Master Drawing Action Poses! Learn to figure out gestures so you can re-invent them from new angles. | Steve Worthington | Skillshare
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Master Drawing Action Poses! Learn to figure out gestures so you can re-invent them from new angles.

teacher avatar Steve Worthington, Storyboard artist/illustrator/sculptor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      About This Class

      2:04

    • 2.

      Materials

      0:39

    • 3.

      Manikins or Mannequins

      3:35

    • 4.

      Blocks, Landmarks, Limits

      5:04

    • 5.

      Boxes Embedded in Skeleton and Anatomy Figure

      1:47

    • 6.

      Drawing Over Reference 1

      6:55

    • 7.

      Drawing Over Reference 2 (front/back bend)

      5:54

    • 8.

      Drawing Over Reference 3 (twist)

      4:31

    • 9.

      Drawing Over Reference 4 (side bend)

      4:50

    • 10.

      Drawing Over Reference 5 (combinations)

      13:16

    • 11.

      Round or Square Or Both?

      12:27

    • 12.

      The Bendy Box

      18:25

    • 13.

      Skateboard Gesture Drawings

      6:25

    • 14.

      Doodle a Page of Figures

      1:46

    • 15.

      Things I've Noticed

      3:52

    • 16.

      Class Project

      3:40

    • 17.

      Thank You and Good Luck!

      0:32

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About This Class

Wether action or just naturally relaxed poses, we'll start by finding out the absolute simplest manikin to use that is actually useful, and apply it to principles of movement found in various actions: Kicking, hitting objects with bats, climbing, surfing and more. If your manikin doesn't look right, neither will a more rendered figure. So iron out the gestures with the most broken down mannequin first. Anatomy and costumes must be hung onto believable actions to be convincing. Many of these actions, once understood, can be adapted to different purposes so you can draw action packed fight scenes, sports, swashbuckling pirates, or anything else you want, once you grasp the keys to progress in this field.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Steve Worthington

Storyboard artist/illustrator/sculptor

Teacher

Hi there, I'm a professional storyboard artist, illustrator and sculptor. I spent 8 years in Los Angeles drawing shooting boards at hundreds of production companies (or hotel lobbies, people's kitchen tables, sound stages, on location in catering tents, you name it!).

Before that I worked in-house at a couple of ad agencies. One in London (UK), and one in Hong Kong. 

Now I work remotely from home (mostly) in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA). I still go in and sit with directors to thumbnail scenes for some tv shows and movies that are being made in NM, which I then finish up at home.

Drawing shooting boards for commercial, film and tv directors has been my bread and butter for most of the time.

