Fun With Stickmen

1. Stickmen Intro: Hey, what's up, guys? It's me. Um, somebody that you haven't maybe seen before or haven't seen in a while. My name's Ed Foichuk and I'm one of the lead instructor instructors at how to draw comics.net. And, um, this is my first foray into the Academy. Um, so bear with me because it might be a little clunky. Usually, I do not do a lot of lives. Um, but I am pretty well known for winging it. So I think we'll be doing we'll be having fun. Um, yeah, I'm sure those that have hung around how to draw comics and stuff has seen my face maybe too much. And you've definitely probably seen my courses on offer and stuff like that, right? I specialize. Let's go with that. With anatomy, muscular anatomy, especially. And weirdly, that's not what I'm gonna touch on today, though. Instead, what we're going to focus on today is the simplified skeleton. Stickman. We're gonna have some fun with some Stickman. So what I'm hoping is whoever joins this during the live stream or after, you pull out a drawing pad and just start doodling away. You know what I mean? Like, just accompany me. If I'm going too slow for you, sketch off to the side, if I'm going too fast for you. Well, I'm not too fast for anybody. Um, yeah, no, I won't be too fast. And this is not a complicated lesson. I wanted I picked Stickman and simplified skeleton because I knew it would be easy for me and easy for you guys to get used to me and stuff. During this live, feel free to ask questions, and we're gonna interact a lot. Hopefully joke around. I'm kind of notorious for dumbass dad jokes and stuff, right? So I'll probably be dropping some of those. Uh, I just got off of a massive recording for those of you who entered into our cover a cover contest. Um, just roll through that. Me and another fellow instructor were giving critiques on those. So that was tons of fun. So don't mind if I take a sip once in a while to lubricate things. And here's my sponsorship Do of the night. This is Pepsi Electric. Zero. Um, kind of tastes like Mountain Dew. I don't know. I'm kind of digging this stuff. Okay, so Clayton is hanging out and watching me perform, and he's gonna enlarge my screen and shrink my face 'cause I've got a giant head, and I don't need to be taking up all the real estate on this screen, right? Um, yeah, we're gonna get into this. Hey, Giovanni, what's up? 2. Stickmen Rule Of 8: Okay, guys, so we're going to start with a simplified skeleton and see where we can go from there. What I I'm kind of presuming that actually, I'm not gonna presume it I'll stop there. I'm going to start from basics and just roll with it and see how everybody feels with it, according to just some basics and stuff. And then we'll add to it, okay? If this is really too elementary for you, M. Have fun with it. Joke around. Make fun of me in the comments or something, right? Okay, let's see. I'm going to just take a blue line. And I'm just I'm starting in the corner of my page, and I'm just going to draw a simple top to bottom line, right? And what I'm doing is I'm going to teach or review, depending on the rule of eight and my interpretation of it. I've seen a few different ones rolling around and stuff like that, but this is my approach to it, so maybe you'll have yours. Maybe it's similar to mine. What I do is I draw a straight line, and then I kind of sometimes use my hand. Shrink. Right? I can use it actually on the screen and just tick and find the center, right? Like, it's just like I'm not squishing your head. I'm more trying to find the center between these two points. So here's my top, here's my bottom, here's my middle. I'm going to do the same again. I'm going to cut it in half, right about there. Gonna cut that in half right about there, cut that in half, right about there. So this top half, I've divided by four so far. And the bottom half I could also divide by four, but I won't because I'm lazy and that's what I do. So I'm going to just cut it in half once, if I really wanted to, I could tick, tick and do my four. But these last two down here, I'm not I don't really use them. There's no point for me for what I'm about to do. Okay, now that I've got this rolling, I've got it divided by the rule of four. What this rule of eight, rather, right? What it is is eight heads, eight head high, right? Now, this is more comic book superhero proportions than the average individual. Some people will be eight heads high if they have a very small head. But most people are about six to seven, the average human, right? But when we're drawing them, we like proportions. We like a little bit of drama, and that's why I'm doing this voice, right? So what I'm going to do is just rough in actually, you can kind of see I'm going to roughen these heads, right? This would be my eight heads. Did I measure them perfectly? Hell, no. Am I going to? Hell, no, I don't care that much. That's not what I'm here for today. I'm just here to play. Okay? So what I'm gonna do with this is just roughen that top head, and that's my ugly circular oval head, right? So that's the first block, right? The first quarter or eighth, right? I'm gonna come down to the fourth one, and I'm also going to draw a circle, but I'm going to draw maybe a little more circular than ovals, right? And I'm hoping you guys are kind of following along. