to need to be bent or I mean like if it's straight on it's going to need to be a bit bent or push to the side a bit so I'm going to push it to the side and now instantly we have a better pose just by uh changing the angles of the uh shoulders and the hips but what else can we do well another thing we can do to add variation um right now you see we have this nice kind of S curve that formed whereas here everything's just straight up and down now we have this nice s um we can tilt her head as well so let's do that I'll make a copy of this and going to tilt her head but what I'll try and do is I don't want it to be looking you know in the same direction as this body so maybe her head's looking in this direction and the reason I'm doing that is cuz her body is kind of facing this way right so I'm going to tilt her head in the opposite direction now remember why we're doing this is because we just want to get as much variation as possible and get rid of uh some of the symmetry so there that's a bit better she kind of looking down like that and another thing you can do is start to bring the body so it's not just you know straightforward we can start to twist things even more so in the same way that we Twisted her head I'm going to twist other parts of her body so her head's looking this way I'm going to bring this shoulder forward and push this one back so instead of this where her shoulders are like this I'm going to take it so this one comes forward and then this one goes back in space so we have some perspective going on let's go ahead and do that and I'm going to have her body twist in a way that this part's facing this way and then this part's facing this way let's bring her shoulder forward push this one back and now her Center Line instead of being in the middle of uh her body it's moved off to the side so now this arm shows and this arm the shoulders back here so maybe you don't see you know you don't see it coming out you just see it kind of peeking out from behind here cuz if we were to draw that arm in it would be going behind this body right so you don't see that and so now we have the body twisting like this and now the shoulders are doing this so I'm going to switch the hips so this one is raised it's really going to make things a lot more Dynamic and I'm going to push this leg back in space so like that so instead of this just being you know both feet are on the same level now nothing's on the same level one shoulder up one shoulder down um one foot is back one foot is [Music] forward so we're really Chang changing the pose quite a bit and cuz this arm comes forward I'm actually going to make this leg come forward usually what happens is if you have one like the left arm coming forward the left uh the right leg the opposite leg will probably come forward so now I have a pose where one legs forward one legs back one arms forward one arm is back and I'm going to bend her arm so that the hands aren't both coming out so maybe she's holding on to uh side of her body and I want to get this so her head's facing this way so we have the curve like the curve of the center line it's going to go down here and it's going to twist here come this way it's going to twist and go this way going have this push out so I want to make that leg a bit different so it's actually pushing out like so and I also just gave a bit of gesture to this hand making it a bit more interesting and now instead of making this hand just coming straight like this I'm going to add some for shortening so this arm's going forward and the way I do foreshortening is I like to think in terms of of cylinders so it shapes like this and then I get rid of this for example this is coming towards us this is going in this direction so going to have it so the arm is coming towards us like this and then it bends back so now we have some overlap have a more Dynamic pose but we can take this even further and how do we do that well we can introduce perspective so right now if we uh look at this character we're kind of looking right here so if this is the camera it's kind of looking dead on right well you can raise that camera so you're kind of looking up or looking I mean looking down or uh looking up that's going to change the perspective so let's do one where we're like near the floor and we're looking up at her so I'm just getting in a Rough Guide of some perspective lines and I'm going to just do the same pose but uh in perspective so have her head it's going to look pretty small because we're looking up and uh have our hips going like this and now I'm starting to use Circle shapes for this line the line of the hips so I can see it as a 3D form so this whole body kind of is like a cylinder like this so now we have a much more uh Dynamic pose uh we have tons of asymmetry if you split this down the middle the sides are going to look completely different and so that's really a a push Dynamic pose um but even if you forgo the weird crazy perspective and you just stuck with this version here it's still pretty interesting um when you compare it to this straight one or this perfectly uh you know facing just a side view one so it's all just things to think about um how to add variation so tilts uh tilt the head tilt the body uh the shoulders the hips make you know twist not just tilt but add twist so the body's twisting around head's twisting um and just variations like break things up that creates a more interesting silhouette and this really works for everything if you have any kind of pose you can make it more interesting by looking at that even if it's just a head and it's a portrait and you have like this is your composition have a guy and he's just looking at us this is me by the way so yeah he's just looking at us it's boring want to make that more interesting twist the uh the shoulders give it like a 3/4 look make some tilt to the head so maybe the head head's tilted bit like this this is pretty extreme you don't have to go this crazy but head tilted and maybe head's tilted like this but the body is still facing forward so then you're going to get some nice twisting happening with the neck maybe one shoulder is raised and one's kind of lowered maybe this is resting somewhere so anyway I think you get the idea just add variation as much as you can and I understand this is this is pretty Advanced um because you might be able to know this on a level where it makes sense as a concept but then executing it is a bit of a different story so what you do need for this to work is you do need to understand your forms how things appear in the 3D space um but if you're at that stage and your poses are still looking boring um then this is something you should consider what are you looking at all right so um yeah I think even if you're starting out you can just try and add little bits of variation you know turn the face just a bit B maybe have the body turned a bit that way so you know you get just some small variation it doesn't take much just to add that interest all right hope that helps

Channel: Sycra

Views: 1,638,981

Keywords: how, to, draw, interesting, poses, dynamic, not, static, boring, pose, contrapposto, counterpose, drawing, sketch, sketching, art

Id: b1nxf5KQ2Js

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2012