#drawing-wise if you wanna make it look more dynamic playing with camera angles or sharp vs soft poses is a good way to go about it too

[mirrorshards]

What are your tips for making poses look less stiff? Your poses for the characters you draw are always so good :,)

thank you so much!

hmmm, this is a bit tricky to answer without going full drawing mentor mode and I can't say I am one... 🤔 but let me try!

(edit: it came out super long!! there's one example but idk how good it is haha)

there is a very long answer to give and it involves a lot of studying your surroundings and looking at people through analysing lenses, some knowledge in knowing how things move (physically or animation basics) and some art history involved.

you see our brain kinda interprets things super literally so when you approach to draw it without knowledge you just draw it by default like your first association would be like. like house looks a certain way, or a tree, or an eye.. they all have images you think of instinctively and might first draw out. but when you study those things analytically and draw enough to learn more about them you learn that houses all look very different and there's architecture, location, "personality" etc to consider, or eyes have different shapes to them to make them differ between people. so poses are the same! when you want to just draw a person standing, there's so many ways they can be standing. mood can be taken into it, personality, sometimes even clothing affects posture. a character could be standing gloomily all slouched or impatiently, leaned on one leg and tapping the other. so that's one thing to consider.

another one is angles. diagonal lines and shapes and arches are all super super helpful in making something feel more dynamic or natural looking. people don't normally just stand straight without doing anything else, so it's just knowing where to use either arches or sharp lines! and in this honestly, you can just practice drawing a lot of gestures from either sites like posemaniacs or even at work or on the train/bus. like just looking at a person's pose and getting it down so you build a sort of mental bank for natural poses people actually do so when you get to drawing it later it's a bit easier cuz you've seen someone sit like that in some cafe or in a movie. another thing that comes in in 'angles' is your "camera angle". sometimes drawing the same pose from a different angle is all you needed to make it feel more dynamic! like maybe you drew a character fullbody from profile but your focus was their expression.. so actually you didn't need their feet at all, and maybe if you drew them more frontal, in a a bust or headshot size then you would get your point across more. and then in this new framing sometimes you don't even need unique posing because the expression does all the moving the drawing needs.

also idk where to put this but volumes are also important to take into account while drawing. like, i draw a lot of interactions and they can be tricky, but it's important to remember and practice that limbs take space, and touching another person means two masses meshing against each other so it affects their shapes. that's kind of a dry way to put it but uhh

you have A and B and you wanna draw A slinging a hand over B's shoulder

the wrapping hand has to go behind the back, then over the shoulder, while "hugging" the neck and the hand itself has volume. as well as their own bodies that are now collide a bit with each other because of the proximity

top view?? (sorta)

and neck closeup ?! idk if it's needed actually but it makes sense for me to show how the neck is being hugged by the arm

basically: something that's super helpful to understand volumes is realize how the pose is supposed to go physically. where one limb goes, where's the other? is anything interacting or reacting to it? etc

and finally..

there is no escape from drawing a lot. sometimes you just have to warm up to get into the mood of drawing freely so it doesn't feel stiff, other times you just draw and it looks like shit and you just have to start over. I've redone lineart at least 3 times before! it's hard. you still gotta do it.. sometimes drawing flow comes with the more you draw literally that day and sometimes it's just something your body learns after drawing a pose so many times.. just draw a lot!!