I also enjoy sculpting animals (I'm Critterville on Etsy... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. About This Class: Hi, I'm Steve Worthington. I'm a storyboard artist, illustrator and sculptor. And I've had to draw millions of figures over the years in all kinds of poses. And they have to look natural and kinda lively. When you combine anatomical knowledge with comfortable natural poses, you end up with well drawn figures. In this class, you will learn how to draw figures posed in all kinds of ways, doing all kinds of things that feel comfortable and look natural. We will break the figure down into very simple but practically useful forms. We'll use those simple blocks to create a very easy to manipulate in our mind and on paper, mannequin. And we'll see how that relates using reference to actual people will have some fun exploring lots of gesture drawings. And we're also invent some entirely of our own. We'll take a look at proportions and also analyze lots of movements and activities in fairly great detail, but still just using this very simple mannequin. But also take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of using round oval type shapes versus more rectangular block shapes. We will see how you can use them in combination for the best results. We'll see how you can start with this very simple shape and then build out. We will look at a few more other shapes as well. For the class project, we'll start by drawing a mannequin of someone doing something that is interesting to us. And then we will take that mannequin and draw it from different viewpoints. The end goal is to fill a page with lively natural poses and then work over those to create a bunch of either a little cartoony characters or more realistic looking people, whichever you prefer. If all that sounds like something you're interested in, I'll see you in class. 2. Materials: So what do we draw with? Well, anything you are comfortable with. I mean, it could be a pencil, Apple pencil. Anything that you're comfortable drawing with is fine. When it comes to what do we draw on? Well, paper's always a good start. Tracing paper is also perfectly fine. The point is if you are comfortable making marks with it, then that's what you should use. Actually, if you are going completely traditional tracing paper is a definite useful thing for kind of working out your shapes over the tops of other things. So get yourself some tracing paper if you don't already have any. And it gets scribbling. 3. Manikins or Mannequins: So if we're going to be wanting to draw people performing various actions, a couple of things we need to know. One is what the actions, how they function, what they look like. And the other is we need a tool that we can use to very quickly sketch that out. What I'm doing here is using a very simple mannequin that will enable me to sketch out my, my action. And then if there's something about it I don't like it's pretty quick and easy to change. In this case, we've got somewhere in the bat to kick a football or soccer ball if you prefer. You can go simpler than that. You can just reduce this box here to a single line. You have to be very careful if you're doing that though, because you've got to know exactly which way is up. And if you don't draw in the whole books, knowing which way is up becomes a little bit more difficult. Actually quite a bit more difficult. So I would advise using the box. That way. You'll know which way is up. We're gonna draw our entire box in there. Got someone that hit a golf ball. There are some very key things within even this very simple structure that you really need to bear in mind. One of them is essentially the relationship of these two points of the hip joints, especially in relationship to this box and each other. And another one is a center line runs up the front or the back of the hip box and the same thing with the chest area. Now this one is pretty much dead site onto us, so we don't see the center line, but here we can do the center line up this box, down this box here. Very important to have a good ground plane feeling of late where the feet are planted. If they're planted, in this case, one of the feet up in the air and the other one is just barely planted with his heel on the ground. That's the sole of the shoe. And the head relative to the chest box and the chest box relative to the rib box. These are very crucial also where the hands are, because that's how we figured out where we're going to put the arms. Sometimes prefer to, rather than working from the shoulder out to the hand, figure out what the hands are doing because that decides how the rest of the arm is moving. Hands. Then of course, the head. We need to know where the middle of the head is. If we see the front side of it and put a little center line down there to say we know which way it's facing. 4. Blocks, Landmarks, Limits: Here are a couple of blocks of wood that I have fashioned on a spring to give you an idea of the limitations of the various movements and also which parts we're looking for when we start looking on an actual body. This is the chest facing this way in a normal standing pose, the pelvis is tilted slightly forwards and the ribcage is tilted slightly back, shaved off a chunk here, rather than keep it like perfectly block shaped, just so that I could demonstrate some forward bending. And I took these corners off because the shoulders make up these corners. So anyway, what are these little red dots and things all over the place? This is the center of the chest, center of the rib-cage. This, you can see represents this opening here. And down the bottom here, these are key areas. So I've just marked them with little red dots. When we're looking at it from the side. You can see that it's slightly tilted forward. And these points here are very important. And I've marked them on here with a couple of red dots. This bony part here is also super important. So I've marked with a red dot. You can see that this block is a conceptual thing to help you identify. Because this is a very complicated shape. It just makes it easier to identify certain points so that you can orient your body and heavier various body parts facing in the right directions and not go too far. On the backside. Done a dotted line for the spine. Got a dot here. Lh would represent the seventh cervical vertebrae, which is a point that sticks out. You can feel it on the back of your neck. Just marks the very top of the ribcage where the neck starts. This V-shape here is very noticeable landmark. If you've looked at any nudes, these two red dots down here, these to call them your sit bones. So if you're sort of sitting down on a hard chair, you feel those bones, they're kind of they might get a little bit sore after a while if you've been sitting on very hard chair for a very long time. So there we have it from the back. We have it from the side. What is very important is to be comfortable drawing these shapes, kind of tilted and twisted and bent around from each other. Now there's some important points to remember in terms of just how far you can move these. You can bend forwards if you're really flexible an awful long way. But you can't bend backwards that far. I mean, that's a really, really, really flexible person bending backwards. That's a very flexible person bending forward. And twisting goes. You can't twist as far as you think you might be able to like that. That's a pretty far twist. Like halfway to 90 degrees is you'd have to fix your pelvis and really be like pulling on something to twist that far. You might feel like if your feet are planted on the ground, I can twist my body all the way around to there. Well, that's because most of the action has taken place in the hip joints. And sunny, a small amount of twist that rotates the top block against the bottom block. So be aware that it's the it's the hip joints where most of the twisting occurs when your feet are planted on the ground and you're just sort of reaching around your hip joints connect your legs to your torso. Side bending wise. That's a pretty good side bend. So don't be thinking you can go like that because that's just not realistic. So that's pretty far bend sideways and say you can also get combinations of little bit of backward bending, a little bit of side bending, little bit of twisting with a little bit of folding and bending. And these are the things you're looking out for anyway. So the next thing we're gonna do is identify these key points. The enabled us to establish our blocks on a human body. And then we can start noticing these blocks. The concept of these blocks, when we start looking at pictures of people in action. 