Sunday Mailbag- Reference Poses?

Q: How do go about drawing certain poses? Do you take photos of yourself, ask someone to pose for you? Use an artist model figure or just make it up? Or a mixture of the above? 

A: Generally speaking I will attempt to draw a figure, pose, hand, whatever, just out of my head first. That works most of the time, especially for smaller figures in say a movie parody panel. When things needs to be particularly detailed, say for a cover or a full page illustration, or it’s a rather difficult or awkward pose, I’ll take some photos. There are also times when whatever I have in my head just will not come out on the paper. When that happens I do not beat my head against the wall and waste a lot of time erasing and redrawing what isn’t working, I’ll take a photo to see where I am going wrong.

I’ll take a picture of myself, using using the webcam on my desktop, for a lot of things, particularly hand poses. When I need a full figure pose, I’ll enlist the help of The Lovely Anna. I’ll show her my sketch of the pose I’m looking for, and she is pretty good at getting close to the sketch pose with the camera. She will also often pose for me as well.

I never had any figure mannequins until very recently. I am working on a job that calls for a lot of dynamic superhero action poses, so I bought a set of articulated figures that you can use to pose in a lot of different ways.

They work pretty well but are ridiculously delicate and hard to pose.

I use photo references as a kind of “key” for figure poses. It’s not that I draw exactly what I am looking at. I use them to figure out how the body or the hands work in a particular pose/movement. The picture gives me the basic information, and then I apply that to my specific drawing. So, a picture of a 54 year old Tom can end up being the basis of a figure of a teenager, or a 400 lb linebacker, or whatever. Photo references are tools that help you reach solutions, not the solutions themselves.

Thanks to Dave M for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!