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna lose anybody at this point, right? This is pretty easy, right? So I've got the head and I've got the hips. This is my hip so far, right? In between the head and the hips is the majority of the torso, the rib cage. Now, some people will draw a rib cage, something like this, right? Because that's kind of actually how it looks. But because in the back, we've got a scapula, that comes back like that. I actually end up roughing it in more like a chevron. You don't have to because the actual rib cage is more oval like this. But like I said, if you look at the anatomy from the back end, I'm not going to flex today. The scapula wings out a little bit, right? So the chevron works for me in its simplified form. Okay? And attached to the Chevron, then I'll put the shoulders, the deltoids to be specific, right? And this is kind of what I have for the torso and. There's my skinny *** neck, right? Okay, so so far, we've got kind of a really easy upper torso, right? And everything gets proportional. I find that this being the crotch, like, so here's my hip, and I'll put little little Superman is on this dude. I'm going to make it a dude right now, right? If the crotch touches this halfway mark, okay? So I'm not going to draw any details in that, but if roughly the crotch touches that, then that also means the wrist is going to roughly touch that mark, okay? So what I do is I draw circles down here and just kind of connect, connect. That is my skinny little arms. So like I said, the wrist will break at around the crotch. Everything's individualized. I've trained with guys that have a massive dead lift, and the reason they had that was because they had those long *** monkey arms, right? So I'm just kind of giving you ballparks of things, and then we can adjust from there. And we will play with it later. I'm giving you an overall guideline right now, and then we'll roll off of that, okay? Alright, halfway roughly halfway in the arm, and we could wiggle it a little bit, but those are going to be the elbows. Pretty damn simple, right? Like, This is such an easy articulate, articulable figure that we're going to be able to do so much, but you have to have this down. You have to be able to draw this really easy, right? Now, the next thing I do is because we're not just a floating torso, I've got to add legs in here somewhere. Okay? Where do I put them? Well, what I'm going to what most people do will draw like a little triangle for the feet, and then they'll draw it down. I like longer legs, not only on the ladies I date, but on the figures I draw. It's a 90s thing, I think. So what I do is actually, I put the ankle at this point, and I draw my little ugly simplified feet, and I draw straight down and straight down. And then that halfway mark, that's the knee. And so I draw the kind of like the hip comes out, the hip joint, how upper skeletal system attaches into the hips, right? Just a little bit of junction bends. I don't want to get too much into the skeletal system itself because it gets really complicated. A lot of bones in the body. But this simplified this simplified skeleton is so simple, so easy that I feel that anybody right now after watching how long was that? A couple of minutes, right? After watching that couple minutes, you should be able to draw it. If you can't if you're watching it after when This isn't live, stop. Rewind and do it again. Do you know what I mean? Do it a few times so you can have it. So it really should be like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Ooh. That's it. Ten second sketch, okay? Like, really, I want you to be able to be so comfortable with drawing this simplified skeleton that it takes you nothing to be able to draw it out like that, okay, guys? So, hey, James, welcome to the chat. I'm Ed. Kind of the weird guest star. 3. Stickmen Side and Twist: Okay, so we've got that from the front. We've hit the major points of articulation, right? Everything from the shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, all that kind of stuff, right? Let me take a drink. I didn't tell Clayton that I was gonna be drinking during this live, so it's a surprise. Now, why don't we turn? Let's rotate this. So I'm gonna do the same thing. You know, I could make it a little bit better and draw it straight across or whatever, right? And you can see how lazy I am being with these lines. Like, I'm not using the ruler function or anything like that. So if you're drawing at home, it really I'm not expecting you to us not everybody has a tablet where they can perfectly rule lines and stuff like that, right? Um, oh, Michael just asked, should the limbs be curved for the simplified skeleton? Not necessarily. No. When you look at the way that certain legs bow, you know what I mean? Like, you could have a little bit of curving in there and stuff like that. But for right now, just keep them straight, okay? Just I'm really going so simple here, and there's a point to it, why I'm doing