5. Boxes Embedded in Skeleton and Anatomy Figure: So these are the bony landmarks on the scalar. And I've put the outer part of the hip joints in green. Here we have our block superimposed over the top minus the skeleton, but we're still with the indications of the bony landmarks. Now we have the muscles added for anatomical reference. And then we got rid of the boxes. So you can just see the anatomy. The boxes of returned, but, uh, now transparent just in case they were getting a little bit in your way. The body become transparency. You can get a clear look at everything. And I've just gone into some more unusual angles here so you can see overlapping and foreshortening. It's just kind of a reference. Just get used to looking at things this way and noticing how things overlap and how they shorten when you're looking at them more from an end. The green part of the hip joint that is visible is called the great trochanter. Obviously the blocks don't line up perfectly with the actual body parts. For instance, the base of the neck. You'll notice that that's quite a way off. That's because the back edge of the top of the ribcage is higher up than the front edge. Here we have our blocks and I've colored them Front, back inside so you can see the sharp divisions. So as the shapes become more organic, the transitions between the front sides and back become much vaguer. Where everything kind of blends and smooths of superimposed the blocks here against you get to see them both. 6. Drawing Over Reference 1: We can see from the the bra and the waist band that the top and bottom portions of the body, not bending sideways, but they are tilting forwards in terms of the pelvis and tilting backwards a little in terms of the ribcage, we're seeing a little bit onto the back side of them. We can tell that they're facing slightly away from us. So we can draw our blocks in. Like so. Just adjust that line a little bit where we could put our center line. Then those landmarks that we have. This next one we can see that this time we are seeing the front side and a three-quarter view. We can see that it's pretty straight up and down. This, none of this tilting, it was going on in the previous one. We can draw our boxes in. This is the front part of the ribcage sternum. We can put our center lane. The ribcage actually is higher at the back than it is at the front. So we could lift the back of that box up a little bit here. And also the shoulders. They vary in their position there. This is way more important to locate the box of the ribcage than it is the direction of the shoulders to try and give you the direction of the rib-cage. Because one shoulder could be sort of lift it up like this one. The other shoulder could be lower down like this one. And the shoulders can you can get them all the way back. You can shrug your shoulders all the way up to here. You can move your shoulder forward. They connect to the front of the ribcage via the clavicle bone. And that is the one actual fixed point, if you like, of the arm to the to the rib cage. As this thing lifts up and moves around, the shoulders would be different relative to each other and certainly not symmetrically placed on the rib-cage when the arms are being used in any way? Unless you're using them very symmetrically. Yeah. Don't don't rely on locating shoulders to get a sense of where the rib cages at least in his facing, which direction? This one we can see. The thrust of this box here is leaning slightly forwards like that. The ribcage is leaning slightly back. So we can draw our box. This would be the notch at the top of the sternum there. We can put a hair center line. As we put more of our anatomical knowledge which we may have now or we may gain later. Refine our shapes that we're using. There'll become more organic looking. But the important thing to consider using these boxes is that you get a definite sense of the center and which direction they're facing, and at what angle they're tilted. So that is important not to get too super literal when you're looking at the corners of these boxes because all the corners get shaved off. You're just looking for those landmarks that appear within the box. We can see through here to align sort of like a bra. That gives us a sense of the direction of our box. For the chest, we can see that our pelvis would be tilted ever so slightly in this direction and the ribcage is tilted slightly in the other direction and leaning forward a little bit. The knees give us a little clue to that because this knee is further forward than this one. Center line. For the top box of the rib, rib-cage. Then we're not seeing the centerline of this one because we're looking at it pretty much from the side and down. Well, I guess if we were going to twist this pelvis ever so slightly more in this direction just so that we can see just a hair of the front of it. Since this knee is sticking out a little further than that one. We can just erase those bits. Just do that bit again right there. And another important thing to always bear in mind is overlaps. So when you've got one box, you don't always see all of both of the boxes depending on what your angle is. The bottom box could be completely obscured or partially, depending on how you're looking at that. How leaning towards you. It is fairly straightforward. Poses. Just put in. The rest of their foot would be back down here. Surfer. 7. Drawing Over Reference 2 (front/back bend): Now the clothes on this one, I really helpful for helping us establish direction of our blocks. So we have this one tilted forwards up a little bit on the other side, and this one tilted backwards. We've got a little bit of backward bending going on there. We can draw pelvis, ribcage box. This is the notch at the top of this. We can draw a box up here. Good to draw through where you have overlapping forms and then you can erase. Later. We can put our center line down there. Again here we see that the shoulders wouldn't be a good guide because one shoulder is down on the other shoulder is all the way up here. We can put a box him for the head as well. My cat box a little bit. Just chop a corner off there. We can see, we are seeing that slightly towards the back side of the box on this instance, we can go ahead and draw a box where we see just a little bit of the back of it. The Clothes help us here with figuring out where our pelvic box goes. We can see that we're seeing a little bit of the back side of it here. We would draw pelvic box like that. Put us into lines in. This is pretty much just from the side. So we can see that the ribcage is bent way forwards and the pelvis is folded up. Pretty far. We can draw pelvic box like we can put the neck. The little point that I pointed out, those seventh cervical vertebrae that sort of sticks out at the base of your neck indicating the top most extent of the ribcage? We can put that there. So there's our site books upside angle of our box, that's the ribcage and the pelvis. And the shoulders abroad fairly far away from the ribcage here. Which is why he shouldn't use shoulders to figure out where the ribcage box is. We can put the thigh bones in there and the tibia