Beginner Figure Drawing - Composing the Figure

1. Trailer: In our next lesson in begin to figure joint, we're going to move on to learning about composing. Composing is really about giving ourselves the freedom to draw the figure in whichever way we want and not be beholden to the reference image. Withdrawing from, in this lesson, we'll cover some more advanced gesture and construction tools. Have a look at how we go about stabilizing L poses and we'll finish it off with a atan during session as always, but there will be an additional challenge involved with this talk. So if you're ready for the next part of your figure drawn GOD, then let's get started. 2. Definition of Composing: Throughout this series of figure during lessons, we've covered a lot of information in order to get our concept of the human body down onto paper. We've started with the ideas of gesture and construction, the foundations for all that poses moved onto developing these ideas in a more dynamic way. Looked at measurements and proportion before finally taking a detailed look at each area of the body individually. During this entire series, we've been doing a lot of drawing, trying to build a database and mode's about how to construct the figure. But what we haven't done for most of this time is a lot of composing of the figure. So what do we mean by composing? Composing the figure essentially means giving ourselves the freedom to take our idea of what the human figure is to the next level. In other words, what we're saying when we are talking about composing is about adding a theme or an emotion to S sketch. Another way to look at this is adding a story. That story can be something that signifies tension, action. It can be a very strong or subtle emotion. It can even be something that speaks philosophically. Essentially what we want to be doing from this point on with their finger drawing is taking the knowledge that we've learned from our previous lessons. Taking all this more technical information, how we go about drawing our figure. And to now start thinking about attaching a greater meaning to it. We want to now control figure does how it looks and instill whatever emotion, theme, or story we want into its design. At the end of it, all, we really want to consider ourselves as being composes, not artists. A composer not only decides where the components in the composition are placed, but is also attempting to place the components in a way that generate a specific reaction from the audience. This relates to not just drawing the figure, but really any creative endeavor. Music, movie making, dancing, Kraftwerk, architecture. The list goes on. Every piece of creative work you've ever liked has been done by an artist who had something to say. In essence, we want to be thinking beyond just copying the posts from here on in and putting a piece of ourselves into our drawings. And if we've done our job right, as composers, if we've crafted our composition clearly, the audience will react in the way we desire. So let's start to break free of the shackles and start diving into some tools to help us with that. Now. 3. Stability, Instability & Action: We had to look at balance in lesson four, we talked about looking for where the white is being distributed in our figure. So let's expand poem this now with a more refined look at how to apply this in how figured compositions. If we are looking to now stop placing our figure in our own unique compositions from imagination. Then one of the tools that can help us to ensure our figures and nice and stable in their environment is a simple triangle. So how does the humbled triangle help us out here? The triangle is a shape that best represents a stable figure. The head representing the tip of the triangle and the legs acting as the supporting structures either saw it. The center of gravity in our figure is going to vary from pose to pose. In this upright position. It's right through the middle of our triangle between the two lakes structures in a more dynamic position, that center of gravity will shift over to one of the structures. Generally speaking, you can simply follow the position of the head to work out way you'll center of gravity isn't you'll figure the moment we move outside the center of gravity, outside the supporting structures of this area is weird. Things start to become unstable for our figure. Outside of the safe sign, figure will start to fall over. This means our triangle is going to act as a means to create poses that either have stability, instability or opposed with action in it. Why the triangle and not the square or circle? Well, if we compare the three shapes and if we were to try to roll them all over, the circle is obviously going to be a pretty easy shaped to move around. The square is a little bit more difficult, but ultimately with a little work, we can shift that overall. So the triangle is a very tricky shape to try to roll. In comparison, it doesn't have an easy way for us to stop moving it compared to the other two. So the triangle by its very nature, is a very stable shape. And one that we see in the human figure all the time. Any standing position of the figure with a front-back protocol or even the top view has this shite present in some white as we need to keep our figures looking balance and whited correctly. And it's not just for our biggest Where this shape is seen. You can see the triangle as the foundational shaping, all sorts of artistic compositions because of just how stable and versatile shape is. It can be used for portrait painting and epic landscape and imposing castle. The list goes on. But as we said, the triangle is not just useful for its stability, but also for creating instability and action. Stability is the triangle standing upright. Instability is the triangle standing upside down, and action is the triangle tilting over off its axis. Each of these three triangles depicts a different level of energy in our poses. And up right triangle gives up the feeling that there is very little movement happening, all likely to happen. If we look at our superhero character representing this shape, it doesn't look like he's about to be knocked. I've at anytime soon. So we can say this triangle shows very low levels of energy are upside down. Triangle gives off the impression something is about to happen because of how it's balanced precariously. Al beautiful dance, the heat is on her toes in full expression, we feel as if she's about to do something she might very well be about to leap in the air or pure await. We also know a 100% certain about what the next move is going to be. But we know eventually she's going to have to move from this position. That balance on her toes can only lost for so long before she has to move to stabilize itself again. So this triangle represents potential energy out tilted triangle shows us something that is happening or has happened. Our poll ydA, he has unfortunately slipped over and is about to spill the drinks he's carrying every way and nothing is going to stop that. Now triangles off axis and has no stability to its position. So this triangle represents pure energy or an action that is taking place. So when we start to think about composing the figure on airline or manipulating the posts from the references. Withdrawing from these three types of triangles, as simple as they can help to establish the type of parsers we are looking for. Now, you might be asking yourself, isn't the box also an option that can be used? The truth is, the box does have its uses, but it's mostly useful for something that is completely inactive, lifeless. For instance, if we are drawing a character who is sleeping, fled out on their bed, then the box is certainly an option we can use. But as soon as that character is up and out of that bed and moving around, then the triangle is going to be outgo to shape. 