turianmailman:

Well thank you and I will try my best to explain how I do my magic

The big secret to poses and stuff is to just keep your hand really really loose and flowy. I kinda pretend the body I’m drawing is made up of water and doesn’t really have any bones-once I figure out the pose, THEN I hammer it down with technical work and fine detail.

There’s also the magical and mystical “line of action”

These guys are really important and are a tremendous help out if the drawing your making looks a little stiff. The line of action is basically one giant sweeping line that creates an arc that your characters body can follow. REALLY good for dynamic poses. Speaking of dynamic poses:

Dynamic poses are better achieved if there is perspective thrown into the mix-an upshot a downshot, any way you can change up how the character is facing the “camera” other than directly placed in front of it. Notice how the line of action is pretty much the same, except its volume changes in each drawing.

I also wanna point out that those weird skeleton model Q-Tip thingies do absolutely fuck all for helping with posing and volume construction.

On the left I used the Q-Tip atrocity and on the right I broke the body into shapes and used the spine as a sort of guide/line of action. The Q-Tip drawing got the girl placed into the sketch (basically just putting a “marker” down for where shes gonna be standing) but thats about it. The shapes method helps figuring out the spacing between body parts, defines the line of action easier, and is far less rigid than the Q-Tip method.

The Q-Tip also doesn’t help with proportioning or perspective so unless you can somehow make it work for you I really don’t recommend using that.

As for expressions I kinda already did a post on that HERE but I’ll explain it a little bit more in this post.

Emotions can be simplified into 3 building blocks (I’m not counting fear here as thats technically a primal response to danger and not really an emotion.) Combining said bulding blocks together to create more complex emotions is what gives us good acting in a character. Just keeping them among the 3 blocks is what keeps them stale.

Not only does combining emotions spice up the character acting, but distorting facial features is a big help too-like the shrinking and expanding of the iris for example.

Lastly when creating an expression you wanna use the WHOLE FACE not just the eyes. Involving the nose, the cheeks and the mouth and eyes all at once is what really defines what the character is feeling without the use of words.

I’m really bad at getting my thoughts all together in a coherent fashion so I hope I managed to explain it all okay. What really REALLY REALLY helps is studying people in movies or even watching people in public interacting with each other. Studying from life is the best thing you can do-ESPECIALLY when it comes to poses and anatomy.