there. We can put the head would be about there. There's some boxes that are folding, folding forwards. And if you're not comfortable drawing box shapes, simple geometric shapes, twisted and bent and leaning relative to each other. I've got a class on drawing boxes, which would be a great place to start because you're going to really struggle with this if that's a problem for you. Here we have a forward leaning pelvis is sitting up like this. The ribcage is leaning way forwards like so. And again, the shoulders are sort of elevated away from the ribcage. So we don't use the shoulders to figure out where the ribcage is. If anything, we use the neck where the base of the neck would be probably be about there. So ribcage box would be their pelvis box would be here. We can put a boxing for the head. Everything nice and side view. Shoulders elevated all the way up to here from the ribcage. Find some pictures online and just practice drawing these boxes and locating them, finding out which direction they're facing and just draw over them. You can just draw over magazines, junk myo. Anytime you see pictures of people, start figuring out where those boxes are in drawing over them. 8. Drawing Over Reference 3 (twist): So we can see that our hip box pretty much just sitting there. The rib-cage because we know this notch here is top of the central front part. And so this is kind of the center line. We can draw ourselves. Ribcage box going like this. What cues do we have here? We've got the back of the underpants. Let me go to the two pockets on the sides here to just confirm that this is the the way that they have is facing this hips box. Then back of the neck. That'll be the top of the ribcage. And it's twisted a bit that way. Because it's twisted a bit that way. It doesn't seem to be bending either side. Just make sure this line is a little bit more in that direction than this line. Putting their center line. Now this one is great. We can see very clearly hips would be in a direction by looking at these points where they connect with the lovely atop thing. Then the ribcage is more like this. And we can see the actual spine kind of moving up there. Say that definitely helps. We can draw we can draw a box in for the head as well. Top of the head. If there was no hair there, you might see a little bit of the forehead. Here we have a good bit of rotation going on. We can put the hips in. And then there's our ribcage. He's swinging his arms around this way to create some rotation so you can bring his board around. This way. We can do a box for the head. Ever so slightly on the top side there. Erase these. We can put the feet in this row. Wine. There'd be a heap on the other side here, down to the knee and then the other foot. Shoulders forward a bit. We can't get a good sense of the pose with just three simple boxes and some just wireframe, arms and legs. 9. Drawing Over Reference 4 (side bend): So something I've noticed when side bending is that the the rib box, you can push it a little farther that way so that this point becomes more above this one and this one goes further out to the side. Just something I've noticed. From the clothing here we can figure that the pivot box goes there. And the rib box side bent a little turned away from us as well. This is the line of the sternum here. We can draw a box. The back edge of the ribcage is a little higher than the front on the top side. I don't know if you want to put that in like that or not, but it's just a useful thing to know. We can put center lines up here. Now of course, we don't want to be too literal with these boxes, as I've mentioned before and will continue to mention. They are a guide. We will get more organic with a mannequin forms further down the line. And as you learn more about anatomy, you'll get less boxy. But the boxes are there again to indicate, make it clear which direction these forms are facing because they will have fronts and they all have sides. They just don't have fronts and the sides that are clearly defined like this. In fact, if anything, you can think of. Okay, So this is a box. This is say, an egg. If you shaved off with sanding, if you've got like a sander and just took down surface of this so that it has a front that matches this. Then you send it off to the side so that it would do that this way. Have a side that matched that. Again, you can do the top. This is kind of getting closer to what we're talking about in terms of the organic shapes that we're dealing with. But what we are getting a hold of is that we have a center line, we have a front side, we have side and this backside, That's where these boxes are coming in useful. We can do another one for the head. We can see that. We can see a little bit on the front side, nothing around the back. So we can just draw a box like this. We can see ribcage clearly leaning over to the side. We can draw it quite confidently like that. And the base of the neck would be about here. So the top of the rib cage would be there. For the pelvic area. I did a sort of brightened up version so I could sort of see what's going on down there because it's kind of dark. I can see the middle here so we can kind of split the difference between the underpants line in the short line. Put ourselves a box. Erase that. For the head. For the head, we can draw another box here. I'm drawing these boxes where the corners extend beyond the volumes that they includes. The head, the shoulder on this on this side is down and this one is way up. So you can see why you wouldn't want to use the shoulders to try and figure out the angle of the box that represents the rib-cage. We can do ourselves a center line there. 10. Drawing Over Reference 5 (combinations): This hip is higher than this one. We'll draw our block tilting down a bit on that side. Then the rib cage is tilting up in the opposite direction, say. And we can draw a center line. The shoulders are up here. Draw a block for the head. There's a bit of a side bend and also a bit of folding, like bending backwards, I suppose. Soviet of backbone then a bit of side bend in combination there. This one. Even though it's covered in a shirt, we can get a pretty good sense that the ribcage is pretty much facing us. This muscle here ends up a notch at the top of the ribcage. So we can draw ourselves a block there. I can't really see into this darkness here, so I'm going to just do it brightened up version. What I can see from that is that the pelvic area would seem to be like this. Not facing us. Like this is facing us. And it's tilted up. On one side. We could put our legs and feet in there. Drawer box for this knee would probably come out a little further. Push that knee a little bit further. There we go. We can position the hips on the sides of that box. Put our center line in here. And keeping this sort of simple three-dimensional form means that you've got somewhere to place these hip joints. So here's the top of the ribcage where the seventh cervical vertebrae makes a little lump on the backup the base of the neck there. We can see that the ribcage is pretty much facing us, just a hair hair turned away from us and the pelvis here. We've got these handy cues of the pants to kind of give us a pretty good idea of how we're drawing those. We can just see the bottom there. Then we can put in the legs, the feet. The other hip would be about here. Going up to the meal there. The shoulders again, I kind of one's more forward and one's more back. Can't see too much of the head there. Those hip bones. We can see that one is there and the other ones here. So we can draw our box. We can see that the ribcage is rotated and bent back. So if I grab my little thing here, it's a little bit like that. Put a center line in there. Put our hip joints in their hip joint would be over here. We can draw the head as a block. We can use the belt loops, the pants to help us figure out where the hips box would