4. Tracking Gesture: Let's talk about an additional tool to help us with gesture. One thing many of us struggle with when drawing the figure for the first time is just how far to really push the gesture about poses. We've stated in previous lessons that we're always looking to exaggerate the position of our figure poses. Because once we start to build up Molas of construction, that underlying just your rhythm starts to decrease in his fluidity. But we also have a tendency to be overly cautious when trying to do this. As we said all the way back in lesson two, we have a very dynamic view of the world. We have this internal bias from ease of interacting with people either front on or from the protocol perspective. It's not often we're having conversations with people in the middle of them leaping in the a. So when we start to draw our dynamic action poses, we inevitably fall prey to these front-end profile biases, making them less dynamic and energetic. We've talked a lot about pushing the poses, but how do enough we're pushing them as far as we can go. What can we do to see these better? A simple tool we can use to help us awesome horizontal and vertical axis lines, which is going to help us trek out gesture. If we put in a couple of vertical and horizontal axis lines next, well figure. Then it suddenly means we have a reference point to compare a gesture to. We can use this vertical reference point and now start to map out just how much we've pushed the gesture. And the same goes for our horizontal references. Well, the beauty of this is that we can use it for any type of odd, we're doing realism then perhaps we don't necessarily want to be taking things too far. If we're doing cotwin animations, then maybe we really want to take this to the extreme, getting our Bugs Bunny top of character into a really crazy position, withdrawing superheroes and maybe way trying to find something in-between. So this simple set of access lines helps to give us an idea of exactly where our gesture curves stand and whether or not we need to do moral lists to it. Remember, once we start to build up layers of Anatomy, Muscle, chateaux, drapery, et cetera, owl gesture will start to stiffen up. So when in doubt, always lead to the more dynamic gesture pose. The other thing we can do if we getting stuck without gesture is to actually break it down into small pots. Now, this runs a little bit counter to what we've learned in the past. But sometimes we're going to find pauses that are challenging, that for whatever reason we just can't seem to get right. And it's often going to be easier in that instance to simply breakout gesture up into smaller coordinates. Essentially, we can take that axis concept that we've just learned about and shrink it down a little. Instead of drawing in those Access Guides, we can alternatively look to the most horizontal or vertical point of our figure and use that as a guide to start chiseling off out gesture. In this example, we can use this part of the figure as L vertical starting point. And like a wood Calvo or mob Aqaba, we can chisel out l gesture. We can almost consider this a way of creating gesture up through construction. How much you want to smooth that back to being more rounded and curved afterwards is ultimately going to come down to taste. But it's a simple tool that can help us if we getting stuck. So that's some advanced gesture composing options for us. Let's look at some more instructional methods. 5. Guiding The Audience: Let's take a look at some advanced construction methods now to help us with composing, or more specifically, help us to guide the audience's eye around. As we've said in previous lessons, one of the biggest challenges we are going to have is developing a sense of depth without poses. For the most part, cross contour lines have been the default way we've been going about achieving that illusion. We're trying to make our head or torso look like it's in a specific position. We'd been using these lines to help create that illusion. But there isn't always going to be a natural cross contour line available for the audience to see you now finished rendering, every so often will have a shadow shape, a fold of skin or no item of clothing that helps to track across the surface of the figure to help define its position and shape in 3D space. But we're not always going to have that luxury available to us. So what we have to do then is to find relationships within the structures. We've already got to help do that. More often than not, that's going to have to come from areas that don't have fully completed contours. But the great thing is, is that we don't actually need these contours to be complete across the figure. If we look at this example, these dots clearly tell our mind that a circle is being formed. Even though we can objectively say there's no circle prison, our minds are filling in the spaces and completing the circle for us. If we've done our job right as artists, then all we need to do is put down enough information and enough dots as it were to get the audience to complete the shape and the position of the form by themselves. We don't need dozens of cross contour lines moving across our figure. We just had enough inflammation of the form down on the page to let the audience fill in the gaps. The beauty of drawing in illustrating, and really any creative work for that matter. Music, movies, sculpture, writing, et cetera, is that the audience is more than capable of doing some of the work for us. Need to know every event of a character's daily life to tell this story, you just need to depict enough information from that day to tell the story. What's important is that we give enough information for our audience to fully clearly, the audience won't know if the position of the body part is correct unless they see how it relates to the other areas. If we've drawn a head that is positioned in a way that runs counter to the position of the torso, then it doesn't really matter how well rendered both areas up. We can have all the realistic coloring and lighting in the world. But if the information we've put down for this head and torso don't fit or relate to each other, then the audience is going to see something is wrong and the whole thing is going to fall apart. The responsibility falls entirely on us as the composers to make sure we've made decisions to that ring true and Cleave for the audience to understand. Going back to our dotted circle, if our goal is to create in the audience's mind that this is a circle. Then we need to avoid doing something like this. No matter how much we want them to see a circle in this series of dots, they are simply never going to see it. So we need to look at what's available to us on the figure and use it to our advantage, not just in terms of helping to define our construction to the audience, but to also further enhance our gesture. If we're doing something like the torso, we can usually get to this point and still have everything worked well of our gesture. But the moment we start to add in the more detailed parts, then all of a sudden our underlying gesture flow has started to become interrupted by all of these more detailed areas we are building up. We want our gesture to remain present and minimize the damage our construction does to it. So it let's look at some ways that we can offset this. 6. Contour Relationships: Continuing on from what we've just