it that way. So what we're going to do is we're going to rotate the skeleton so that we're looking at it from the side. Okay? So we've still got the hips, still got the head, but, you know, our head has side profile to it this time. Okay. We've still got our torso, but it's from the side, so it's a little bit different. So the rib cage is more here and it comes like this. Actually, usually, now, this is where it gets a little bit. There's a little bit depending on how much duct butt you got, but you've got an anterior pelvic tilt, so it'll tilt this way and the back will tilt this way, depending. I'm not going to nudge it too far here, okay? I'm just going to kind of draw it straight. But as we start to customize a little bit, you'll start to see the flow changes just a little bit, okay? So once again, from this point, leg comes down and down into the foot. Here's the knee. Now, we can kind of start to bend things around a bit with the flow of the muscles. Don't want to do that yet. I'm going to put this hand here, this shoulder here as we're carrying it over and connect that to the hand halfway, there's the elbow. So again, what I'm hoping for is that you guys are able to one, draw this simplified stick figure when you're sleeping. Or when you're awake. But really, like, at any point, you should be able to, like, Whoosh, draw a line, divide it and break it down into its sections, okay? If you do not feel comfortable with this, if you're like, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice so many times because we're going to venture into moving, twisting, pushing, pulling, all this kind of stuff. So getting it at its it's chorus foundation is what I really want from you, okay? This is really, really important that you guys feel so comfortable with this. Just I don't know if you can, in the comments, give me a little bit. Like, are you saying, Yeah, I think I got the simplified rule Vate for front and back or front and side, at least, right? B. Looks the same until we add musculature, right? Does everybody think that they're kind of doing okay with that? And what's interesting about this is I was stuck on this. This took like, my proportion sucked until Clayton, how long ago did you put out your proportions class? Because that was the first lesson I ever took online of any art course, and it blew my mind. When I took that and then made it a little bit my own, everything was just unlocked, right? So what I'm hoping ten to 15 years ago, that's about right, actually. Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm hoping that this either unlocks something for you guys? Or just makes it a hell of a lot easier, okay? Because, really, that's what it's about. Okay. Okay, so we're feeling kind of okay with this. If I'm looking at some of the comments, we're feeling kind of okay. Okay. So I'm going to keep going on, keep on going on, right? I'm just going to carry this line over, right? Do the same thing, and divide it in half, divide, divide, divide, divide. Yeah, like I said, I don't I don't need that division down in the lower section so much or anything like that. I'm going to go back to straight on. But this time, I'm going to straight on. What I want to do is turn the torso a little bit this way and turn the bottom just a little bit this way. So normally, what I do, for example, if I'm drawing the Chevron and everything, and I'm going to see if this makes sense to you, with this underwear and the rib cage and all that kind of stuff, what I normally do is here's the center line and here's the center line, right? We can see these dudes are looking straight at us, right? The center lines are straight on because these are straight on shots, right? Um, but that's not what I want to do here. I want to turn some things around. I want to twist some things around. So what we don't really pivot at the crotch. I may have tried on occasion. Thus, my hernias, I don't know. We pivot more between the rib cage and the hips themselves, right? So the actual pivot that we're going to be doing will be at this joint. So what's going to happen is I want to have this one pivoted this way and this one pivoted this way. And you can see, it's not a huge it's not a huge twist. Right? Um, I'm not totally turning. We'll get into really big twists in just a bit, but I just want a little bit of a twist here, okay? So my underwear line's going to stay the same, but it's going to wrap around this ball just slightly. And the rib cage is going to slightly go there. So that means this shoulder will come, doing a little bit, you know, this shoulder will be more visible for the viewer, and this shoulder will be a little less. So it would be a little bit behind and, do, do, do, do. Like that. Right? Okay. So what does that mean? If I'm drawing these down, maybe my little booties will be more like this. And I'm going to do something with the arms in a minute. But you can see how now I've pivoted the hips just a little bit, and I've pivoted the torso just a little bit. And if I want to, I could do something similar with the head even, and I could start to turn it, right? So you can see how you start to get this nice flowy movement