go. The ribcage would be rotated, bend back a little bit to a side bend and M and a rotation going on there. There's a box, hip joints. There's a lot of swivel in these hips. This whole torso moves around by virtue of these hip joints because they're ball-and-socket joints, very flexible. Box in here for his head. Get rid of these bits. This one, there's a lot of overlap. This is the side. Then the ribcage as a little bit of a rotation. So we would rotate that. Also. We're looking down on it. Because we're looking down on it. It's overlapping this pelvis quite considerably. Then the is help us with the browser as well, figured out that the block for the head would be facing in this direction. We're pretty much looking down, right down on the top of it. The shoulders. Once for the forward and the others further back. The other hip joint would be over here. Going out to the we can see we're looking at we're not dead onto the back of the pelvis. Read a little bit three-quarters. So we're going to see some of the side. Then that ribcage is rotated a little further around. So this would be the base of the neck. A little bit more of the side of the pelvis should probably make a little adjustment there. We have the center line control block for the head, the hip joints, the knee, and the hip joint. The b here would be that this is very foreshortened. So massive overlap here. Overlaps are always good things to be on the lookout for. We've got some very definite side bend and rotation going on here. So we can put the rib-cage. Then C into this dark area where I've brightened up the photograph so I can see what's going on a little better. We're seeing sort of bottom of the box here. Sit bones would be kind of air in there. This would be a little triangle shape. Hip hip joints. They're down into the knee. Of the hip joint there, down into the knee. These are going away from us. This is where drawing more volumetric leg would be helpful. Then we can see clearly that this part of the leg coming towards us further down it goes by how we draw the socks are a great way to indicate that. Here I've done pretty much the same thing with some Michelangelo paintings from the last judgment. That's how you can use them to figure out if your pose is looking right. You didn't have to put much time in. You can just use a minimum amount of lines. You get a really good idea of if, if, if it's working or if it isn't. There's no point going any further with a drawing. If not, if it's clearly not working, you can just try something different, move things around very quickly. That's where this is really helpful. 11. Round or Square Or Both?: So here's a question. Round or square when it comes to putting these mannequins together and working at her gestures, which is better. With round shapes. We get something a little bit like this. Square shapes, we get something a little bit more like this. While they both look fine, there are definite dangers that you can encounter when you just go the round route and also certain advantages. Likewise with the square root, There's good things about that and there's one or two things to watch out for as well. With the square approach is really clear where the center lines would go down your main blocks. You have a very good sense of what's facing in what direction and why that's important is that, you know, how far various parts of the body can move relative to the other parts. So you won't put, say, the front of this box over here by mistake. Once you start working into your drawing, you're very clear on where the front sides and where the sides are. Whereas when you start working on your rounded drawing, I mean, you might quite easily move your center line way too far in one direction relative to the other. Once you get further along with your drawing, you're going to have all kinds of problems making your anatomy work because you don't have any fixed points. Everything's kind of fluid. One thing when you're doing things using a square approach, your, you need to be really clear in your mind of where your boxes are oriented and how they're facing. You can't just kind of muddle your way into it quite so well, because you're being kind of exact with your points and your planes. Like here's the hip joint. There's the knee, the foot's up here. The other hip joints over here. So that's the other knee. This is someone throwing something. Your center lines again are very, very clear where they are. But unless you have a very clear idea in your head of what it is you're drawing. Drawing it with the squares first is a little bit trickier to figure out with the circles. You can work your way in a little bit more. You're not sure where the center is. You can try a hip joint here or a hip joint here. You can just kind of get a good sense of volume using this method and then just kind of find your way in. But you have to, I would say, decide on at a certain point that the hips are facing this way and the torso is facing this way. And there's a certain amount of overlap here. Just means that you can kind of work your way in a little better. When you're drawing things with these ovals. You can get this feeling over a bending form like this could be. What we're going to end up with, which is a block for the chest area and a block for the pelvis. Maybe hips are here. Then we've got some fee. Would work. It's way too there. We could have a head game facing in this direction. We can start with kind of a more circular approach. We can put our shoulder out here. There are other shoulder back this way, but when we're starting with these, I mean, these could be facing any direction. They could be. What you have in mind when you draw them to start with, might change as you're working into your drawing and you forget which way this was facing. And until you fix those points. This circular approach can lead you astray. As soon as you can. Once you've figured out some things. Then with your circles, you can. Give it a little bit more dimension and direction. And after that, you've got your center line here and you know that the center line has gone kind of tucked under. Maybe you could even see it on the front side where, for instance, if you have a shape, bends all the way under like this, you'd see the center line on the back side, say, and also on the front side. This would be if someone is let's say someone is flying through the air. If we look at say, someone hitting a golf ball, we've got a circle here in a circle here for the hips and the ribcage and other one for the head. But until we figure out which one is facing in which direction, we really don't have that much other than a sense of volume. Sense of volume is really useful, especially if you're drawing the same thing from a different angle. Like let's say we're going to be much higher up, looking down. Then you've got your volume for the for the ribcage and you've got the other volume for the rib for the hips, then we need to start figuring out well, okay, where are we? Where do we put in the hip? Where are we deciding is the center line? Then you can sort of start squaring things off a little bit more. Just kind of once you start squaring things. So if you are making decisions and those decisions relate to where your center lines go. Bring this down a little further. That hip there. If we're looking more down on it, where we know the hips are facing in this direction. We know that the center line is about here and the rib cage area and there's some overlap going on. Then if you're just dealing with circles where you put your hips gets a little nebulous as well. But once you've kind of solidified it, given it some dimension, we're not dimension but direction. Made those decisions on what's the back, What's the side? Whereas the center line, then you can position your other hips. And then you can you can put that other leg and foot down in there. And then this arm goes all the way around