learned, essentially, what we're trying to do here is fine contour relationships. In previous lessons, we've talked about a couple of ways we can go about developing relationships for our construction in order to build depth. So let's just cover those briefly again, as well as some additional strategies we can use to not only develop our forms, but to use them to compose or orchestrate them better without gesture. Overlapping is the most obvious way we can help to create relationships in our forms. In fact, it gives us a pretty simple visual arrow to guide the eye across the form to define its shape and position. In lesson two, we talked about the bean-shaped, which is the best representation of this idea. The squashing side of the bean causes compressed faults. And even though they don't go all the way around the form, we still get the feeling of roundness of the bean shape and position here. We feel the contours tracking over the form even though it's an incomplete contour. This takes us to the second option that we've talked about previously and that is cross contouring. As we've already mentioned, every so often, we will get something that tracks all the way across the form and item of clothing or a piece of hair, some pinching skin, a cast shadow, something like a tattoo or a scar, can help track over the form of the figure. It's not always going to be a perfect cross contour, but it doesn't always need to be. It just needs to wrap around correctly enough to convey the position things, or into the audience. Another idea related to this is anatomy. We've got landmarks throughout our figure, both in terms of bone and muscle structures that we can also use to imply movement and position across our forms. We can usually find relationships throughout to help guide the audience across our form. The more muscular and athletic our figure is, the more of these landmarks we're going to have available for us. Moving on from this are intersecting forms. This is essentially eight more refined form of overlapping because sometimes overlapping doesn't always work to our favor. Perhaps due to the type of foreshortening that's going on. Or maybe it's just the pose itself being a bit tricky. Intersecting forms is when we merge or insert one form into the other or a transition from one form into another. The best representation for this type of shape is a mushroom, the stem inserting itself into the button, which is actually closer to what happens with muscles in real life. So an intersecting form moves around and merges into another. A good example of this is the arm inserting itself into the torso, which creates that mushroom type of shape. We can also see it sometimes in the torso itself. So those are some additional components we can use. But the beauty part is, is that we can use any number of these to get our point across. We may only need to use one of these strategies, or we may end up using all of them to help develop our form. But even then, it's still unlikely we're ever going to get a full cross contour line moving across are formed from one side to the other. But as we've already stated, that's perfectly okay. We don't even need for these construction details to be super obvious. We don't need a lot of them and they don't even need to track over the shape of the form perfectly. As long as we are consistent in our approach, the ID we'll come across. We've taken the same general idea with our dotted circle that we saw earlier and have now more or less applied the right information we need to get the audience to understand what shape it is they're looking at and what position it is in. 7. Composing Relationships: So how do we go about taking these additional construction strategies and having them compliment out gesture. Let's first develop a little bit of a torso posed for us to work with. And we're going to keep it nice and simple at this stage with a nice and easy bean-shaped to start with. Now, as we said in the past, the bean shape is great because it's both instructional and gestural form. The stretching sought about beanies are just your side and the compressing side is our construction side. Now, what we're going to do first in this instance is focused on developing the compressing sought of the torso because we want to see what happens he first before we start to tackle the gesture side. The more and more instructional pots we develop on this compressing side, the overlapping anatomy, cross contours, even something like shadow and clothing if our model was wearing it. The more we're going to get the audience to believe that looking at something that has formed in depth, the construction site for all intents and purposes, takes care of itself in most instances. This is why the bean-shaped tends to be a very good shape to work with, because we can get a lot of good information down in a relatively short amount of time. And the less work for ourselves, the better. So we're building up a construction site and it's coming along nicely and well-defined. So everything's so far is going pretty much according to plan. It's when we start to move over to add gesture facade with the torso that we're going to start running into problems. As nice and clean as this currently is. It's not exactly going to work well with what we've created on the opposite side. And as we start to build on top of this, we're going to notice that nice fluid clean connection that we started with gradually become more and more diminished as we start to layer in more and more detail over the top. We started with this nice big claim curve. Now I've got all these lumpy hills impacting that curves. So what exactly do we do to combat this? Well, the first thing we can do is to simply minimize these lumpy areas. That's going to be the easiest solution. Instead of having these very noticeable peaks and valleys, we can make things far more subtle. That's not always going to be the right thing for us though. So the other option we can do then is instead of trying to get our structures on this side to fit into the gesture that we've light down. We can simply carve out a new gesture path by taking out outside contours into the interior using that intersecting form idea we just talked about. Why would we want to do this? Well, what we can do then if we start to break out outside contours into the interior is we can start to find new relationships. If we start to alter these other areas of the figure out outside contours, out anatomy, et cetera. We can start to generate a brand new gestural movement for the audience's eye to follow. We can see he now with just a little bit of extra development, we've created a much more interesting journey for our gesture than what we originally had. Initially, we started with one big C curve. Now if taken a real roller coaster ride, back in lesson one, we talked about how gesture is the implied movement or the relationship l body parts mike together. We started with this. Now we've managed to do this. Wow, what an amazing evolutionists is. We've taken those weaknesses that ABC Construction was causing on our gesture aside and have now turned it into a strength. So we've really come a long way and we can get evermore refined with these relationships. We found a series of new connections throughout contours are anatomy throughout, overlapping that create an even better journey for the audience's eye to follow. And the beauty part is, is that they'll never know it was intentional on our part. Now, what if there's nothing to find a connection to? Well, this is where we can start to use the knowledge we've learned from our classes on the body parts to our advantage. We