Drawing Poses

[Yuki H.]

=[ I've been fighting with poses for a very long time, and I want to end this war.. Actually, I've tried tutorials, and those would work for a second, then one morning I just cannot draw it the same way I used to, or it wouldn't work out so well if I were to do something different (like a sitting pose or something).

How do you start off drawing a full bodied pose?
(one standing, dynamic poses, weird poses, poses at different angles, etc.)
A friend of mine told me to start off drawing the central axis line, make a stick figure by drawing lines for the hips and shoulders, add some sort of curvature to the arms and legs..

If I have a pose in mind, I usually have some issues with fleshing out the figure properly, or if I were to start with the shoulders going down (or any order except the head), the head wouldn't really 'fit in'..

What should I do, where should I go? (Or is there anybody out there willing to show me?)

[bhanu]

Start reading and practicing from book byt bridgeman, loomis, hogarth. I dont think you need to do much else right now. THese books are available for free online and very cheap softcover by dover publications.
Practice makes perfect, remember this.

[SlowhandHenry]

Just be willing to keep on working at it. Nothing in the art world is easy, it's always comes with years of drawing critiqueing studying be a sponge and soak up all that interest you... Even be willing to look at things that might not, you might open up your mind to new worlds.
Heinrich Kley is a great book to look at by dover. Forget online buy the book real cheap like Banu said. 20 bucks and it's worth gold to an artist.

[Yuki H.]

Thank you..
But, may I ask, what process do you go through in order to draw a pose?

[Crush]

Step 1; Take a sharp pencil
Step 2; Take a piece of paper
Step 3; Use the pencil to draw pose onto the paper any way you wish

There really is no secret formula to it, once you have the knowledge of where everything is and what it all looks like then you can do what you want with it.

Action lines and whatever else your friend has told you can help to get a dynamic pose, but if you don't have a thorough knowledge of anatomy then no little tricks in the world will help you.

Just look at this short clip of Marko Djudjevic working and you'll see what I mean, there are no shortcuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhF4fBetN4Y

[JL.Alfaro]

There is a shortcut,you can make a lot of mistakes but in the end it will save you tons of hours of frustration and wasted time. Its called practice.
I'm thinking about patenting it, maybe sell a book about it.

[Puck]

There is a shortcut,you can make a lot of mistakes but in the end it will save you tons of hours of frustration and wasted time. Its called practice.
I'm thinking about patenting it, maybe sell a book about it.

It seems more common in today’s world, that people want life to be like the movie "the Matrix" where you can just plug yourself in and a minute later you can say "I know Kung Fu". It must be frustrating to realise that practice is the only answer for people that are used to getting what they want straight away (don't save for it! put it on your credit card!). I'm not targeting you Yuki, I've just been noticing it a lot lately.

So if you want to get good at poses, do a few years of life drawing. If you'd like a formula for drawing poses (albeit not very good ones without the aforementioned practice) then start with a torso, plant the legs next, then the arms and the head last (because they usually 'follow' the weight of the rest of the figure, although the arms will be counter balancing as well as doing all the funky things arms like to do).

[Yuki H.]

To Puck + Crush: Thank you, seriously..
(even though Puck wasn't targeting me, I'm not looking for instant knowledge.. I just curious what others would do, because a good amount of people would use geometric figures in order to draw something, or some stick figure.)

To JL: Yeah, you go do that; you'll be like Paris who patented 'That's Hot'.

[FlameDragon]

Step 1; Take a sharp pencil
Step 2; Take a piece of paper
Step 3; Use the pencil to draw pose onto the paper any way you wish

There really is no secret formula to it, once you have the knowledge of where everything is and what it all looks like then you can do what you want with it.

Action lines and whatever else your friend has told you can help to get a dynamic pose, but if you don't have a thorough knowledge of anatomy then no little tricks in the world will help you.

Just look at this short clip of Marko Djudjevic working and you'll see what I mean, there are no shortcuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhF4fBetN4Y

Awesome vid

[Farvus]

It's actually simple. To be able to draw dynamic poses you need to sit down and draw lots of different poses from life, photos, anatomy books or copy paintings of old masters'. After that you draw what you remembered.

[S!R]

This video series, has been helping me personally..
It's about $50 if you buy it. You can find portions of it on youtube and other random webspots, but there is something like 150-200 lessons in total...very helpful i believe.

http://the-structure-of-man.blogspot.com/

[Duq]

One thing that I learned, is to forget about the arms when starting with poses. Poses are alot easier of you only focus on legs/pelvis/chest/neck/head. When you can bend the body like you want you can add arms and voila.

[brianhamner]

Listen to farvus, get some reference material. Take a pic of your friend in the pose you want to draw and then draw the photo. If you get stuck on something, trace it.

[Farvus]

brianhammer - I actually prefer something different. Draw as many poses from reference as possible and when you feel confident enough, throw those photos away and be free. Draw whatever you want from imagination :).

There is also one useful thing. When you can't figure out how to draw some character, go to some nearby big mirror and make the pose you want to achieve. Remember it, go back do pencil and paper and sketch it. Voila! Ian McCaig said he uses this and he has his mirror in the bathroom :D.

[dose]

Check out this drawing by Cambiaso. It says a lot more about your question than I could.

To draw like this, you need a really good understand of perspective and anatomy. To turn those cube-people into regular figures, you need a good understanding of anatomy and figure structure.

Ultimately, you'd want to get to the point where you don't need to draw the cubes- they're just there in your mind. But that takes a lot of study & practice.

So in other words, your problem isn't necessarily with "poses". It's a lack of understanding of perspective and construction of the figure. I'd recommend studying those until you can make a drawing like Cambiaso's out of your head.

Hope this helps

Tim

[dose]

Oh, and do lots of drawing from life and reference. You need that along with the technical knowledge.