here. Squares. Your ultimate goal for position and direction of things. Circles are kind of how you might get there. Once you've got this feeling of overlapping volumes, you then need to start deciding on where you're gonna put the center lines in the direction of things. We can sort of think circular, moving in the direction of square. Good way to start rolling. Good way to feel grounded. That you can then further advance your anatomical knowledge into your, into your drawing. You want something more sort of definite with squares. One thing that it's important to point out is that because we're starting with boxes and sort of fairly straight lines, sort of armature, if you like, doesn't mean that our final drawing is going to be stiff and rigid. It's just that it has a solid foundation that we can then work on. I'll show you what I mean. We have pretty much nothing but straight lines here to indicate various parts, locations of various points and give us a sense of the direction that things are facing. So when we actually draw over that, if we know a little bit about where the parts of the body sort of start from and where they go. We can be very loose and flowy in a continuation of this. There's nothing stiff about, about this drawing here. Very loose and flowy, but it begins and is grounded by these straight lines and sense of where things are and where they're facing. This is because we have a sense of the front. We've got our center lines, which we got from the initial blocks, where the positions of the hips are, where the positions of the shoulder joints are. From putting in the hands and the feet. We can work out the direction that the volumes of the legs and arms go. If we understand where these points are and we've learned a little anatomy along the way, then we can start driving muscles to certain points because we know where those points are relative to the sort of armature that we've already drawn. An arbitrary might have straight lines doesn't mean your drawing is going to look stiff. So we've learned that while you can get a good sense of overlapping volumes and flow with some round shapes. Pretty soon you want to move those forwards to having decided directions and dimensions and positions of things. And then over the top of that, you can then get really flowy and lively with your final lines. But it will then be placed over the top of something more grounded. 12. The Bendy Box: Besides thinking in terms of two blocks, There's always the twisty box way you can look at things. The bottom of our box and the top part of our box will be stiff. But this whole middle section will be very squishy. You can sort of move your box like, let's say we're starting it in the same position. We want to twist it this way. We can end up with this piece here, would be connected to this piece here. So actually, we want to keep that top part stiff. And then we just, then this would go up to here and this would come back to a point through there. We can bend up box forwards like this. You can even give it some twist as well. So we could add a little twist in there, but I going just drawing this rectangle here, but like up a little bit like this. Center line wise. You've got the center line of sight, the backside, and then the center line of the front side because it's folding over. You get to see it on both sides. We could draw pelvic portion of our twisty box. Then it will be kind of squash and stretch. Very squashed up here and it will be stretched out on the other side. We could figure out where the hips go. Draw those legs. Put the feet in there. You could draw the other leg. Put the other foot in there, and put a boxing for the head, shoulders, the hands. We could do another twisty box doing a back bend so we could start with the chest area. Then it would go over to the pelvic area. Shoulders would be extended away from the ribcage a little bit. We could put a heading down here. There's another box. Hips here. Make a put our legs in. They wouldn't be F508. The other hip would be over here. The other foot would be battling. Make that feel a little bit bigger. The arms with the hands behind the feet there. Again, we can put it in our center lane. Maybe you'll see a little bit of it there. We can use this as the basis for drawing the entire figure. Because we know where on this box, which is basically the bottom part of our long bendy box, the bottom pi stiffen, the top part is fairly stiff. So we can, assuming, assuming you've learned a little bit of anatomy, you can figure out where all the body parts fit into this. Let me go to the forearm and hand getting in the way. If this part here. We can indicate the volumes of the forms and the direction by putting some bits of clothing on here, put some socks on there. I guess I'd have to erase the toes. Then for the headgear and the other way. For some parts of this, worth flipping it over because you're more used to seeing a body the right side up. If we want to draw a vertical line, center line covering parts of the body here. We can do that. I almost put the waist band on here. So you can do a pretty loose, lively drawing, even if you start out with these kind of more square-shaped things. Let's just emphasize this squash and stretch thing that I mentioned earlier. If this is our sort of bendy box and the top and the bottom section of it are fairly rigid and stiff. This middle section here is kind of flexible. If our box is leaning one direction on the bottom area and then back again in the top direction. What's going to happen to our squishy area? This is going to get much longer and stretch here and it's gonna get much shorter and bulge here. So the way we draw that would be like this. We could draw this side of it darker. Put a little shading on this side of this box. But to emphasize the point of the flexibility of the hip joints. We've got the feet facing this way. We've got the hip joints facing this way and the rest of the rest of the torso, the rest of the way around like that. The body is facing off to the side and the feet are facing off in this direction. You've got nearly 90 degrees between this angle and this angle. But most of that is occurring here in the hip joints. So the whole thing moves around. Surface facing the direction of the feet. The whole torso can move around just by the hip joints moving. Then the rest of it moves by the top of the torso moving relative to the hips. But, but that, that amount of twist is not that massive. Again, we can emphasize squash and stretch there. Well that's more of a twist. This is the squishy middle section. Probably the arms would let me be back where major flexibility in these joints here. If seen in the flexibility of the hip joints, the flexibility in the middle of the torso, but it's not as flexible as you may think. Okay, let's take another look at some squash and stretch. We'll start with ribcage box. Will put put our pelvis underneath, but at a much more. Angled position. We can put our hip joints in here. With Jordan will be down there. Put the head. Shoulders. Have the shoulders kind of raised or from the side of the ribcage. We can see we've got some very squashed and stretched here. We could draw will just reverse the squashing and stretching. So we'll draw our ribcage books again. This time we will have the pelvis block angled up on the near side, down on the foss side. Put the hip joints in here. Other one would be through here. We'll put the head, shoulders up off of the ribcage. We have a stretch happening on this side and squash happening on this side. It's not forget center line. We can see we've got some sort of side bend going on there. So if we're going to take a mannequin a step further, you can bring out the rib-cage, will bring further to accommodation breasts as well. The center line will be using cylinders for the arms. And since we know that the back of the back of the rib cage is higher than the