can then start to play around with the body's position, structure, and proportions to get the result we want. If we're drawing a model and a particular part of the body isn't exactly tracking the way we want it to, to add gesture that we're now creating. We can alter its of suit. We can feel alway to a connection as long as the changes that we're making to the figure and the anatomy ring true enough still to what they are in real life, as long as it doesn't look completely out of place, then the audience is going to buy into it. This is us composing the figure. This is US conducting the orchestra as it were. We've got our string section L woodwinds are up bras, EPA caution. We've found this series of concepts and relationships and have now gotten them to work together in one big movement for the audience to follow in a far greater way than what we originally thought we could. How many of those relationships you find is ultimately up to you. You can keep going with evermore refined details that follow whatever path you wished to layout. It can't be stressed enough. However, it is our responsibility as the composer to put down enough information for the audience to clearly understand what our ideas are. So with the lecture out of the way, let's move on to doing the demonstration. 8. Demonstration 1: Okay, let's get going. We've got a nice, upright and very stable post to begin with. Good out modal he with a sword so he could very well be an injury or some type of semi Ri, character. We don't know at this stage, but we'll play around with this to see exactly where we can take this. Because we really thinking more now about, well, what can we actually do to these pose? Let's use our imagination a little bit and start to take what we've learned over the past 16 lessons and see what we can do with it. So I'm just putting in these foundations here for the arm. And I'm going to probably look to maybe make the legs a little bit wider. We've got a very, as we said, very upright pose at the moment, but I want to try to make this a little bit more dynamic. Now we've talked about the triangle as being the foundation for L poses for stability, instability in action. And the reference image at the moment is quite a narrow triangle if we were to draw over the top of it. And generally speaking, the more narrower the triangle is, the more upright, the more stable, the more rigid the pose is going to look. The moment we start to increase the width of that triangle, the more we going to shift the part is looking as if it's very rigid and strike to being something has a little bit more of a dynamic field to it. We going to suddenly start to get a sense that there's a bit more action happening with this pose, even though all we're doing is shifting the sod supporting structures at a little bit more. So these little things can make a huge amount of difference. So just putting in the leg structures now and I'm trying to tell them a little bit further apart. And I'm thinking as I'm drawing this, just how far I can push these legs out without the figure actually feeling like it's about to fall over. And so that's going to be one of the challenges that will start to have when we start to draw the figure from our imagination is really getting the sense that it's locked into place onto the surface that it's standing on. So that's probably about as wide as I can make the legs at the moment anymore than this. And it's really going to start to look a little bit unnatural. So we're going to have to try to find that balance. If we start to manipulate the limbs around, we don't wanna take things too far outward. It looks like leaves us stretching in a way that doesn't ring true to real life. So this is probably as far as we can push things down so we can start to develop things with the legs and the feet. Hey, trying to get these locked into place. You can say I've also changed the position of the arms and the sword as well to get that little bit more of a dynamic field to it, the original image is perfectly fine for you to do some type of heroic sort of parties. But, and really trying to push this into more of an action ie talk of poses, if he's prepared to take on that Dragon will take on that band of ninjas, whatever it is. So I'm looking how this is looking so far, but I'm still thinking to myself, I think I can do a little bit better with this, with this sword and these arms over here. So that I tried to make these a little bit more dynamic than to try to push this pose a little bit more to make it seem like he's about to swing it something. And so this going to mean having to start to change not just the position of the alms, but also change the anatomy a little bit as well. If we want that a little bit more of a twist to the torso, we got up to start to shift, not just the arm around but all the pots that a connected to the torso as well to try to make it feel as if we've got a bit more of a, an anticipation happening. He was sort of shifting outputs from being one that's very rigid in heroic and very much looking as if he's not going anywhere into one where there's a real sense that something is about to happen. And again, all we've done is made a few structural changes. He, we haven't actually changed the post too much. But these few alterations in the structure and in the anatomy and the position of things has really started to shift this away from its original reference to being something else entirely. It's given it a completely different story than what the original did. And that's ultimately what we really want as artists and as composers, we want to be able to tell our own story. He, what we really want to be doing at this stage is using these reference images in live models. If we're using those as really just the starting point force, I like to think of them as being the worst case scenario. This is as good as it gets. If the image references as good as it gets, then that's perfectly fine. But we need to start asking ourselves now that we've gone through this series of lessons, well, what exactly kinda like do with these? If I've got something, decide and how do I translate that onto the page using this image reference h0. So we really want to think about inserting a theme into a illustrations from here on in trying to tell a story, trying to get the audience to go along with us as it were, giving them the necessary information as it would to understand how IDs and intentions. So we won't finish this one up here. We've taken it a lot further than what the original image is. We've shifted things around just enough to give it a little bit more of a dynamic field to it. So let's finish this one up here and move onto the next demonstration. 