Drawing Digital Comics – Action Pose Tutorial #1
Hi folks, I’ve created a series of new tutorials focusing on drawing action poses. It’s one thing to be able to draw your favorite characters in a static setting, facing the front, either full length or partially in view. But what about drawing your figures in dynamic action sequences? Never fear, gang – idrawdigital is here – with a few tips on how to develop your own action sequences for your comics. This series of brief tutorials will show you how to set up a wide range of action poses and rough in your forms. This first tutorial will focus on the classic martial arts move: the side kick. Let’s get started!
Step One: Gesture Drawing
Create a new layer in Photoshop. Start your scene by drawing out your figures in a mannequin form. Pay close attention to your proportions and positions. Its much easier to erase and redraw at this point, than it would if you just jumped in and started drawing all your forms in detail right off the bat. When you’ve done this a million times over and in your sleep, you can go straight to the detail phase. But since we’re just starting out, we’re taking the baby steps.
Step Two: Creating the Forms
Create a new layer above your mannequin layer, and using a small round brush, start to block in your forms based on your mannequin. Pay attention to the areas where your joints are, and determine where your character is facing by creating an axis and bisecting lines for the eyes, nose and mouth.
Build your muscles and rough in the placement of fingers on your hands. There’s no need to put fine details in your body parts just yet. We’re creating the outer shell, so we want to make sure all of our parts are in place first, and then we’ll make our adjustments. The proportions should be just right – knees and elbows in the right spot, arms and legs the proper length, and foreshortening issues sorted out!
Step Three: Tackling the Tricky Parts
All action poses require a bit of planning and observation. Bodies contort, forms are foreshortened and the angles and shapes of things appear distorted and awkward. You could easily draw a person getting kicked in the face from the side view – the leg at a straight angle, the recipient’s head looking upwards – but it wouldn’t look realistic, or have that feeling of depth or dynamic action. So we contort and distort and exaggerate the forms to convey the feeling of strain and force.
The head is an interesting shape to work with. Especially when you’re dealing with the underside. In this example, the head is snapped back and to the side, due to the force of the impact of the kick. So you’re best bet to get this form to look right is to do one of two things if you can’t draw this on your own.
1) Take a digital photo in roughly the same position and use that as a reference.
or
2) Find a series of reference photos on the internet.
Photo reference is your friend. Use it to your advantage. If you don’t have a model, you could use a doll or a human shaped form and pose it in the proper angle. Do whatever is necessary to get that angle looking just right. It can make or break the entire image!
Next up are the feet. I remember a friend in college who used to talk about the dreaded ‘foot fear.’ Artists would spend all this time drawing these wonderful characters, and when it came time to do the feet they chickened out because of their difficulty. They don’t have to be that hard, provided you know how to draw the basic shapes first.
Feet are basically three parts: the heel, the arch, and the toes. Most people have a hard time drawing shoes, because they often fail to draw the arch and the toes properly. Since you’ve already drawn a ball where the ankle connects the leg to the foot, you can start with that as your base for your heel. Draw a ball in that area. Next, we are going to draw five smaller balls to indicate where the toes are going to appear. Determine the length of your foot, and draw the five balls in descending size. Once the toes have been placed in the proper position, draw two smooth curved lines connecting the ankle to the toes – one for the top of the foot, and one for the bottom arch of the foot. Depending on how these are drawn, your foot will change in shape – make sure you’re satisfied with the arches before drawing your details.
Here’s another quick tip – if you have a hard time drawing shoes, boots, etc, do not stick your head in the sand and ignore them by placing items conveniently in front to avoid drawing them. Do the ball trick as mentioned above, and if necessary, draw a bare foot before tackling the outerwear.
Step Four: Finishing up the Pose
Now that we’ve figured out the head and foot placement, we can complete the basic outline and form of your action pose. Draw your joints, connecting muscles (exterior lines) and foreshortened limbs. You can see now how your intial form drawing is really starting to come together.
Hide your gesture drawing layer, and take a look at your forms beneath. You’ve created a dynamic action pose your character booting another character in the head, karate style. From this stage, you can make some refinements to your forms before you get into the actual detailed drawing of you character.
Note the dynamic movement created by the pose – your imagination fills in this action shown above. By taking more of an exaggerated view of the kick, you create a feeling of intensity and action.
You’ve successfully completed the first part of the action pose tutorial. Check back for the second part where we add our details and expressions!
Related Posts
Tags: Drawing, how-to, proportions, tutorial
January 19th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
[...] here is the second part of the tutorial on drawing action poses. If you recall, in the first part of the tutorial, we talked about starting with a gesture drawing/mannequin and developing the scene into roughed [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
[...] we go! The third and final part of the action pose tutorial. In Part One we drew our characters and roughed in their forms. In Part Two, we drew in our rough pencils, drew [...]