front. And we can put in a nick ahead. Then we can put in shape to indicate the abdomen area. And with this one with the hip coming up this way, you can put it in cylinders for the legs. Hip area here. Again, we'll accommodate the breasts there. By bringing that forward. We'll take it back side edge of the ribcage up there. Then there'd be sort of like a compression of body tissues like muscle and fat and were heavy. Can put bottom of this shape here and add little compressible shape for the abdomen area. The arms. Just use simple cylinders for the arms. Likewise for the neck. And then we can put the head on top there. If you want to get more details on drawing heads, class on drawing heads. So that will help you out a bunch there. Once you've got these mannequins worked out. Adding the muscles. Beyond that point. Once you've established some shapes that have passed that relate to key parts of the body. Landmarks, particularly bony parts, then it's much easier to draw the muscles in after that. So for example, you can put in the pectoralis and deltoids here and the lattice seamless and other muscles. Likewise over here we'll put the pectoralis and deltoids in as well. To make up the shoulder area. Disappears into the armpit there. Around the back side we've got the muscles that belong with the shoulder blade. Won't worry too much about that. Since we are around the front side. We can bring the abdominal muscles into the front area here where the pubic bone is. Got some good dynamics going on. And it all begins with these very simple shapes. And then you just build on those by learning your way around the human form. But you've got all the, all the angles kind of contrasting against each other. And you're drawing things in a solid three-dimensional form. So that it's more convincing the further you go. We've looked at the long bendy box with the squishy bit in the middle being the basis for a more organic approach. Beyond that point, you can fix your positions of various anatomical body parts. We looked at some twisting of our long bendy box. We looked at bending and twisting of our long bendy box. 13. Skateboard Gesture Drawings: I have a couple of different kinds of gesture drawings here. The first kind, which is what you're looking at now, is me freezing some action on the TV and just taking a few seconds to make a quick drawing and then unfreezing it and then pausing it again, making another little drawing. And I'm using a sort of slightly abbreviated version of the mannequins. In a sense that we've got the we've got the line between the hip joints always present. And I'm simplifying the torso quite often just down to a flat rectangular shape so that you can twist it and stuff. That's just an economy born of necessity from trying to just do these drawings very quickly. And here we have some other ones. You can see we have that separation of the two hip joints. And if I was going to elaborate a little further on that, then I can just build out my three-dimensional structure a little more. But there's enough information here to go on. This 11 leg there with the knee up and there's another link there with the knee down. And this line between the two hip joints is almost identical to the line of the thigh there. So you almost don't notice it, but we've got a bunch of skateboarders, various poses. You can see. As far as balanced goes, balance and speed are two things that sort of, if someone is definitely way out of balance, like there's no way this guy could hold that pose. He's obviously going fast or he's just gone up something and he's about to come back down again. This guy just slid along here. I think he just kind of either comes to rest up here or he just goes back down again. I don't recall. But the point here is that I've had the video paused. So I'm not even sure I would technically call them gesture drawings. I mean, they're quick drawings. What I have here by way of contrast, I just had the TV playing. I didn't pause it. I just looked and then I kind of took a snapshot with my mind and then just drew it and just ignore the TV. And then I went back to the TV again with my, with my fresh focused eyes and waited for another pose that I particularly liked. And then I drew that. There was no pausing of the TV involved here. What these are, are very quick gestures, but they are born of my minimized mannequin approach. I'm always bearing in mind the distance between the hip joints particularly, and they sort of simplified shape of the torso. What you're really dealing with is, is a short-term memory drawing you're noticing maybe as opposed kind of comes into being. And it's like maybe in the instance of the skateboarders, they're scaling along. You're noticing and being aware which way their body is facing. And then they do a thing, and then there's a shape that you like. You just kinda quickly memorize the shape and then you draw what you knew and what you saw and you combine them. That's what I've done a number of times here very quickly. After you've got a page full of these very loose sketches, you can combine the short-term memory drawings that I would call true gesture drawings because there's no sort of paused action that you're being able to kind of refresh your mind with, with what you just actually know. So you can then just build over the top of these very loose gestural sketches and just add more. The adding more isn't necessarily what you're remembering from what you saw because you didn't see it for long enough to remember it. It's a combination of what you already know and what you saw. That's what I think of as gesture drawing is like a combination of what you know, applied over what you quickly saw and snapshotted and memorized for a shorter period of time as it takes to throw down a few lines. And then you just move on to the next one. But the point is simplifying with figure into these minimalist mannequins is a great way to just get your mind into the habit of seeing the essentials of an action and emotion and oppose. We've seen how the simplified mannequin can inform your gesture drawing. So I would suggest running some video or YouTube things of montages of some actions that you're interested in drawing and just have a go at it. I mean, sort of pause them for awhile first and just get into the habit of keeping it as simple as you can. And then just see how you do when you don't pause it. The great thing about YouTube, for example, is you can set the playback speed to something slower than like fully natural speed. That's one way you can kind of gradually transition between pausing things and then drawing things at just life natural speed. Depending on the action that you're drawing. Some things that he's way too fast, you'll have to slow them down just to see what they look like. But it's kind of fun. And it certainly is good practice for if you're wanting to be able to draw things from your imagination quickly. Which is one thing that I've had to do most of the time. Well-being and storyboard artist. If you're in the animation field, I'm sure that would be hyper useful as well. 14. Doodle a Page of Figures: Here's a page full of figures. I do too. I didn't use any reference. I was just making it all up as I went along. It didn't really know where I was going with any of it. So I just started. My point here is, I guess is that you can see how when you're using these sort of simple block mannequins, you can mess around with proportions, like with this guy. If he doesn't like what you drew, you just try it again. I mean, you haven't invested a massive amount of time into that. So I just redraw things. If I was doing this for like a storyboard or something, I wouldn't bother erasing any of the lines that were wrong. I would just use a light colored pencil and just draw over everything until eventually you get the lines that you'd like. And then you can if you want doc and over those will just put another