Tips on avatar poses?

[Drewzer987]

I've been drawing OOTS style avatars for my friends over the past few years, and recently one of them asked if I could try and draw their avatar in a particular pose.
After quite a few failed attempts at drawing the posed avatar I have decided to ask if anyone has any advice on avatar poses.

All and any tips/advice/general help relating to drawing avatars in different poses would be welcomed greatly :smallsmile:

(Thanks!)

[Emperor Ing]

Look up pictures on, say, Google Images of characters in certain poses. Reference pictures are always helpful and there's a plethora of both live-action and sketch poses

[AsteriskAmp]

I've been drawing OOTS style avatars for my friends over the past few years, and recently one of them asked if I could try and draw their avatar in a particular pose.
After quite a few failed attempts at drawing the posed avatar I have decided to ask if anyone has any advice on avatar poses.

All and any tips/advice/general help relating to drawing avatars in different poses would be welcomed greatly :smallsmile:

(Thanks!)Thinking of a pose and actually drawing it are two very different things. It appears you already have an idea, guideline or at the very least some restrictions for a pose.

The first thing if you are drawing an avatar is that you don't have an infinite canvas and resolution, you are stuck on a 120x120 box. This has several repercussions:
Details can't be too small or they will be scaled into pixel size or below
Scaling will be forced by the biggest element either horizontal or vertical this may in turn also shift what the image center is unless you scale the white space along.
If you are adding a frame to shrink some dimension the frame will also take real estate inside this space so you have to be careful about it
Arcs and circles on the edges require some care or they will force a fairly sizable amount of white space

Most of this are big deals and only apply if you are specifically drawing avatars for the forum. You can entirely disregard all of this if you aren't drawing an avatar for a forum (though in general do mind your constraints in whatever medium or purpose and make sure you plan around them actively instead of as a hindsight). This generally will apply to tokens and portraits as well. And while you will ideally be drawing in a bigger resolution than target and could just crop the image I'd advise against doing the last, you will work for no reason and you can get away with LOTS of things if you don't have to draw them (either by just planning for the frame to cut them out or by having an object hide them).

For inspiration on poses it really depends on your preferences. For dynamic posing I find sports to be a good source, specially since once you figure what's roughly what you want you can figure out what specific sport is likely to have someone in that pose. Burst photos are another great source of references since you can catch all of the intermediate motions and figure out more than from just a photo specially for moving parts.

Something I do and have found useful when trying to double down on a pose is using wireframes of the body. It doesn't have to be super detailed (I use a circle for the head, a triangle for the torso, another for the pelvis, 2 sticks for legs and arms and sometimes sketch the hair contour and extra appendages). This lets you have a rough idea how things are going to look and what movement the final image will be suggesting. Furthermore it also let's you figure out the total space that it will probably end up taking, which is really useful in the above case.

http://i581.photobucket.com/albums/ss257/araveugnitsuga/Celestia%20Timelapse.fw_zpsprcy8pdq.png

Sometimes sketching things out on paper and then scanning and tracing can be useful as well. It helps get things going and focusing on the resulting final contour and white space instead of detailing and clothing dynamics before they are REALLY needed.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/269366416971530250/304475748960305162/SongOfStorms_TimeLapse.fw.png

Obviously a lot more can be said since posing normally also extends to planning out pretty much all aspects just shy of carrying them out, including clothing, colouring and lighting. At which point there's many many tangents that one could go on, from actual ... tangent lines... to pretty much everything in composition and perspective.

If you need help on drawing an already planned pose you might also hit up references to see how approximations to it work, some basic anatomical models (or tutorials on them), and occasionally just trying to act the pose yourself on a mirror to get an understanding of how things work together (and having some fun at trying the ballet career you never wanted). If you need pointers in any specific topic or type of poses you could mention them so that someone can go more in-depth into them.

[Drewzer987]

Thinking of a pose and actually drawing it are two very different things. It appears you already have an idea, guideline or at the very least some restrictions for a pose.

The first thing if you are drawing an avatar is that you don't have an infinite canvas and resolution, you are stuck on a 120x120 box. This has several repercussions:
Details can't be too small or they will be scaled into pixel size or below
Scaling will be forced by the biggest element either horizontal or vertical this may in turn also shift what the image center is unless you scale the white space along.
If you are adding a frame to shrink some dimension the frame will also take real estate inside this space so you have to be careful about it
Arcs and circles on the edges require some care or they will force a fairly sizable amount of white space

Most of this are big deals and only apply if you are specifically drawing avatars for the forum. You can entirely disregard all of this if you aren't drawing an avatar for a forum (though in general do mind your constraints in whatever medium or purpose and make sure you plan around them actively instead of as a hindsight). This generally will apply to tokens and portraits as well. And while you will ideally be drawing in a bigger resolution than target and could just crop the image I'd advise against doing the last, you will work for no reason and you can get away with LOTS of things if you don't have to draw them (either by just planning for the frame to cut them out or by having an object hide them).

For inspiration on poses it really depends on your preferences. For dynamic posing I find sports to be a good source, specially since once you figure what's roughly what you want you can figure out what specific sport is likely to have someone in that pose. Burst photos are another great source of references since you can catch all of the intermediate motions and figure out more than from just a photo specially for moving parts.

Something I do and have found useful when trying to double down on a pose is using wireframes of the body. It doesn't have to be super detailed (I use a circle for the head, a triangle for the torso, another for the pelvis, 2 sticks for legs and arms and sometimes sketch the hair contour and extra appendages). This lets you have a rough idea how things are going to look and what movement the final image will be suggesting. Furthermore it also let's you figure out the total space that it will probably end up taking, which is really useful in the above case

Sometimes sketching things out on paper and then scanning and tracing can be useful as well. It helps get things going and focusing on the resulting final contour and white space instead of detailing and clothing dynamics before they are REALLY needed.


