I'm gonna show you a system that will help you capture any dynamic pose from
any angle.
When I was putting my portfolio together to submit to CalArts, a big portion of it
consisted of these Bridgman studies which are meant to teach you anatomical forms.
But CalArts is looking for your ability to draw movement.
Well,
I didn't get in.
I was struggling with stiff, disjointed figure drawings.
But years later, I was invited to teach at Pixar.
How?
What did I learn during that time to make such a drastic difference?
Your secret sauce is Rhythms.
They could even speed up the initial stages of your drawing.
What we're trying to do with Rhythms is find visual alignments that capture a
flow between the forms.
It's an abstract way of looking at the subject.
In fact, a system of Rhythms is sometimes called an abstraction.
It's more about where things are and what they're doing.
It's about the idea rather than the details.
Because with Rhythms, we're looking for connections between the forms, these
larger flowing lines help keep the pose feel connected.
It's more convincing that all these parts make up one machine where all the parts
are working together because they're unified with a common flow, a common
idea.
I'm gonna go through each body part and show you guys how to break them down into
their Rhythms.
So, I usually like to start my quick sketch drawings with the head, neck and
shoulders.
This gets me a good grounding and so, usually a head could be indicated with a
very simple oval.
So, this usually is indicating a front view, a little bit of a turn, you know,
the head is still kind of oval like.
Once you get close to side view, then I start breaking it to like the top of the
head, the front of the head and then
A little curve.
So, it's kind of like a guitar pick and this is the chin obviously.
So, this gives it some context.
Now, coming back to this front view or kind of close to front view, sometimes
I'll modify this oval a little bit.
If somebody's looking up enough to start flattening this bottom plane of the jaw
from the chin to the corners.
We'll start with an oval and then flatten it out.
Now, that's not enough.
Usually, I'll put in a few more tiny, very key landmarks of the features that
tell me even more about which direction this head is turning.
And that's all I really care about.
In my first pass, I don't worry about the expression of the face very much.
It's just about like which direction is the head going, that's really all that
matters.
In a straight pose like this, I'm just gonna put that and that's usually enough.
This is like the brow line, the bottom of the nose and that shows me like, oh, this
person's looking right at me.
When the person's looking up, this is gonna be quite different.
Right?
This is going to wrap this way and then the nose is going to be here and I'll
even put a little triangle for the bottom of the nose and that's an even better
indication that this person is looking up.
And see how like I'm barely doing anything, there's no detail here.
This is just a few very strategic lines that indicate something incredibly
important about this head.
Same thing for this, I'll just kind of do that and then a little bit of a nose.
The placement of the ear is another one that is great for positioning the head.
Like with this one for example, the ears would be somewhere in here.
But all of these are kind of either straight on or to the side.
So, let's look at a head where it's kind of in between.
Like if I have something like this and they're looking down a little bit, right?
So, I'm going to wrap this
This
Further explains that this person is looking down.
This is showing this way down and to the right.
And I don't need much more.
Sometimes if there's something interesting with the hair, something
gestural, I'll do that.
After this, which takes maybe under 10 seconds when you've really got these
down, I go into like a single line for the neck.
So, for example, with this one, I'll pick a side
The side that's being lengthened the most.
So, if I'm doing this, this side of my neck is being lengthened whereas this
side is short and being compressed a little bit, right?
So, I'll pick the longer side because that's showing the most motion and I'll
go to the pit of the neck.
Pit of the neck and I'll even put a point there.
And that's going to be important later on once we get into the body.
From there, I'm going to extend the body.
This is a very very key landmark that's going to help me find placements of other
things.
And from the neck, I'm gonna look at the shoulders, the angle, but also the
distance of the shoulders away from the chin.
Like that distance between here and here.
That's really important to take note of because sometimes if somebody's like
charging at you, look at how my shoulder line is actually above my chin.
But when I just kind of go like this, then it's actually quite a bit below my
chin.
And we capture all that with just one single line.
It's really critical that you put that line in the right spot and at the right
angle.
If I'm doing this, I'm like "yeah".
Obviously that's important to capture this, otherwise I'm like "yeah" and
that's a lot more boring than "yeah".
Now, because we're only using one line, we can pay attention a little bit more
closely to all these things because we're just doing one line.
We don't need to do anything else on the shoulders.
From a pure side view, you're gonna see some other stuff.
Like I really like to put that straight and then get that curve in here and then
sometimes get that curve in here to the pit of the neck.
You can't really see the other shoulder if it's just like that, then there is no
rhythm across the shoulders and then so you have to indicate something totally
different, like a little oval for like the deltoid muscle or just an angle of
This part, right?
