Everyone Can Draw

Motion

Here I have an image that actually involves movement and detailed positioning. The position of the man is quite complicated due to the fact that he is twisting his body. Defining the back I have used spinal nodes along with his shoulder blades. You can use these two features to show the positioning of the back, this is especially true of the spine seeing as it is the core of the back. Notice how the node line curves in the middle. To demonstrate the twisting you can see the side of his abs, and also you can see the curvature of the rib cage. I have drawn the hair flicking forwards to add movement to the image, imagine if I had left it falling limply to the ground, it would be far less interesting. You can see some extra lines on the image which denotes movement, these should be used sparsely and only to represent specific movements such as jumping, spinning, flipping etc, too much and you completely lose the effect. I could have drawn the puppet with all limbs in a forwards direction as he is being driven backwards by the kick – why didn’t I? Because it wouldn’t be as interesting, and because as he is a puppet I can get away with moving his limbs in ways that a person’s would not naturally move in. Look at the leg pointing to the left – it is totally twisted inwards. A puppet would naturally be limp and its limbs would fly all over the place. I have curved the puppet into the kick it is receiving as this is what would naturally happen to a body receiving force into the stomach. For images like this it is worth having a look at martial arts videos and images. Another important thing to note is once again the balancing of forces. The man is putting all of his weight onto that one arm, so that arm is the core of gravity to the movement, it needs to be a completely stable part of the image – as such it is almost completely straight, if I lean that arm too far one way or the other I end up making the character’s movement inherently unstable.