9. Demonstration 2: Right onto demo number two, we're going to trek out just you with this one without little horizontal and vertical axis tool that we talked about in the lecture. And just want to try to figure out first roughly what the GST is for the pose. And then I'm going to see how far I can push this. And I'm just using this as a little bit of a god for myself to get a rough idea of where exactly on need to take this pose and sometimes have gesture like that I think will work reasonably well. Gotta try to push this one little bit further than our loss one. So this little tool here will certainly help us to figure out whether or not we've pushed it too far. You know, I need this tool, of course, you can just sort of eyeball things if you need to. If you're not a 100% sure just how far to push your gesture, whether they've pushed it far enough. It's a simple little tool, but it's certainly useful. Whether or not you've pushed the gesture too far is of course entirely subjective. It's entirely up to you whether or not you feel like you've done it. If you're looking for realism, of course, you're not going to push the gesture to such a ridiculously rubbery state where it just loses all its structure. But there are oddest to can do very fluid gestures and they work and they fig is and get away with it because the overall composition is quite strong. So it's going to be a lot of playing around to sort of find out where exactly can I push this and what is to my taste as well. A lot of this is simply going to come down to twice, once we've mastered the basics of gesture in construction and proportion and our body pots, then it's really open to us where exactly we take that toolset. So I think I've got this tool set to my liking and yeah, it's just about finding this head area and in getting trying to get this position right for the hidden the hair and making sure it relates well to the rest of the toss onto native. We're going to make changes to a reference image or a live model. It's important that we make sure that the other body pots also react to that change as well. That they are also positioned in a way that makes sense in relation to whatever body part of these we've just changed. So if we're changing the position of the ribcage, the arms, the legs, everything else needs to also follow suit. So I'm thinking about these legs at the moment and trying to think of how they should relate. Now that I've given that talks a little bit more of a twist to it compared to the original image. So we just have to sort of make these mental notes as we go along and we're going to make mistakes, of course. So it's not a big deal if we screw up along the way. In fact, it's better that we screw up now then later on when we start to adding shading and color. As we've said in previous lessons. As long as we've got that process in place for ourselves, if we use our pencil tests to figure out the position of things and just look for those landmarks as well to get a sense of what position is this leg and this knee. And at the moment, at the moment I'm just having a little bit of trouble trying to work this out because I've changed the position of the torso. I have to sort of think about things a little bit differently. I've done now start to imagine how these legs are going to react to that change. And we're not gonna get it right straight away. We are much better off trying to feel out white through it. So if we've altered something significantly, take your time with it and just try to feel your way through it. If a pot is giving you a little bit of difficulty like these fall leg was then just move on to something else and try to develop that a little bit and then come back to the area that is giving you the problems. So I've pushed this leg a little bit more and it's probably not quite in the right position, but we'll just leave it there for the moment and we can come back later on and start to shift things if need be. But it's giving me some platform to work with so I can get this other leg in. So stretch these out and make that triangle shape for our pose a lot wider He than what we originally had. As you can see, it's a lot narrower, again, as it was in the lost, referencing the Jazz Studies and this one maybe have even taking this a little bit too far. So I don't just have a go at the first image you put down, you may very well think that the first thing we had you've, you've drawn is the best one that you could possibly do. And put your feet up on the table and say job done. But always think about, well, maybe if I can do this in a slightly different way. Let's just see how that ends up. And you'd be surprised how often that doing it a second or third, or even several times more, can end up producing a far better results. Sometimes you just a little bit rusty. You need to do a couple of sketches before you really start to fund anything that you really like. So it draw the poses, add a couple of times, a chi. Let's finish this one up here. Move onto a new demo. 10. Demonstration 3: Ok, let's stop there. Third demonstration for this one, we really got to try to find some relationships he within our figure to map out for ourselves a new gestural path. As we said during the lecture, we will often get to a stage where we start to build on top of that gesture foundations. And what we'll notice when that happens is that the construction that we stopped putting over the top of it starts to reduce the fluidity of that initial gesture Foundation. So it's important for us when we get to that stage where we find out that just is no longer working for us, that we really start to find an alternate plan. Now what we're going to try to do here, and I'm just trying to work in this torso at the moment is I'm going to try to fonts some relationships throughout the body to really God the eye around, fool the audience. Essentially, what we're trying to do here is a far more sophisticated gesture than what we initially learned back in lesson one. So get his arm in here and I'm probably going to move this a little bit because I've got reasonable idea about where I want this gesture rhythm to flow in this pose. And just looking at the shutter shapes and the shapes of the breast and weigh the legs and the gluteal muscles off. And just sort of trying to imagine to myself where I want this to go. And this is roughly the rhythm I'm trying to capture is top of movement here. I want the head to lead down to the pelvis. I want the pelvis to swing around to the glutes and up towards the arm like this. So Guide to try to find all these relationships to help guide the eye around to this direction. We've got the anatomical structures he of the muscles and bones and breast tissue as well as the shadow shapes as well, and some folds in the skin that are going to occur also. So I've got all these little things that we're going to manipulate to try to achieve that effect. Not quite sure what I'm gonna do with that. Becca ME just yet, but I'm probably going to try to incorporate that into that whole rhythm. So we'll play around with that a little bit as we go along. But this is really stretch our legs a little bit and just play around with proportions and the anatomy of things as well. We don't want to get too crazy with anatomical changes lie because if we start doing things that run it a little bit counter to how the body should be moving, then people would go into, notice we don't wanna get too crazy with those changes, but we want enough of the changes to happen where we can guide the audience's eye. So any anatomical changes that we're making in service of this new gesture that we are creating, still have to ring true enough. So I've just got to shut eye shape here. That's stock crawling its way down. Hey, they're just making these a little bit sharper than what's in the policy. Because I really want to direct the audience's eye down in this direction. And you've got this shadow shape that's pink foam t by this anatomical pot is muscle which is merging into the pelvis. But I'm just going to change that a little bit to again point in that direction so it kills its way around to the glutes and the back. They just making a few subtle changes here in the shutter shapes to really get them to leave the audience's eye into the direction that we want. If we've done our job right is oddest weekend, really get the audience to follow exactly the path that we want them to take. And the beauty pod is the audience will never notice it. They will simply follow the path that you've lied down. Essentially, what we tried to do, he is kind