random grouchiness

[ratcreature]

I'm beginning to feel oddly understanding about the stupid "sex kitten" poses female characters are so often stuck with on covers and such. It's not that I'm getting fond of the sexism, but it is frelling hard to come up with engaging poses when you just want to draw some character, portrait-like I mean rather than some scene with an inherent action. And while the message isn't great, at least the stripper body language says something rather than having the character stand around dumbly, looking very boring.

How do people who are good at portraits figure out how to arrange the character? I totally fail at this. My attempts always look stiff or stupid or both.

Comments

[astridv]

It's definitely tricky, much trickier for female characters than for male ones. jwaneeta posted a little sketch once, ages ago, that really helped me figure out how to do female poses that are dynamic without being oversexed. (Still struggling with it, mind.) Let me see if I can find that post...

I loathe the sex kitten poses, so much. blch.

[eta] okay, I can't find that particular pic, but here's the link to her lj scrapbook. She's a pro comic artist and does both poses and faces masterfully, there may be something in there that helps.

[ratcreature]

Thanks for the link, I'll check those out.

And yeah, sex kitten poses really aren't the solution, but I sort of get how you end up there if you want the image to be engaging. And unfortunately I don't find male characters much easier either. Maybe I should just draw John Sheppard in a sex kitten pose... *sigh*

The one simple trick I know for slightly less stiff posture is to sort of cant the lines of shoulders and hips towards each other slightly in whatever pose you pick so you don't end up with 90° angles, but that is still not much help.

[astridv]

Hey, I found that sketch I was talking about: http://pics.livejournal.com/jwaneeta/pic/0000x60y

Maybe I should just draw John Sheppard in a sex kitten pose... *sigh*

You so totally should! And I have a feeling you'd get a lot of happy viewers if you did that. :)

[ratcreature]

Yeah I suppose he would look pretty drawn say kneeling with his legs spread, the back arched and some sort of collar around his neck... You could probably even make that in-character by making the background a Wraith hiveship. *G*

[astridv]

Turnaround's fair play, eh? :P

I was reading a few French graphic novels the other day, and the heroines were important to the story, well-developed, had their own agenda... and yet, every once in a while there would be the gratuitous titts/butt shot. I wonder if those guys are even aware they're doing it, sometime.

[maire]

What do they do for men?

[ratcreature]

Well, in comics they either do the rather boring "iconic superhero standing" (the thing with the legs apart and fists clenched where the perspective is slighly from below, it's supposed to look heroic or something) or they have signature poses, like Spider-Man swinging or crouching or Wolverine's slashing motion, or they hold some sort of weapon. There are actually not that many that look really engaging, IMO.

[maire]

It's odd, but I've never been good at 'reading' comics. I remember the people and what they say, but I miss details in the pictures.

I also mostly think in text, not sound or images, so I guess it makes sense.

So I mostly don't notice the poses, except perhaps for Nightwing and Spiderman.

[sholio]

Oh man, that is one of the very hardest things for me to do when I'm drawing people. I have the hardest time coming up with poses and making them look natural rather than (badly) posed.

It helps to think about catching them in the "act" of doing something they do in canon (e.g. pointing a gun, climbing a wall, etc) or pose them doing an everyday human activity like watching TV, sleeping, sitting on a park bench or something like that. But ... yeah. It's really hard for me.

(If you look at probably 90% of amateur snapshots of people, they are either in the act of doing something or standing stiffly with their hands at their sides, so it's not just artists that have this problem. :D)

[ratcreature]

(If you look at probably 90% of amateur snapshots of people, they are either in the act of doing something or standing stiffly with their hands at their sides, so it's not just artists that have this problem. :D)

Heh, yeah, it's something of a universal problem. A least in the good old days of the Daguerreotype, nobody expected portraits to look anything other than supremely stiff and awkward.