Dynamic Axis In Poses

All right. In this lecture, we're going to be talking about dynamic axes. So what is an axis? Well, let's go ahead and let's have a look at some examples so we can start breaking this down. So there's two types of accesses. So the first one is going to be a horizontal axis. So that's going to be accesses that go straight across. So if you can think of an X, Y and Z plane, what you get is you get the horizontal axis like this and you get the vertical axis like this. And so everything has an axis like this. So when we draw the human face, for example, or the head, we kind of give them a jaw line, the round part of the face, and then we always give him a center line for the face and usually an eye line or an eyebrow line, whichever one you want to draw. And this is the horizontal axis for the eyes, or you could even do one for the mouth. Anything just going across horizontally are your horizontal axis and anything going up and down is going to be your vertical axis. And so every part of the body has these. So let's go ahead and let's break down this photograph that I have here. So first of all, we can start breaking it down into simple axes, like, for example, the line coming straight across through the eyes, the lips, right. Simple enough. And we could break that. If we're drawing this as a lumis head, those would be the axes that we'd be drawing. Then we can go ahead and do the same thing for the shoulder. So it's hard to see the shoulder, but I can tell just by looking at this that a shoulder goes down. So from this shoulder to that one, it has a very angled axis like that. The same would probably go through the breast. So underneath the breast are probably angled up like that until we get down here to the next you could say unit. So we have the chest, the head, which are separate units. Then we get down to the pelvis and we get something different going on. So one hip looks like right there and another one right there. So now the hips kind of go a little bit more straight or they actually angled downwards just a tiny bit and you can do the same thing through the butt and then you can't see the other knee. But it basically the other knee would kind of angle like this. So we get all these different angled accesses and that's what we want. This creates dynamics. Now, these are horizontal axes, so even though they're angled, they're not just going horizontally straight. The reason why they're horizontal is because if any of these forms so for example, let's say the upper chest form is kind of like a cube if we were to see that straight on. These are just kind of horizontal straight accesses going across here. And so that's why these are considered horizontal. Let's go ahead and undo these because it's kind of cluttering up our image because now we're going to talk about the vertical ones. So vertical would be things like the middle of the face or the middle of the face is kind of as a line like that. And then for the upper body, it's just kind of like this. And then for the pelvis area, it angles down like that. Right. So we get all these really interesting looking dynamic accesses because they're all different. So there's one to that in that leg. All right. Let's have a look at another example. So here's another good example. So you can see that the head, if we go right through the eyes, they're kind of a straight line, straight through the mouth. So we have these straight axes right there. And then for the neck or sorry, let's just move on down to the chest. You can see that the shoulders angle up the chest kind of angles like that as well. If we could see the bottom of the rib cage, they would also angle like that. And then when we get to his pelvis area, if we went off this belt, you can see that it basically just straightens out. And it probably straightens out all the way across the bottom. And then when we look at his knees, it's hard to see his other knee, but I think his other knee is probably just a little bit lower like that. And this one is right about there. So we kind of get another axis that's angled like that. And then for the feet, the bottom of the feet is a good way to mark out the axis. And you can see that we can mark it like that. So we have all these different angles in our axes, and that's what creates a beautiful or a beautiful dynamic pose. There's more to it than that, but this is part of it. So if we went ahead and we did the vertical ones, you can see that the center of the face is kind of angled that way. Then the neck is kind of angled back that way, and then the whole upper body and pelvis area is kind of angled like this right through there. And then this part is just angled straight and then the legs are kind of angled at that angle right there. But you can see that there's all these dynamic looking axes because they're all different, they're all angled differently, and they're switching back and forth and they're all at different angles. And so we want to try to create this as much as possible in our character designs. So just to really illustrate the point and bring it home for you, let's go ahead and look at a bad example. So we wouldn't really want to draw a character like this. We would want to kind of change it up a little bit. But you can see that if we draw all the axis lines for this guy right here, so right through the mouth, right through the eyes, and I'll draw this on another layer because we can kind of redo this. So. Right through the eyes or through the mouth. All right. So that's kind of the axis for the head. And then the shoulders are also just straight across the bottom of the chest or the nipples are also straight across the hips or straight across the knees are probably straight or straight across. They're kind of off the page, but I know they're straight across. And so this is just incredibly boring. And all of our vertical accesses are just straight as well, just one big straight line going through. And basically that's super boring. And so what we can do to change this up is let's go ahead