of like breadcrumbs as it would essentially putting little visual areas down here, not just in terms of creating a new gestural path to lead around, but of course, the forms of the figure itself, as was said back in lesson one, are construction really is the directional movement across out forms. So we've got a couple of jobs as the oddest, we've gotta get them to believe that what they are looking at has some type of three dimensionality to it, as well as lead the eye around in a specific way to convey a certain path as well as a certain emotion as well. So, juggle few things as we putting these things together. So this is how the gestures working sort of fall and go a little bit of work to do here. This arm's is not really working, so I want to lift this up a little bit more just to make it fit with that rhythm that I had in mind. That's looking a little bit better. So just have to develop few more areas. Heap the head. I'm not too happy with a this author combat if to change that. And, and I think doing more of a profile image for the Haidt is going to be much better in this instance. So we'll tackle that shortly. But I want to say something about this other on that's reaching up and seeing where I can position this because it's and I think it's going to work too well with the gesture with them that I have in mind. So it will start to play around with that in a moment once we get this other arm in first and it's looking at right so far. So again, just building things up slowly and analyzing where we can try to find these relationships as well. So just looking over the anatomy and folds in the skin, shadows and light, of course. I don't think that arm's going to work too well, so we'll try different parties here, maybe have it up in the air and cooling around. So it's sort of links in with the back of the skull. He works a little bit better so far, so we might go without loan, but it's always good to try a couple of different prizes too. So I'm going to try one way. The OMB is thrusting backwards a little bit because we won't be able to make it work with the rice on left to change a little bit of anatomy here. If I go this one because we got to have a little bit more of that twisting action that happens as a result. This arm thrusting backwards, we'll get a little bit more of the shoulder blades poking through h0. But I think I'm gonna go with these other pies with the backend on, is I like how this is looking so far. So this is the anew gestural pathway and we can see these relationships and now starting to form here. But again, this heads not really working for me, so I think we will get rid of this and we'll do one that's more of a profile because that's going to link pretty well with the profile of the tool side, which is going to link its way around back to the glutes and up to that arm again. So we're going to get a sort of figure right type of gesture with them here at the end. So this is why it's always a good idea not to go with the first idea that you put down because really developed things a lot more and test the waters with anatomy and gesture can really give yourself the opportunity to screw up. And we often very hot and ourselves is oddest when we make mistakes. But in a weird way, we kind of have to embrace the errors that we are going to Mike he, because it just ends up being a lot better for ourselves. We tend to be very unkind to SF sometimes not getting that puzzle, not getting that gesture caught. Reidel having now construction to be a little bit off in weed white, if we embrace the mistakes that we going to make, it really does make things a lot easier for us. It's just about the process. And at that stage it's about analyzing its, about looking at it and saying, what have I done wrong here and how do I fix it? So this'll do for our pose. And let's take a look at out just your rhythm. The odd guys from the hand through to the head all the way through the torso and up and around to our closest. So we've really taken at gesture to a new level he. So that's gonna do is for the demonstration up next we've got the time drawing session. Now, for this session we're going to step things up a little bit compared to previous lessons. There are only going to be two images for this lesson, but they are going to be a lot of ten minutes h. What I want you to do for this time drawing session is to look at these images and really start to play around with them. Use the ten minutes to you and see where you can type the poses. Try to change the position of things. And Sean fond relationships with all these construction pots that we've gone over. It's not using your imagination from here on in. We really want to think about controlling what it is we are doing. So I'll leave you with that now and then I'll come back in about 20 minutes and do mod demo. 11. Timed Composing Session: Two? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Ok. Yeah. Why? Okay. Four. Okay. Okay. Yeah. No. 12. Timed Composing Demonstration: Alright, time for my homework. So I'm gonna play around with this one a little bit. Not gonna get too serious about shadowing and accurate details and things like that. Just going to try to feel my way through this, looking at the reference pies at the moment and saying, well, we're gonna take this and I'm going to think about trying to move these legs around them quite happy with how that upper torso is looking at the moment. But the legs looking just a little bit to stiffen, inactive. So we're going to move these around a little bit, maybe try a couple of different poses. Could also do some type of sitting pose or kneeling pose with these two. So it will give that a shot. And I'll just get the rough foundations in first for how the post currently is. And then I'll just start to manipulate things here and they try to work out some new gestural rhythms and move somebody pots around. Yeah, you might very well be asking yourself, actually, we've gone over some new ideas for gesture in these lessons, some more advanced methods in order to create gestural POS for the eye to follow. And you may very well be asking yourself, well, why didn't we learn this at the very beginning in less than one? And the reason we didn't dive headfirst into this method when we started at is because we need something a little bit more tangible for gesture when we're just starting out. The more advanced method that we've used here with the finding relationships with body parts and feeling our way through the pose. That can be a little bit abstract. In many figure drawing classes, gesture isn't always all that well-defined. Begin as it can be a little bit difficult trying to interpret what it is a teacher assigning when they're referring to gesture as being the rhythm, all the action, all the movement or the pose. And so back in lesson one, we tried to find a more tangible place to start with. We said, it's simply the longest curved line that's available to us. And that's a much better foundation for us to start with. Otherwise, it can end up being a little bit of a abstract concept that's almost a bit like trying to describe what it looks like if you think that in those terms. So I've got this torso in noun, I'm just thinking about these legs and I'm going to try doing something a little bit more straight up first and move this left leg back. So it's a little bit more strident and quite short and gonna do with this other leg of the moment marked rise it ever so slightly. Just traveling fond the stability in this pose at the moment, get that foot down nice and flat here to make sure it's carrying all that white. Just going back to gesture for a moment