piece of tracing paper over top or a new layer and just draw it again. So you can see like with that foot there, I'm sort of trying a few things out and not liking it and trying again. Likewise with this guys, didn't like the too much. So I just kind of made it a more of a sort of forced perspective type of thing. Um, and then I just turned the lines black and cleaned it up a little bit. Just have some fun constructing figures, even if you don't have the faintest clue what you're drawing. If you just start with a box and then say for the ribcage and then add another box for the pelvis. And just try different angles. They will suggest poses that you can sketch in some legs and arms and just see where it takes you. It's kind of fun doing that. Feel free to post your drawings on the project page. Always fun to see what everyone else is getting up to you. 15. Things I've Noticed: So it's important to be aware of the weight of the body and even the different body parts and what they're doing, where they're moving from. And too often during the course of an action, you're completely out of balance until you basically done and come to rest. If you're throwing a javelin, for instance, you go right over your leading foot because you're just putting all your effort into throwing the javelin. You're completely out of balance. You can afford over flat on your face unless you bring your other foot out in front of you and stop yourself. After all the act of walking is just throwing yourself out of balance so that you're going to fall over and then catching yourself and then repeating the process. Noticed that with a lot of actions, but you're hitting something with a bat, the shoulder towards the target, which would be the ball or wherever you're gonna hit is lower and the other shoulder is higher. So for instance, the shoulder this further away from the ball as high, but then as you swing your body around, that shoulder ends up lower. These things I've noticed aren't hard and fast rules. They're just things I've noticed. And if I notice the opposite happening in a certain other activity, then great. I mean, I just bear that in mind when I'm drawing it. For example, in table tennis, if you're hitting a topspin forehand, the opposite is true. So the shoulder closer to the target, which would be the incoming ping-pong ball, instead of being lower, is actually high. And then the shoulder that's got the paddling, it is lower. And then at the end of the move, then the opposite is true. And when you're throwing a javelin, the opposite is true. So the shoulder towards the direction where you're gonna be throwing the javelin is higher. Then when you throw the javelin, then your body swings around and the throwing arm is the one closer. And then that one is higher. When a pitcher is throwing a baseball, their shoulders remained fairly level throughout the throat. There's a lot of rotation in the body. Another thing I've noticed is that in throwing and swinging a bat and that kind of stuff, the hips lead the rotation. The hips rotate first and they generate some rotational energy in the spine. And then that spins the top part of the torso around and then the arm just carries through in a sort of whip-like fashion. The opposite of that happens when you're looking at skateboarding, snowboarding, or surf boarding. Because the feet of the things that are affecting change in the board. And so you have to do the opposite. You swing your arms and your top part of your body. First and then the hips catch up after, and then the feet kind of whip around and move the board. In that case, the shoulders lead the rotation. Another thing I've noticed is that when throwing, the back is often arched so the body can be considered folded in a direction that's away from the target, like the direction of where you're throwing a thing. And then usually at the end of the moves, the body folds forwards. There's a whip-like motion in the body there. I've noticed if you're kicking or hitting something with a bat, the body is usually folded towards the ball or the target object, whatever it may be. But overall, to draw an action convincingly, you need to be paying careful attention to where the weight is, where it's moving, and the state of balance, which may or may not be balanced at all depending on where you are in the action. 16. Class Project: For our class project, it's time to put into practice what we've learned. We will start by finding some reference images of activities were interested in drawing and using tracing paper or layer. If you're using digital, draw the boxes over the top of the figures and be careful to look out for any overlapping and get the angles relative to each other. How you see them put in the feet. A ground plane. If the feet are on the ground or one of the fetus on the ground, put the hands, the arms, and legs in there as well. And then look at what you've got without the reference underneath. If you fancy a challenge, by all means, take another layer or sheet of tracing paper and then draw the figure over the top of the mannequin that you've drawn. And then you can pull your reference back out afterwards and see how they compare. After we've drawn some mannequins over some reference. Another thing to do is then draw the same figures performing the same actions, but from a different viewpoint. This is where you're gonna have to utilize that enclosing box. Very important that you have that going in order to manage this and the ground plane. If they're interacting with the ground in any way, then work out from the angles of the boxes. How you would draw your manikin from a different viewpoint. So you could be looking at it from high up to down or from ground-level looking up a little bit. Or he might have originally got it from the front. So now you're trying it from rear, three-quarter or something like that. Just challenge yourself. And it's a good way to see how you're understanding the juxtaposition of those key boxes. Then the last thing we can do is just fill up a page with doodles of figures doing the kind of activities you're interested in. Looking at reference tutorial, just making everything up and not even knowing necessarily where you're going when you start. Just have some fun. And once you've drawn a little mannequins, feel free to put another sheet or layer over the top and draw them as little cartoony characters are more realistic characters if you prefer. And take a look at what you've done. If it looks good then great, and if there are parts of it that look a bit awkward or unnatural, then figure out why. And to do that, you just have to go find some imagery or video of people doing the things that you drew. And then analyze them by drawing those boxes over them and putting in the legs and the feet and the hands. And just see why yours look awkward. Why the actual people don't buy simplifying everything down into the simple mannequin. It's easier to see in your own drawings where you're going wrong in regards to poses, rather than getting distracted by any anatomical details or clothing folds or anything like that, do as much or as little of that as you're comfortable. I mean, it might take you a while to develop some skills where you're comfortable trying to draw things from different angles then what you have reference for, for instance, in which case, don't worry about doing that yet. It's good goal to aim for. 17. Thank You and Good Luck!: Well that's it. I think the end of the class is here. And hopefully you've learned some useful new approaches to get a little more naturalism and life in your poses and post your progress in the project section. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the discussions and I'll keep an eye out and get back to me. I'm around online on Instagram. I'm Steve Worthington, art. Thanks for taking my class means a lot to me. So let's grab our favorite drawing tools and keep on scribbling.