As one merchandisable blue hedgehog once said, “Must achieve haste!” Or maybe it was simply, “SPEED.” Either way, I wanted to take a break from feeling out anatomy and start referencing poses in a more ornamental fashion through what’s known as the armature stick figure.

The armature, for the uninitiated (myself included, until about three hours ago), is the prelude of gesture study and involves making a stick figure with shoulders and hips that connect out to the arms and legs. Simple enough, right? Well, it gets a tad tough when you set yourself a rather RIGID time limit.

The following scribbles were done with the following handicaps:
– 20 second time limit
– No glasses

This technique was essentially meant to recreate something I believe Proko recommended where you would blur the reference image by a lot so you can focus on the measure line of action rather than the intricacies. I also made sure not to try and pull these images into my Procreate canvas as that would make me loose precious seconds…!

As you can see, practically anyone could do this! The trick is to try and maintain proportions, which I failed to do a few times since sometimes the head is too small or the torso is too long or the arms and legs bend too early or late, but this was my first time and I was in a bit of panic.

I feel like if I keep doing this, I can start to convey character mood and motion a whole lot better and eventually graduate to gesture study, which is far more loose and interpretive, kinda like the cave drawings of yestermillennia.

I’ve also been toying around with perspective since I don’t want to get into the habit early of having my characters sort of floating around in an empty void and having a plane and vanishing point is a good first start. It’ll also help in figuring out a few other things later, like when I eventually have to simplify the figure into boxes, I’ll actually have a reference for what face of the box tilts where.

One of these days, I’ll share some of my other artistic ventures, but I wanted this blog to primarily focus on what I do with my pen, not my mouse. Besides, I think the Home page chronicles enough of my vector art – old and new!