instead of just straight on static I'm just standing here, right? Staring at you with eagles, calling in the background and my blue steel Instead, now I'm turning, giving the side eye, right? There's a lot of a lot of ways of approaching this. But as Clayton just mentioned, I am really trying to simplify this, really trying to make it so that you could doodle this out and rough this out, you know, when you're plotting, when you're making your thumbnails and stuff like that, so that it takes you seconds seconds to be able to do this, okay? So that's what we're going on for. So hopefully, if you guys are following along, you've done this little turn and twist, right? Okay. Now, one thing that I want to talk about in articulation and stuff like that. Let's see if I've got enough room here. Let's see where am I going to go? I remember I said that roughly the wrists would break around the crotch level, right? Okay. Okay, what does that mean? That means that if I was to raise this arm, it would roughly follow a circle around these pivot joints. Those are not boobs. That's just a pivot joint inside the shoulder, right? So, you know, if the arm is here or here or here or here, and of course, I'm roughing this badly, right? And we'll have a certain range of motion that it'll break and it won't be able to rotate all the way over, right? But that's what I want you to be able to do is understand that you can move it within this range, and this arm can move within this separate range. Let's see. As I go off the screen a little bit, right? So I can break, break, break, break, that type of thing, right? And so when we look at these points of articulation, change. We know that that's exactly what it means that we're able to move those joints. Yeah. 4. Stickmen Proportions: Eric just dropped a question, so let's get into it. I might be Bit Hein. So this strategy is regardless of size of the character also. I mean, let's say if you have a character like the Hulk, She Hulk, et cetera. Let's do that right now, man. I think that's perfect timing. Jump me back to the screen. Okay, remember when we were talking about proportions, right? We had this rule of eight. We had this rule of Eight saying, Well, it's got to look like this and that, right? What if I shift? What if I do the hips down here? Put the torso like this. Well, what did I just draw? Right? That's a quite hawkish looking figure. So I can, I just wing that, right? But if I'm looking then I got one, two, three, four, I kind of did the top relatively in proportion. But this is kind of a six head high figure with it being very, very top heavy, right? I put it all into the torso, I can blow out the shoulders and stuff like that. I blew out these hands. They're monstrous gorilla hands, right? And if anything, if I really feel like messing around. I can make the head even smaller, right? I I really want to do that, right? So that's one way to approach it, right? Another way is like, let's say, I can bump the torso smaller and I just divide, let's say this is my halfway point. So this is I'll put my hip here and then my knees, my feet. I'm starting to play around a little bit, right? So here's my Now, does this work as a character? I don't know. Maybe I would have, like, instead of what I did here, I think instead, I might have if I'm going to lengthen those limbs, I might as well, lengthen these limbs, too. Do a nice little halfway point, right? So there's more of this is kind of hulkish. This is kind of slender mannish. You know what I mean? Like, you could really elongate things, right, stretch them out, and play around with proportions. But what's cool about this is we've all we're still back to our points of articulation, right? Like, it all still works very similar. We've got these points of articulation that fundamentally carry over, right? You know, like, these are all the same little points that we've been using and we can play around with. So when I go to draw this slender man or Hulk, right? Like, let's see. Let's draw this hulk. Okay, so I'm going to do this with a small head. I'm going to draw the hips here. Big torso, big shoulders. I'm going to put his head kind of like this, right? Okay? And there's the hips. So my central line is going to be kind of like this. And let's He's got these monstrous shoulders, right? That's what I kind of got going on here. I actually made his head too big. Let's make this smaller. Okay. So maybe what I might do is, like, put these up here and then they carry back to these giant hands, and he's going for, like, a big hulk smash. He's flying through the air. Oh, he's got small legs. Right. A and there we go. And you know what? I think I don't necessarily love it, but what I would do you could see here's the center lines and stuff, right? That kind of thing, right? So what I would do is probably even push it further because right now he's just kind of leaping, like, a bit of a gorilla, but it just works so easy that once you understand these basic simplified skeleton and point of articulation, all you need to do then is draw an action line, a line of action. However, we're going to and we're going to do that on the next page