what is posing

What is posing?
Posing is positioning character in such a way as to tell a story.
The biggest goal of posing is to show personality of a character, while showing his "buisiness" in the scene. While posing, one has to remember attitude, appeal, balance, force, composition, exaggeration, contrast, flow and silhouette. These five, when done well give a great pose.

The first of these is attitude. To show attitude, we should understand the character that we are posing. How old is he. What is his background. What is his attitude in this scene. What is his mood. What are his intentions. What are his shortterm and long term goals and so on. Once we have this information, we would usually draw 4 or 5 poses and see which one of them is best in the given context and composition. There are several ways of showing a particular attitude, mood and emotion. The degree of emotion he needs to have also defines the pose.. Is he upset? Annoyed? Frustrated? Angry? Mad? Homicidal? If he is upset, it could be a more "toned down" pose with just the face being the main ingredient.. but if he is really mad at this other person and wants to dessimate him, his pose will be elaborate and aggressive..

To get to the point of doing good poses, we need to understand three things first.

1) Action line or Flow line.
2) Silhouette.
3) Exaggeration.

A knowledge of these three is really really important.

1) Action line:

Action line is the general flow in which the body parts are placed in such a way as to suggest the direction, intent and mood of the character.

Consider this picture from Preston blair's Cartoon animation.



See how all the characters have a single "Arc" type of a line running through their body? That is what makes these characters really "physical" and "appealing".

A good training is to just draw an action line and try to build a simple character around it.. This will give an understanding of "balance" and "flow". The more curved the line is.. generally, the more "dynamic" the action is and/or the more "exaggerated" the pose is...