Adding dynamic movement to your characters

From drawing session to character sheet

In May, I attended the Art Gym drawing workshop hosted by Adam Ming and Katie Stack to improve my character poses. During the session, we focused on dynamic sports poses, and it was a game changer. We used a “brickman” (a stickman with a rectangular torso) as a frame and worked from the reference photos of people doing different sports. Adam actually talked about this method in his recent post. First, we sketched a long line of action. Then, we connected the hips, shoulders, and spine to form a brickman. After that, we added subtle details with head tilts, hands and feet to bring the pose to life.

I did these quick sketches during the session. I need to tilt his hip and raise his right shoulder a bit more.

It’s pretty fascinating how starting with the line of action can instantly add more energy to your poses. By the end of the session, I could already see the improvement in everyone’s drawings. You can spot the subtle difference in my sketches below. The one on the left is from the beginning of the session without any instruction, and the one on the right is from the end. The right sketch has more bounce in the movement.

Adam suggested trying out dynamic sports poses with your own characters, and since I wanted to add more character sheets for my portfolio, I went for it. The characters I made for my new story were young animals with big heads, short torsos and little limbs. Once I started sketching, I found it pretty challenging to draw them playing sports.

First, I started with a line of action. I really liked the graceful line her arms made, but I went with the line created by her head, torso, and left leg. Next, I drew a brickman over it and sketched my squirrel character using that as a framework. Since my character has a bigger head and much shorter limbs than the ballet dancer, I made some adjustments before finalizing the sketch. I followed the same process each day until I had enough sports poses of each character I liked to create a character sheet. When finalizing sketches on Procreate, I did more tweaking — adjusting things like height, limb length, clothing, head tilts. Then, I painted with gouache, added details with colored pencils, and did a few final touch-ups digitally.

This pose was particularly tricky since the dog character has such short legs!

I did the most tweaking on this one. I made her face look younger and dressed her in her own clothes.

Quieter poses like this one can be tricky to draw.

This is my second favorite pose. I like how energetic it is! He’s such a cute character anyway.

This one is my favorite! I used more straight lines to show strength and tension in the movement. His facial expression gives away how he really feels.

I added shadows digitally at the end, and tada — my character sheet was done!

If you’re interested in learning how to draw dynamic poses, I highly recommend subscribing to

Art Gym: Live Drawing Workshops & Illustration Tutorials

! You can watch all the past workshops in the archive.

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I’ve been quietly sending my query letters to art directors for the past two months. I’ve received several positive responses — hurray! I don’t have any immediate gigs lined up, but I’m hoping and believing it’ll happen sometime soon!

Do you have any summer projects you are working on now? If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

I hope you’re weathering the summer heat all right. Stay hydrated!

💗
Yumiko