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0:00 What makes a pose actually dynamic? Brains love patterns, eyes follow the curve, and that's why we use curves to help guide the eye in our paintings. But, to make something truly dynamic, to add change, energy, activity, are random curves really enough? Something is missing. When something disrupts the curve, has an impact because it disrupts the pattern our brains like. [music] That is how you make something dynamic. But, while logically we might know this, this gives us the problem of how we could realistically add this concept into our workflow of drawing. I found a solution that might interest you. This This curved T in 3D space solved all my problems. So, [music] I'm going
0:46 to show you three ways of how to draw dynamically, easy to challenging, and how this boring, simple T changed the way I thought about drawing poses, and can maybe change yours. Imagine you want to draw a character, >> [music] >> any character, in a full body pose. Like any resourceful artist, you do the smart thing and find good references of the human body before you start [music] drawing. But, before you could even place your pen onto the tablet, there's already a problem. The pose you have in your head that you want to draw doesn't have any good photos you can use for reference. >> [music] >> Maybe it's because it's an action pose with weird angles that are hard for photographers to capture. But, for whatever reason, you realize
1:32 you have two problems now. You want to make a good [music] dynamic pose, and you're going to have to do this from scratch. So, let's start with a fix for that, which is simultaneously the easiest way to add movement to [music] a drawing, the curved T, which you've been seeing me use in the background so far. [music] The goal is to establish three things: the curve, the impact to make it dynamic, >> [music] >> and a way to draw the human body. Draw a random curved line, a C curve, [music] that folds in on itself. Place it in 3D space by not making it just a line, but a ribbon. And for impact, place another ribbon perpendicular, but connected to that first line. The resulting shape looks simple, like a T cut out of paper. And you can rotate that T however you want, as long as there is a curve or
2:19 twist on it. Building the body using this [music] curved T, by making the torso follow the curve of the long line, you can draw the human body both with a curve, the torso and legs, and with impact, the perpendicular upper limbs. The T is [music] important because it has a front and a back. If the front of the T is showing, >> [music] >> it should be the front of the body you're drawing. If the back of the T is showing, the back of the body or limb should be angled to show. You don't need to follow it perfectly, as long as the overall flow of action matches the lines. You could say that it's [music] the line of action, but it's not really a line. It's kind of an upgraded version of it, because if you're drawing it right, you can [music] see the folds, the front, the back, and
3:06 actual curve in 3D space, which should help you with the 3D aspect of drawing. Starting with this curved T adds movement to the body. And if the character is taking an action like attacking with a weapon, the weapon can follow the limb as an extension of the body. The typical advice to draw more dynamically is to do a bunch of gesture drawing from photos and to draw the line of action. But, there was a basic problem with the way I drew gestures. I wasn't truly looking at the body and drawing it in a 3D way, with volume and flow. So, I found using this curved T instead made a huge difference. If you're worried about how much a certain body part can turn or rotate, just check the range of motion or ROM. You can just search it up for a specific body part to
3:52 see how far a limb can or can't move. You don't need to memorize it, but as long as you follow the flow of your guideline and bend body parts within motion, a full body dynamic pose is not too hard. I recommend using the curved T for an easy full body pose. It gives you flow, impact, and a base to build the body from scratch. But, what if I want a dynamic half body pose instead? You might think [music] it's easier because you don't have to worry about the legs, but less of the body means less [music] joints and limbs to make an interesting curve and impact. So, something needs to change. >> [music] >> Instead of using the long part of the T for the spine, use it to represent a
4:38 limb outstretched to an imaginary camera, and make sure the position of the body is perpendicular to the limb for more impact. This is much more difficult because of foreshortening, when you need to distort the limb to make it larger as it gets closer to you. And that's a whole 'nother skill. >> [music] >> But, poses like this, where the limb is reaching towards the camera, have a certain vibe, like a still or snapshot of something in the middle of an action. So, why do I consider this harder? Following the rule of making things bigger when closer is easy enough at first when only drawing [music] the body. But, adding clothes leads to yet another layer of difficulty. When the body is bare or in skin-tight suits where muscles are clearly defined, you can easily see the gradual increase
5:24 in size when the limbs get closer. But, like in this drawing, as soon as you start drawing clothes, you need to make sure the silhouette is minimally disrupted to keep the illusion of the limb getting bigger, on top of trying to draw the folds accurately. Here, I erase everything and redraw the clothes from scratch to try and match the character design with thinner sleeves while adding wind to blow the sleeves and add movement. But, it ends up looking so much worse than before, so I have to retry again. I'm half sure the reason why superhero suits are all skin-tight is because of this. >> [music] >> Drawing heroes means drawing action. Foreshortening is definitely a way to draw it, and if base muscles and perspective is already a challenge, doing that with actual clothes every day, I can't even imagine doing that. Knowing
6:11 this, if you do try foreshortening, I recommend trying to draw a character with clothing that hugs the body, since the form is much easier to visualize. Or, armor. That's another good one. Once [music] you start adding loose folds to this is when the difficulty starts biting. But, let's say you hate yourself even more than that. Sorry. Let's say you want even more of a challenge. Make it even more dynamic, but with another twist. What if the character I want to draw is a boring person standing completely straight, no fancy limb placements? Using the curved T showed me the impact curves and the importance of visualizing space in my drawings. So, to take it a step further, let's look beyond the T. If the pose itself is boring and stiff,
6:58 use curved space. If the space around the character is distorted just as much as the character is, [music] the character can still pose the most boring pose imaginable, but still be dynamic. If you want to do this, the keywords are four or five-point curvilinear perspectives. This box, [music] simple three-point perspective. This box, you can tell this is curvilinear perspective because curves. But, also lines converge to the left, right, up, down, and diagonally to the bottom right. This requires a whole 'nother video to explain fully if you've never heard of this, but [music] if you've ever used a fish-eye lens before, you would see that it distorts the image [music] or space in a certain way, because we're taking a wider field of
7:43 view and squishing it so we can see more of the background. The way four- or five-point perspective distorts things is predictable because math. But, so predictable that people have made grids, which you can use as a guide to draw backgrounds on. Just follow the grid when drawing. The closer to the center of the grid, the closer the background looks. So, to do this, you already need to know foreshortening on top of learning a whole 'nother perspective or two. But, there's lots of resources out there by people who do this all the time. I'd recommend these three if you're willing to take a challenge. You can take [music] this to the next level and draw truly crazy dynamic things. Paintings where it
8:29 looks like the environment [music] itself is moving and exploding in ways so unreal, it inspires [music] you to start drawing, which is why I consider this the most difficult of all three of these ways to make dynamic poses in drawings. Once your sketches are done, you can color it in. I liked this [music] one the best. I think harsh lighting compliments poses like this a lot, so you'll see me block in the flats, and then use hard light layers to paint in the shadows and lights, like how I explained in my previous videos about lighting and color.
9:18 Curves, a curved T, and more curves is how you make your drawings more dynamic. If you'd like to see me finish rendering these sketches from this video, stay tuned for the next videos from me. Keep drawing. See you.
