Drawing poses (Patreon)

I was asked to take a few minutes to explain how I do poses, I hope Im able to explain it well

So like any thing I start with an idea of what I want to do, simple enough. Now in my mind I try to figure out the general flow of the pose that being said I will some times draw that flow and it can be a good idea to do that too when starting out

Nothing fancy but this is the flow, or line of action i want the over all pose to follow. with this im thinking its going from their head to the tip of the toes on one of their feet. You can also really try to push this line of action and it could lead to more exaggerated and interesting poses

With that figured out I block in the head, chest and pelvic. the legs make up roughly half our overall height 

Now I block in some limbs, Im not really thinking of details yet Im just getting the forms of the body and the silhouette of the pose

Dont feel locked into what the line of action you drew is. Its more of a suggestion then a hard rule to follow

When i was doing this part I realized I could use that line of action for a slightly different pose

As you can see you can do many poses following the same line of action. I thought of a 3rd one while i was typing this but Im sticking with these two.

With the general poses figured out I start refining things

Upon finishing this part I felt they looked a little stiff so I used some mesh transform tools and tried to exaggerate the poses a bit more

might be hard to tell the difference so maybe these gifs will help

now with that out of the way you can do a more detailed pass

That's more or less the gist of it. This just an explanation of what I do when I make up poses, and I don't even follow all these steps all the time.

When I try to get better at drawing and understanding poses I do this kind of stuff but I try to recreate poses from photographs or other artists. Nothing wrong with using refs and learning by copying others, just be sure to put your own spin on it.

If there are any questions I can try my best to answer them.