here, and fill it the **** in, you know what I mean? And just have fun with it. Okay. So any questions before? Right now, we've got the rule Vate we've got so I'm going to highlight that rule Vate. We've got twisting, and then we've got proportions changing around the different proportions from slender man. So you can bump it wider. You can bump it narrower, you can do whatever, right? Next one, I want to do a line of action, but I just want to make sure that everybody's Sorry. Geez. Everybody's kind of caught up and feeling kind of comfortable where we're at. So I'm just going to again, read through this. Yeah, skeleton gets warped to some extent. It depends how much you want to play with it. You know what I mean? Like, I just it's like putty, you just stretch and pull and stuff like that. You could really play around if you're wanting to push those proportions. Like, if you're making the hulk, make it look like the hulk. This is where we get into character design and that's another section, being able to look at the difference from one character to another just in their silhouettes, right in their proportional silhouettes and stuff like that, right? So, play with proportions, like, stretch limbs and see how that works. And then when you're designing your characters, make it recognizable. Distinguishable and then consistent. So if you're always drawing the hulk that's six heads high and four of those heads are torso, who then stay that way. You know what I mean? Now you know when you're going from page to page, panel to panel, that's how you draw the Hulk, you, right? You've chosen that you've cared because it gets really confusing when all of a sudden it starts bouncing around, right? And whether it's slender man, Hulk's the easiest because he gets very bulbous and Billowy and all that kind of stuff, right? And he's fun to play with and everything, right? But the tick would be a very similar thing, being, you know, Dorito Oh, whatever. You know, like the Dido shape, big uptop small down in the bottom. That's what makes these characters stand out. Right? Or that's one of the things that can make a character stand out. So really play with proportion, guys. Get the rule of eight down, get the twist down, play with proportions. Okay? We're at the 45 minute mark. I think we're doing okay. So far, reading the comments, I think I'm doing okay here. I've only sworn a few times, and Clayton hasn't booted me yet, and so I'm good. And like I said, um, this episode has been brought to you by Pepsi Electric. Actually, that's really what it's called. Zest citrus. This **** is good, like for zero calories. Like, it's like, legit taste like Mountain Dew. Clean's gonna give me so much **** for this. Okay, I want to switch into a new page. Oops, didn't need to do that. Here's my new page. There we go. Oh, note on. Eric just ask. So if I draw skeletons for a character transforming, I kind of play more and more with drama dramatizing dramatizing the skeleton, yeah? Yeah, like, okay, if the character's transforming, like, from Bruce Banner to the Hulk, ****, yeah. Like, that's the point of it, right? If it's just proportionally Bruce Banner to proportionally Bruce Banner bigger, it's just bigger banner, right? It doesn't really do much, right? Like, M, M, ma, ma, right? You want to see goes from Bruce Banner and even the posture. Like, that's something else, you know, like, just that's where, like, Christopher reaved really well as Superman, right? Being able to, like, have himself kind of brought in a little bit, a little bit smaller, you know, kind of hunched in. And then standing up and bigger, right? And that's just one human actor. We can push it further. We've got these or pencils or whatever the **** you got, right? Were kind of amazing that way. So we could really push that proportion, right? And yes, Christopher Reeves is he's the superman, right? Like, he just his transformation sold it. And so lucky for us, we don't even have to do that. Like, we can really it's putty in our hands. We can literally push and pull proportions and play with it. Do you see all these peas that I'm talking about? Okay, I want to do line of action. And, uh, there's two things I want to cover, and maybe you guys can remind me before I'm done with the lesson for today. Line of action, actually, three. Line of action, weight distribution, and fun. 5. Stickmen Figure References: A quick break to show you something behind me. Uh, let's see. Who do I got? I'll grab this wolverine. When I was growing up, action figures sucked. They were this high and just robot up and down arms. The new ones have tons of points of articulation, right? We could see the knees, the hips. There's a lot of external, internal rotation. We can see this and if you're gonna buy an action figure, look at the chest hinging. It's kind of hard cause the light's blowing it out a little bit, right? But this chest, he could fold it in and he could fold it way out. So there's actually, like a hinging a butterfly hinge going on in that peck area and stuff, right? So as a side note, when you're playing around with simplified skeletons and you're doing all these things, if