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

[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.