Obviously a lot more can be said since posing normally also extends to planning out pretty much all aspects just shy of carrying them out, including clothing, colouring and lighting. At which point there's many many tangents that one could go on, from actual ... tangent lines... to pretty much everything in composition and perspective.

If you need help on drawing an already planned pose you might also hit up references to see how approximations to it work, some basic anatomical models (or tutorials on them), and occasionally just trying to act the pose yourself on a mirror to get an understanding of how things work together (and having some fun at trying the ballet career you never wanted). If you need pointers in any specific topic or type of poses you could mention them so that someone can go more in-depth into them.

Wow. Thank you!
I'm definitely going to try out sketching some of my pose idea.

The general pose I'm going for is a charging into battle type pose. As it's for my friend, I'm always allowed quite a bit of leeway when drawing.
I've tried to draw some jumping and running poses, but I never know what to do with the legs. They always look a bit all over the place (when I'm drawing poses, limbs quite often end up looking out of proportion or just seeming a bit out of place)

Once again, all and any advice will always be well received :smallsmile:

[AsteriskAmp]

Wow. Thank you!
I'm definitely going to try out sketching some of my pose idea.

The general pose I'm going for is a charging into battle type pose. As it's for my friend, I'm always allowed quite a bit of leeway when drawing.
I've tried to draw some jumping and running poses, but I never know what to do with the legs. They always look a bit all over the place (when I'm drawing poses, limbs quite often end up looking out of proportion or just seeming a bit out of place)

Once again, all and any advice will always be well received :smallsmile:Getting the proportions for arms and legs right is a mix between anatomy, perspective/geometry and cheating. If you work with wire frames it's a bit easier to fix it early while working on the pose. Under ... ideal accuracy the body:legs:arms ratio is fixed and something you can just copy from elsewhere. The problem is that in more dynamic poses like attacking and running there will be foreshortening from perspective on top of bending and occasionally things lining up and hiding other parts or a limb being orthogonal to the perspective plane. While there is a fair amount of theory (descriptive/projective geometry could give you a the exact length of each element if you were mathematically inclined and had the patience to... just do it) playing around till it looks right works pretty well. If you are using a vector program this is relatively simple since you can move around the nodes and if you keep the limbs simple you can do this till you are satisfied, if you use a raster program you can always keep limbs on their own separate layer and use transforms around or just redraw over and over, in wireframe stage it's just a line.

Running poses can be referenced from running animations. One of the things that's hard to notice is how the head position and tilting has a major impact on the look and feel of the animation, same for the spine alignment (curved inwards or outwards). Inwards curving tends to make it look more focused on the action, outwards tends to look like someone that's already tired from running. In OotS art head tilting is done both by changing the eye/mouth position as well as physically moving the head forward or backwards. Spine alignment is slightly harder to do since most bodies are potatoes on its purest form (I deviate from this mainly to make my life easier when drawing things).

http://i581.photobucket.com/albums/ss257/araveugnitsuga/SomeIdeas.fw_zpsydkkhjkk.png

One of the harder things to pull off on this sort of aggressive poses is the twisting of the torso since it impacts the clothe physics in ways which are hard to draw on a single try. One way is cheating, just draw something that covers the twisting like loose clothing, capes, a sword slash effect or hair billowing to the wind. Another is to try to simulate the twist yourself with close enough clothing in front of a mirror, or look for references with a roughly similar deformation (some anime have a borderline creepy fixation with this sort of posing, see Attack on Titan for people with their shoulder line looking away but their legs looking forward. Comic book characters have the opposite twisting, legs facing away but torso facing forward which makes everyone look like a runway model). There is not much of a trick just getting used to weird warps like that and getting ingenious with the cheating if you feel it's beyond your skills at the current time. Positioning of other moving elements and effects can hide away grievous sins if you plan in advance for them or get lucky halfway through

http://i581.photobucket.com/albums/ss257/araveugnitsuga/SomeIdeas.fw_zps3rkhf5b4.png

Leg and arms can both be pains in the neck. Arms because anything that requires the arms above the shoulder line will run into OotS globeheads and how they interact with things, legs because it's hard to figure out how they interact with each other and how the curves can go. My advice for legs is to figure out the entire running animation (in your head, not necesarily drawing it) and see where in the animation you would be and make it so that you can actually reach that leg positioning from a natural progression. If you want fancier animations like somersaults and whatnot try looking for videos of it, stopping on the frame that's roughly what you want and wireframing over it and then redoing proportions as needed.

Just figuring out the "skeleton" of several images doesn't take long and let's you see how the pose works at a really basic level which helps you further develop your own pose drawing skills since it gives you a pool of references to draw from in the future should you need things that look close to those. Having a file of poses you've analysed before also helps greatly when you need inspiration to draw from nothing since it's like a catalog of already solved problems, occasionally you figure that one of the harder poses you can't draw is but a small adjustment of one you CAN draw and then you figure out how to complete the transition or the motion to that state.

http://i581.photobucket.com/albums/ss257/araveugnitsuga/SomeIdeas.fw_zpseonnisbv.png

On that note another way of trying to figure out placement of things around a given pose is to extend the advice for legs to everything. Try to think how you can go from a standing still state to that particular state through natural motions, this let's you think of the drawing as freezing the frame of something that is happening which let's you have a more complete understanding of how things should be moving (legs, clothing, light, arms, head, etc)letting you make the pose look plausible.