again, as I was saying, it's not always something that is well explained and certainly something that I struggled with for a long period of time until I found a method that worked for me. And simplifying it down to being just the longest axis curve that we see is the best place to stop for breaking up this method that we've gone over in this lesson about finding relationships to create a new gestural path. This is really more about composing anyway. So like everything that we've gone through throughout this series, we've started with some basic concepts and we're now working our way up to some more sophisticated tools and ideas for us to start using because they're sitting in lecture from here on in. We really want to start thinking about creating our own stuff from here on in. And these legs are fine, but I think I can do a little bit better than this so much how to do something a little bit more. It will actually bit more dynamics. I'm gonna push this leg closest to us back a little bit. Really try to feel that, that big curved action from the head going all the way through the tool so to the leg here, moving around. So maybe she's she's no longer standing. Nope, she's jumping in the air. So give this one a shot and see how this ends up looking. Sort of building our own figure at the sort of Frankenstein stuff. That's the best way I like to describe it as taking a little bit of torso from this image, a little bit of leg from different one, sort of stitching them all together in a Frankenstein top of y. And this is where the real fun starts to happen actually because we can really start to push these poses and we start to play with the proportions. And this is where we start to put a little bit of ourselves in, into our odd here I tend to have a style of art which sort of sits somewhere between realism and college book. You will find, you will eventually, and it will come from playing around and of course, looking at other artists and copying other artists work. Saying how they've done their designs, their figures. And I think this one's not too bad at the moment. So we got some time left on the clock. So let's move on to a new pose. Seems to work reasonably well. I'm quite happy with that movement and the pose. So I'm going to show that sitting, sitting pose now, or maybe a kneeling pose them a 100% sure which one I'm going to do just yet. But we've got to take the position of the torso HI. And make it look as if she's crunching IVR, she's kneeling will sitting down. So as I said, that toolset pod, I'm actually really happy with a really like how that looks. And I'm gonna put it in my little access guide here just to track where my gesture is at the moment. And can probably push this a little bit more that this will do as a starting point for us. We can always make some changes along the way. As the beauty pot with what we do here, we can make as many changes as we want. We can keep adjusting the body pots to Sudan, UNAIDS, keep finding those relationships between our construction all IDs. And keep going until we get it just two outs haste. And we've got to make a lot of mistakes along the way as well. So there's no Skyping that it's very easy for us to get very hot and ourselves when we start to screw up bool because we haven't got that certain pot. Correct. So thing having a kneeling down is actually looking pretty good in suits the rest of the torso IT quite well. So I'm going to go with this one. Probably not gonna have much time to do a third sketch. But if we do, we'll try to figure out another pose along the white. This is where the studying ovale Bodhi pots is really going to come into play if we. Don't practice those lessons on the body pots, then it's going to be very difficult for us to stop trying to move things around if we tried to alter some areas of the reference pose that we're working from all the log model of course. And we don't have that knowledge, then it's going to be very difficult for us to really manipulate the post to our likings and will forever be stuck with just copying the reference that we're drawing from. And we really don't want to be doing that. As we've said during the lecture, this is really about sort of taking all the knowledge that we've learned over these last 16 lessons. And really now starting to think about really putting a pot of ourselves into the pies. We're transitioning from copying what way seeing to having something to say. So we've got many hats that was sort of wearing nail way. We constructing, way of composing. We are storytelling with trying to say something as we're putting this down. Not a 100% sure what I'm trying to say here. But it's certainly something to do with legs. So you will sort of learn a little bit about you. So of actually as you start to draw the images from your imagination, start to manipulate the modals. That's way you'll style will come into it and you'll personal tastes will start to emerge. And eventually you'll just find your voice and figure out what direction you want to go in as an artist too. And maybe it is as a concept designer or a comic book artist stool working in 2D animation or even 3D animation. What are these principles that we've gone over here can be applied to 3D animation as well. Even something like landscape painting. If you wanna do that as a potential career option, becoming landscape pi into, well, a lot of these concepts, one of these principles that we've gone over, I'm going to apply to that as well. Not the same way of course, but the general ideas of form and gesture and proportions and dynamic forms that's all going to apply to landscape paintings and architectural paintings as well. If you want to do sort of fantasy Casals and vehicle designs as well as some really cool spaceships to all of this stuff is adaptable. So even if you end up not doing anything related to figure drawing in the future, then there's still a lot to learn he that can be applied elsewhere. So don't discount any of this. Just have it in the back of your mind is an additional skill set that you'll have in the most skills we have as an artist, the better, the better we get. Completely forgotten about this far out. And I've absolutely no idea what to do with it in the last 15 seconds. So it wasn't paying enough attention. Hey, that again, just sort of playing around and not really liking that. But we're not going to have the time to really worry about it. So just sort of laid this one he so we've changed the original post quite a bit. So I'll just finish this one up hand will move on to our next image. Okay, let's move on to our next one. We've got our semi ride type of character back here again. So I think I'm going to just stick with the one post for this one, but I'm really going to push the shape of push the shape of this sketch because the reference is quite good and nice actually shot, but we can do more with this. And it's always the thing you want to have in the back of your mind as you're drawing along here and scientists cellphone is this is as good as it can get. Can I do this in an even better way and really challenge yourself to, you know, look to your construction and look to your gesture and ask yourself, Will, can I do this in a way that seems even better than what I currently have. It's very easy for us to quickly sketch something down and look at it and say, oh, that's good enough. But good asks will often not be a 100% content with what it is they've produced. O often ask themselves a series of what if questions are, What if I move this arm a little bit more this way? What if I twist that pose a little bit more? How's that going to make it look? We've got