and turn off our images so we can see better. Now I'll switch over to a blue so we can see this a little bit better. So we can kind of for example, we could angle his head like that and then we could, we could even keep the shoulders kind of straight like that if we wanted to in the bottom of the chest. And then we could go ahead and angle the hips. To make it much more interesting. So now if we were to go ahead and kind of draw him back out a little bit. The vertical line can be more tilted like that. The vertical line for his chest can be like that. You just kind of draw a bow like that for the hit, for the waist and for the hips. Because of the way this is angled, we can do the bottom of the hips as well, like that or the pelvis. And see, now that's much more dynamic. And then we could even change the knees to be kind of more like this, angled like that. So we can kind of bring those legs back down like this. Right. And that's that's much, much more interesting because now we have all these different angles going on in our axes. So now what we're going to do is I'm going to switch over to paper and pencil and we're going to draw kind of a better character form than this, and we're going to really pay attention to the axes. So let's go ahead and draw a character body form where the axes are at different angles. So we get that dynamic look so we can go ahead and just kind of start by sketching out about what we want it to look like. So we can start with the line of actions. The line of action is just going to kind of go like that. So slight curve, the head will be somewhere up here. Just do a circle to represent the head for now and we can come back and change the size of that. Then I'm going to make the shoulders kind of angled like this. Same with the rest of the chest. So get kind of an angle like that and we can go ahead and just kind of draw in. The rib cage like this. We can do a circle for. The hips. Or for the waist and then for the hips and the pelvis, we can go ahead and kind of do sort of a trapezoid type shape that'll kind of angle back this way. Looking at this, I think actually this all needs to kind of get shrunk. So I'm going to go ahead and just shrink the. Ribcage down a little bit. I'll go ahead and erase this. We do the hips or the waist and then redo the hips. Just kind of shorten that a little bit. But then this leg will continue on the line of action. So go ahead and do this leg. So we'll get this nice curve going from the hips into this leg. Let's see and let's add a little bit more of a tilt to these hips. So what I'm going to do is we can keep this one right here, but let's kind of tilt it more like that. So I'm going to bring this down a little bit like this. Maybe bring this leg out just a little bit more. Something like that, you'll see that the knees are at a kind of different angle as well. Then we'll go ahead and put the shoulders in there. So just do these two round sort of circles for the shoulders neck. The shoulder will just kind of go back behind the arm will go behind the body. And this arm right here can have it kind of angled out like that for the bicep and then for the forearm. It will come down like this. Put some little fingers there on her hips. Something like that. And then for the face, let's go ahead and angle it down like this. So the front of the face, the horizontal axis, are going to be down like this. That collarbone. Kind of sketch out that heart shape like this. Draw the side of the pack right there. Then we can go ahead and draw the breast in. There's her arm and kind of solidify these fingers a little bit more. It's rather wasting right there. The back. And then a rib cage kind of is right there. So can you use that as a guide so it can kind of dividend right there? And back in. All right. This is looking pretty good. But there's one thing that I'm noticing, and I wonder if you can see it yet, if you have caught it. And that is that the breasts are actually not drawn in correct perspective. So if we draw a line across the bottom of them, you can see that they should be lining up with these lines, but they're not. So that was my mistake. So I'm going to go ahead and erase these and redraw them, keeping that in mind. So we want to kind of keep them in that kind of an angle. So we need to bring the other one further down. You could also put some fingers over here on this side as well. You could draw a face on her character just to show. Just sort of the angle of those accesses on her face. And she's kind of standing on her tippy toe. But if we draw a line coming straight down from the center of her chest, most of the weight is actually going to be back here or on this front foot. So what we need to do is we need to kind of change it, because if somebody has a bunch of weight on their foot, they're not going to be on their tippy toes. They'll kind of they can still be on their toes, but it'll be kind of more flattened like this. And that's where all that weight will be held is right there. They would just give her kind of a hairstyle. Maybe a bun. Give her a belly button as well. All right. There we go. So there's a character where we drew her form and we have some nice accesses going on in there. So you can see that the face is kind of going like that. The shoulders are going and actually we need to bring this shoulder down. Shoulders are going down like that. Bottom of the breast are going down like that. The bottom of the rib cage is going down like that. And then her hips are going like this. So the top of that leg in the top of that leg are going at that angle. And then her knees are going at that angle right there. And then her feet are going at this angle right here. So we have all these interesting and dynamic looking accesses. So we really want to try to work this into our drawings as much as possible. So just keep that in mind when you're drawing your character forms and as we move through the course, you can start applying this to those forms. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lecture.