you're struggling even a bit, and if you're looking excuse to buy toys, even a bit. Look for action figures. But when you're looking for action figures, look for as many points of articulation as are workable and applicable to what you're going for. I'm trying to think of, do I have somebody that's not really good for articulation? Yeah, so this she hulk has no butterfly hinging in the peck or anything like that. So it can go up as stiff as hell, right? It can go down and it kind of got this and it goes forward. Whoo. Actually, it goes forward and back. Back in the days, you couldn't even do this. This was new, right? It just action figures would just go like this, right? So this is kind of cool, but you can do better, right? You can get something with better articulation, like I pointed out, this wolverine. I find for some reason, Wolverine and Spider Man. I know what it is about those ones. They're great on their points of articulation and stuff like that. I think because they're and Hulk, too, I think it's Marvel's, like, throwing itself into its main characters and stuff, right? Okay, guys, so this was a little break showing you guys about action figures, but we can see how if I was to rotate this around, how it follows the principles of what I was talking about, that circular range in the shoulder, right? Let's go back to the drawing for a second. Okay. 6. Stickmen Line Of Action: Let's see if I can do this. Okay, line of action. I'm going to pull up this new page. And I'm going to draw a line. Now, let's say this is my person. And obviously, I'm kind of moving forward here, right? Like, we're moving forward. This is an action line. He's going forward here, right? So once again, if I really want to, actually, I'll make this flat on the ground, I guess. I'm just eyeballing this, right? Here might be the hips. Here's the torso, here's the head, right? This is where I'm going to have him running. Okay? So let's do that. He's going to be looking straight ahead. This arm is going to go up. The opposite arm shoulder is going to come back. Maybe I'll have this leg. And remember, I'm kind of eyeballing, roughing to say, Okay, the knee would be about here. And I'm just going to put this back leg back to about here. Okay, so this is the line of action for this character. He is running. And if I can do a little toe hinge there or whatever, which my spotty has. And that's a reasonable character running, right? Like, it looks to me, it looks like the character's running. This character is not just is not standing because they would fall over, right? So we know this characters running. The motion, the pieces of the body are all signifying it. Let's push it further, okay? So I'm going to see how far I could push this. And I like pushing things. I like pushing limits a little bit. And, believe me, just so you know, when you push hold on. One, two, three, four. Yeah. When you push, y'all can **** it up. Like, seriously, you push a lot and you break it. And that's kind of cool, maybe I'll push I'll try that today. But, like, really, you want to push the line of action so far that it snaps, then you take a half step back, and that's the money shot, right? Okay. So, what have I got? I got my hips here. I've got my torso from the side here, and I've got my head here. So I'm going to I'm gonna have my dude my dude looking forward. Shoulders, I'm just doing this from a straight on angle, straight from the side just to simplify things or whatever, right? So let's see. Put this hand here. And I've pushed this, here's the knee down to this knee. There we go. That's pushed a lot, right? That's almost Looney Tunes cartoonish a little bit. Like, the way he's running there and stuff like that is kind of ridiculous, right? But it still works. The anatomy is still there. It checks and everything like that. And boy, is he ever going, right? Like, he's the motoring and stuff. Do I love it? I think that's probably as far as I was to push it. If I was to do one more, it would almost be like he's falling on his *** or falling on his face a little bit, right? But I think how that works, how I've got it, it still kind of works. So, whether it's Spider Man and a funky pose, whether it's the flash running forward, you know, if I was to do that with a figure, pose it, and then from the side, honestly, it's kind I did it for anatomy's sake and stuff like that for drawing it. But from the side, it kind of reads a little boring. But when how many times do we see that cover the flash? Covers plural of the flash running towards you, right, like hands up and just like, and everything's, like, bent and, you know, the fore shortening and stuff like that. If I was to pivot this camera and put it head on facing him. Well, now I got a bad *** shot, right? Now I got the money shot, right? But it's still I've pushed it. I've been pushing this pose, right? So that's what you want to kind of do is push that line of action and see how far you can push it until it becomes ridiculous. And even if it is ridiculous, you just stepped into Looney Tunes world, and that's not the worst thing in the world, right? I think that still works. So, this then leads me