Best Daily Drawings: This picture is supposed to be a lady standing in a very confident pose. I just need some pointers...

This picture is supposed to be a lady standing in a very confident pose. I just need some pointers about how to get it across better that her head is tilted up slightly (it looks very weird to me), as well as how to better get her left arm looking like it’s supposed to be tucked in closer to her side. It mostly just looks like her forearm is much shorter than the other one.

Thanks for all the work you guys do!

submitted by @ hunter-kole

Redlined by Mod Future

Posing

I’ll do a preliminary pass before focusing on the head. The idea of the pose is very well established, but the way she is standing feels a little awkward. This is because the line of the shoulders and hips are tilting the same direction. There is little balance, and we want to avoid that when making static, standing poses. (Think: S-curve!)

Here is a quick guide to the concept of contrapposto by “Griz and Norm”:

Now, onto the actual redline:

I did the quick sketch on the right first, exaggerating the pose, then I brought it back to something realistic in the left. Sometimes this can be helpful to establish a STRONG line of action or gesture within a pose.

1. The easiest thing to fix in the head would be shifting the ears down. The eyeline across the face curves with the spherical shape of the head. I link some helpful resources at the end of this post.

2. For musculature in the arms, I think you run into this problem where you are thinking about the contour of the muscle without thinking about the way the muscle sits on an interior form. Muscles at rest will also appear very subtle (when you flex, your muscles become more apparent and look bigger and “”bulging””). I would suggest keeping a roughly cylindrical form to the arms and adding the slight muscle on top.

For the breasts: Don’t think of them as round spheres. Think of them like heavy water balloons or sacks. There will be a slight squash in the lower half of the shape. I like to find the contour of it by imagining a loop of string around the neck and pointing down towards the armpit.

Now onto the head:

Sorry that this doesn’t really look like your character, but I hope you can get my meaning.

I had this issue as well, before. I used to catch myself thinking of the face in frontal view when I was trying to draw a tilted perspective, and that’s what made it look awkward. You can catch this in the way the ears line up with the eyes (as they do in frontal view) and how you rendered the top bridge of the nose (we would not see the top of the nose because this is looking up at her).

I also think there is too much of the lower jaw shown here. I have linked some neck + jaw tutorials below, but the thing to focus on now is the protrusion of the chin and making sure the jaw aligns with the neck (remember, there are no harsh edges because the skin is stretched over everything, so it should all flow smoothly from one form to another.)