Levels of Complexity in Figure Development

Carried this one farther still using the mouse, but I think I'll let it go until I get a new tablet -- or maybe just let it go altogether. I realized what I'm doing is copying a picture, not developing this from my own mental mannikin that I've developed through my drawing of these little comic figures and quick-sketches. I'm beginning to understand that I need to work my way up from the little figures and gradually add on levels of detail. And by detail of course I don't mean pointless stuff that detracts from the main focus, but the increasing levels of complexity that you see as you get closer to a person - in the small figures you're seeing what you would see from across the street or even farther - just a simple body shape. Almost just a silhouette.  But when you put in more time and do more developed drawings you add levels of increasing detail - each limb takes on a bit more structure and form, and then at the level of a portrait or a waist up shot you get the full level of detail.

So I drew these yet again. I'm not sure it's particularly helpful though to keep doing the same drawings over and over - but it was by way of a warmup before doing a few posed figures from imagination below. Wanted to brush up and get myself thinking in figurative format - it's been a few days since I drew any of these and I felt like I had lost any progress I made. So I brushed up.

And I decided not to make pretty drawings, as I did at one point recently in copying these images (from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way). Making pretty drawings hinders the process of developing an idea, because you don't want to mess them up. So keep them rough but serviceable.

Begin Imagination Work:

Here I started working from imagination, developing an idea for a pose. I suddenly realized this looks a lot like some similar poses I did in brown fountain pen in the long sketchbook back in 2014.

And as I mentioned on ConceptArt yesterday when I posted these last 2 sheets, I learned that I need to start with a simple pose, usually drawn from a basic viewing angle so there's no or very little foreshortening, and limbs are posed simply -- even awkwardly sometimes. I can't work out all the complexities of a difficult pose in my head before I start drawing - need to go through a few little thumbnails to work it out stage by stage. 

Interesting - I just realized this is working through levels of complexity of the idea for the pose, just like I said at the top about the levels of complexity of the body. This seems to be the new thing I've latched onto and am thinking about all the time now. 

I won't go into detail about this just now, but I had a thought about a sort of hierarchy of levels of complexity beginning with the simplest and working through the different levels in developing an image: 

Shape, Form, Figure, Pose, Action, Composition, Story. 

You don't necessarily go through it in exactly that order - in fact you would skip around and go back and forth a bit while developing the ideas for the image.


To develop individual figures you go through Shape, Form Figure, and Pose, but the last 3 terms branch out into larger realms. The Action is about how multiple figures are interacting with each other. Composition of course is an overall pictorial device or strategy. And Story moves outside the confines of the image itself - the image is a reference to some part of the story. Shape comes in at different points - it's the 2 dimensional aspect of a Form, which can become part of a figure, or part of the composition, or of any other part of the image (such as the landscape or an object). 

I'll develop this idea a bit more and write something up about it.