into, I was gonna do balancing, but I want to do play first. So we'll do line of action. Um Balance and play. Just to remind myself, 'cause I don't feel like you guys are gonna remind me. Okay. 7. Stickmen Balance: Okay, so balance. And this is related to balance because right now, if this person that we're looking at up here, they're not balanced. They're falling forward, right? Luckily, their momentum keeps them rolling. I don't know if you guys have ever tried to run down a hill. But you look ridiculous. But you stay up because you keep moving forward, right, until you don't? So if I'm looking at balance, I'm looking at the weight distribution of how things pan out against, in this case, gravity. There's other forces that play on occasion, but for right now, we're just going to talk about gravity. So like I said, if I have this character, all right? And my character is just standing here. They are decently balanced, right? We can kind of agree that my character will be kind of balanced standing there. Although my feet are not the most balanced in the world, I think you guys get it. This is the ground. This is the middle weight of the character. It's all balanced. Okay, what happens if my character likes yoga, Woops. And I try to hit a yoga pose. So I'm going to put swing this up. And I'm gonna put the pose like that. That's a yoga pose, right? Well, no, hold on. I'll get all yoga on your *** and call me the yogi today. I'm gonna put these down here. There we go. Okay, so, how's my character doing? Is my character in a yoga pose? Yeah. But there's a lot of weight on this side. There's a lot of weight happening on this side, right? So with this knee being out here, this shifts the weight distribution, and there is a very good chance my character is going to topple over. Okay. So how would I change that if I was to do this over again? Hmm. I might have the head here, but I might have to shift the hip this way, just a little bit. I might have to shift it so that this leg is coming from this side. Do you see how the body's trying to correct? It's trying to find its balance without being pitched over, okay? Balance is really important, in a standing pose, especially. Now, we'll go back to this line of action thing. There is no balance here. There is momentum. So the momentum is carrying the balance forward, right? That's what's happening with the running one, right? So if I I'm trying to think of a cool pose. Somebody was submitted some artwork to me the other day, and it was a trooper that was running. So I'm trying to remember what the pose was. But fundamentally, You know, I mean, it was a half half step pose or whatever. I can't remember what it was. They had a gun or something, right? I don't know. So sometimes I draw what it's supposed to be. And then there I go up into a shoulder or whatever. And so I'm looking at where just this line of action has him tipping forward. But I'm going to put the balance more forward. So he's on this foot, this knee, the weight carries it down here. You see what I'm saying? So this weight of the center line, I've moved that forward. This has shifted. This one is not on the center line. Here's my center line. This one's off, so he's going to fall over here. But this center line, this center line of the weight lands a lot on this. Plus, there's a little bit of momentum. Okay. It's a little tough without I should have pulled up a lot of references for you guys and stuff, but I just wanted to wing it and just totally do it with stick figures. But you can see how having just a little bit of momentum with a little bit of an eye for balance will help you make a more believable pose in your stick figures, right? 8. Stickmen Fun and Review: Hey, the last one first line of action, balance, now, play. What I like to do, and this works out perfect. We're at about an hour now, right? What I like to do is goof around in some of my warm ups. So I will and it's harder than you expect. Like legit. It's fun, but it's actually kind of hard. So what I'll do is I'll I'll draw some circles randomly, and I'll be like, Okay, how am I going to take these random circles and make them into a figure. So my random circles are usually head, hands, feet. So I'm going to let's say I make this a foot and this a foot, my ugly *** bean feet, go to make this a head. Hmm. Okay, so how can I do this now? Well, kind of roughing in here maybe maybe my torso could be here. No, I'm thing I'm going to drop it down because I want this to connect to this. Here's a hand and I'm going to do a little spidy hand or whatever, right? Um, this will go back to an elbow. This will come here for another hand. This will come up here and then come down into this, and this will come up maybe somewhere here and then down into that. So how ugly is this? But here's 1 ft, here's another foot. Here's this. Here's this. All right? It comes up into a knee here. This is coming back here. We've got our and this is just an exercise in ridiculousness. Like, don't get it twisted. This is just fun, but it's a fun little warm up. So you can really play around with just throwing circles everywhere. So that's kind of, like, either the first