those additional construction tools that we went over our overlapping cross contouring, intersecting forms in anatomy. And maybe it's a case of asking ourselves, well, what if I exaggerate that anatomy a little bit? What if I make that intersecting form just a little bit more obvious? What if I add in some type of cross contouring there that doesn't actually exist in the reference with a live model. Just to get the point across, we just do whatever we have to do to make sure the audience intuitively feels like there is formed to this image. We're only ever going to see part of the format any one time. So we need to use these landmarks in these tools that are available to us to help achieve that. And of course, thinking about stability low, while as well. Trying to make sure that the pose doesn't look like it's about to be over. If it's a standing pose, of course, if it's more of an actually type of photos, we've got a little bit more freedom to work with there. So no matter how much we tried to exaggerate things, we've still gotta keep in mind those laws of stability. We've got our upside down triangle, which is all about instability. We've got our right-side-up triangle, which is going to make our poses nice and stable. And then we've got our tilted triangle, which is sort of what I'm trying to go for here to give a very actually type of pose. So they're all got different levels of energy that we're going to have to make a decision on. In general, anything on an angle tends to depict something in motion, something with some energy in it. So lawns at a crisscrossing overall, triangles that are off axis have a tendency to give off that vibe. So I'm reasonably happy with how these foundations, as you can see, I've really pushed that torso. It's far more upright in the original image and this is going to Big C curve going on. Also move the position of the leg as well or both legs in this instance, that looks like he's. Really coming in to, you know, cut down those ninjas or attack that Dragon or whatever it might be. And after we get to the stage, we can start to think about costumes and clothing. Start to really define who this character is. And that's really going to start to develop an even greater story. Every, every decision we make here is giving information to the audience. The gesture of the figure that costume he's wearing, the facial expression. It will starts to combine to create an even greater whole. Because we've only got one image to work with. We don't have the luxury that and animated does or a filmmaker does where they've got 24 frames in a second to help till this story, we've got one image. And so we don't have the luxury of being able to tell our story over a long period of time. So in some respects, our task is a little bit more difficult and that's why the strokes you put down half to matter. If you want to convey that story or to convey that emotion in your annual poses, then you have to ensure that you are guiding the audience around in a way where they can understand that if we haven't got the position of things right, if we haven't got the gesture right. If we haven't got that pose in the way that we wanted to, then they simply never going to understand your intentions. Fueled designing a character that is sad and depressed. And this is really not the talk proposed to try to elicit that emotion. So our choices have to matter. If we're trying to convey a certain feeling in a pose and the audience doesn't see it. Then somewhere along the line, we've screwed off. Somewhere along along with either missed something or skipped over a step. Or we just simply haven't spent enough time developing the image correctly in order to get the response that we want. So it's 100% air responsibility. He had the audiences not dare to do homework if you'll try to get them to see that figure is a figure, but you present to them something that bears absolutely no resemblance to a human figure, then they're not going to buy into it. And no matter how much you try to explain to them what your intention is, they're just simply not going to see it. But if we do enough of it, right, the audience is quite forgiving. They'll ignore the fact that we've exaggerated some muscles or stretched out some leaves to be a little bit proportioned and out, simply buy into it because we've conveyed enough information for them to see what our intentions are. And when we've conveyed enough of that information down, that means we can start to play around with things even further, not just in terms of gesture and construction, but just design elements, design principles in general. So we can start to play with the light and the shadow. We can start to play with the line width if we want really thick lines, really thin lines, we can even start to play with whether or not we want l. Sketches to look more two-dimensional, three-dimensional, curved or more straight. So we can then start to push things into a even newer direction when we start to plug the design principles. So that's something we'll probably look at in a future lesson. Go over things like characterization and shaping. Design will useful stuff for us. So this has come along reasonably well, tried to find relationships between the upper arm through the pec muscle and down through the torso and stretching out into that back leg. Trying to find those relationships, dig a little bit of that interlocking ID with the ribcage and the torso meet. Now a 100% certain this leg is working and go. I've got this in the wrong position. He has so little of Tang lift. So we'll just get rid of this and start from scratch here just to make it feel as if it's bit more inline with the torso here. So one of the challenges we're going to have and we stopped moving these pots around, is tried to imagine how how they should be overlapping and they should be fitting in relation to everything else. And it's going to be super important that we get these relationships looking correct. Otherwise, the whole thing is going to fall apart. So I'd have to practice up all these body pots in different positions. So I recommend if you haven't gone over the clauses on each of the body pots either recommend going over that. Will clauses on Head Construction, torso, arms, legs, hands and feet. So we cover them all. And there's a lot of reference images in each clause for you to practice with. So the more study we can do on these areas, the more of a library will start to build mentally for how they should be looking in. Well, these different positions. And the more we can then start to manipulate poses, change them to be exactly how we want them to be. The back legs not still working for me a 100%, but not really going to have the time left to do anything about it. So I'll just fill in the rest of the minute also with some shading here. So as we stopped the wine these down, I hope this lesson has shown some additional instructional and gestural tools to help you with breaking free of the shackles of the reference images in the law of modals and help you get into composing. Because there's a roof freedom. When we get to this part of our artistic journey, this real sense of liberation involved with it, because we've kind of reached the next level. We've done the hard work learning about OLAP tools. And now we can really start to play around with them and see what we come up with. So, enjoy the freedom. Now, start using that imagination. Start seeing what you can come up with. But kate, practicing HOD is well, there'll be some additional references in the class notes to practice with, so I'll leave you with that now and I'll see you in the next lesson.