thing you want to do when you're playing with warming up with torsos or something like that, or kind of last thing is, like, just see if you can place a bunch of circles and say, Okay, well, how do I make a figure out of this? Like it I'm just looking at it. I'm like, What the hell? What am I going to do here? Okay, so, what I can do is kind of throw a line of action in here. And let's say this is a head. Okay. Well, then maybe a torso here and hips here. So I can put a foot here. Up to a knee, down to a foot. And you can see how I'm just like, I'm guessing here, guys. Like, I have no clue before I drew this what I was going to draw, right? Okay? So this is coming from the hip joint, up to the foot. That's a little and I can push the size of that if I want, right? Maybe I'll come here to a knee down to a foot down here, right? Maybe this could be like I like Spidey because, you know, he could be holding on to webbing or something like that, right? And he could be reaching down in this one or something. And that's how ridiculous. Yeah, it makes it into a game. Like, it's a weird, weird exercise that I do, but it really challenges your brain to say, how how can I do this? How can I connect these dots, right? And so that was kind of like the last thing I wanted to throw at you as a bit of an exercise, right? Just to kind of play around. Okay, so we're going to review, guys. Ooh. Did I go upside down somehow? Yeah. Okay, so the first one, and maybe I'll write this in. Purple. I just rule the rule of weight, getting proportions down, right? Nice static proportions. Then my twists, earning to twist a little bit around the pivot points of articulation and also being able to do it with a little bit of a bend and stuff, right? Not breaking being aware word, aware of that 90 degrees, okay? And then we get down into proportions. Pushing and pulling the length of the limbs, the width of things and stuff like that, to really have fun with it, okay? I love creating characters this way, and I love also recognizing, like, what ****** me off a little bit, because I go to a comic and people are like, You look like Wolverine. I'm like, No, I don't. Wolverine's five foot three and 260 or something like that. Like Wolverine should look different. I love Hugh Jackman and stuff like that, and he's a great in the role and everything. But Wolverine looks different than cyclops. Cyclops looks different than the Beast. The Beast looks different than Colossus. Kitty Pride looks you understand what I'm saying here? So push and pull proportions and really, really understand why certain characters might look a certain way. Then we get into the line of action, seeing how far you can push it until it gets into Looney Tunes territory and having fun with that, right? Balance, understanding how, um, you can still have a bit of a line of action and a bit of movement, but you have to have it a little bit grounded. Okay? So looking for, are you grounding yourself correctly? Does it make sense, okay? And then have some fun. Just play around, have some fun with it, be goofy, make it a bit of a game. Don't stress yourselves. But really just I found, even just doing it live, I don't think I've ever done that live. It's a little challenging. I'm like, what the hell am I going to do here, right? Like, this is not as easy as It looks you'll be like, Hi I can do that. Do it. Let's see. Do it. Like, have fun with it. I want to see what you guys come with. And if you have another 20, 30, $40, go get some action figures. Get some ones with some very cool articulation points. Look at how Spidey here, too. He's got that butterfly hinge in the peck there, right? He's also got the to articulation? Yes, Spidey is a bom. I think this is Mafex actually, is the maker of this one. Guys, that's going to be it for my first class in the How to draw Comics Academy. I want to thank you for hanging out with me. I'm glad that I got to hang out with you guys to look through some questions and stuff like that, to bounce them back and forth a little bit. And I very much appreciate Clayton welcoming me in. Normally, like I said before, I'm a little bit of I'm more focused on muscular anatomy and stuff. And also, I'm a kick *** colorist. But simplified skeleton. I think if you can get this down, if you can just draw a line, break it, twist it, bend it. Sounds like one of those bop it games, right? If you could bop it, you're gonna kill it. You're gonna do so, so well. This is going to be so easy for you guys, okay? So I know that afterwards, there's in later days, there's some joint sessions and stuff like that. Hopefully, I'm going to be able to jump in on that a little bit busy this week, but I love hanging with you guys. You've been really cool. Um, Matt, Eric, Joshua, Clayton, all y'all. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. And for those who are watching it at a later date, hope you dig it, too. And that's the cool thing. You can pause, rewind and watch it again and stuff and see if I talked way too fast for you. And just to be clear, this episode of How to Draw Comics Academy was brought to you by Pepsi Electric. That's it. Have a good night, guys.