So, just some kind of angle that helps you place the connection between the neck
and the body.
As you can see, this is not an exact science.
This is just like the art of indication.
How much can you simplify something and still make it really convincing and
exciting to look at?
Obviously, there's going to be really extreme angles like if somebody's just
going you know, chin's pointing straight up and all you see is like the bottom of
the jaw or there's the back of the head.
There's all sorts of really extreme angles that you see very rarely but they
do happen and I'm going to cover those in the basics course in another lesson.
Moving on to the torso, the torso is the center of the whole body, right?
Everything else connects to the torso.
Rhythms are all about connecting the body parts together and so the torso is
literally where everything connects.
So, it's important to try to find rhythms that flow from the torso into these other
things.
And I mentioned that I usually start with the head but I don't always start with
the head.
Sometimes, the head might be covered up.
Somebody's doing this, right?
You could see a little bit of the head but the body, this part of the body is
more important to capture and so, I'll usually start with the torso in poses
like that.
But anyway, let's just say it's kind of a typical pose.
I don't want to get to some extreme stuff.
We got something like this, right?
To the pit of the neck.
I found the head, the neck and the shoulders.
Now, what I want to do is
From the pit of the neck, find the pubic bone.
And a common mistake that I see people doing with Rhythms, they'll start
executing the line without being fully confident with where it's supposed to end
up.
And that causes proportional errors because if you don't know where you're
gonna end up, you're gonna have a high chance of putting it in the wrong spot.
Something you could do very easily, very quickly is just find that end point
first.
Just by looking, right?
If I know that the pubic bone is actually over to the left a little bit from the
head, get a general measurement from here down to here, maybe like two and a half,
you can just eyeball it, right?
When you're doing quick sketch, try to use it as a way to practice your
proportions.
Repetition over and over again, you're doing so many of them.
By considering where the end point should be, even if it's just for one second, you
just kind of go right here.
That will make your rhythm
More accurate.
Just to show you guys how things flow together, I'm going to put this over
here.
From the pit of the neck, kind of find this flow and see how it's kind of
connecting with the neck.
It's kind of similar flow.
It's not always going to be the case.
Sometimes you'll get this is this way and then
This goes completely in a different direction because the neck can move
independent of the body.
I found the point.
I found the curve.
How much is it curving?
And also notice, I'm going beyond that line.
I'm not ending it there.
I'm using my whole arm.
And then after I've gotten this, I want to find the sides of the ribcage.
This is something that I personally like to do.
If you look at the Frank Riley rhythms of the body, which is where all of this kind
of comes from, is from Frank Riley.
From here, I'll follow the ribcage.
And this to me just feels a little bit more approachable because it's closer to
what I'm seeing.
I actually see the size of the torso right in here.
No matter what angle it's in, I'm just gonna be like, okay, it's wherever I'm
seeing those two lines from the front back or side to side, those are the lines
I'm putting in.
So, it's just more approachable, easier because it's just direct and I'll connect
them to the shoulders.
And then from there, depending on how much of the back I'm seeing, I'm gonna
see some kind of hip come out.
And this is not a straight on pose, right?
This was like the diagram that you see with Riley.
This one is a little bit turned.
So, I'll just look for this corner where you'll see the hips coming out.
In order to get this placement correct, sometimes people will put it too high or
too low.
Too low is actually more common.
What I like to do is imagine if I keep this going, what does it align with?
And it's going to be different every time.
It's just when I look at the model or the photo, I'll kind of just imagine that
angle of the hip continuing through and just see like where does it intersect.
Sometimes it'll be like something in here, it'll intersect with the pec or
it'll intersect with the ear.
In this case, when I'm inventing here, I'm seeing a nice rhythm, a nice flow
into the other side of the neck.
And that helps me place it in the right spot when I look for connections in other
parts of the body.
Again, this is all about finding connections.
So, it's important to not think of this as like isolated pieces, even though I'm
presenting to you guys as like here's these body parts.
If I wanted to indicate a little bit more, the next few lines that I would put
in are a rhythm across the ribcage, either the bottom of the ribcage or the
arch of the ribcage here, right at the level of the pecs.
It's a xiphoid process there.
If they're tilting back, I'm gonna show that arch.
Like this.
Remember in the previous lesson how shapes like this, when there's a turning
point, it's almost like an arrow pointing in a direction.
So, this helps to point that chest up.
And then with the hips, same thing.
I like to find a rhythm towards the other side.
So, we're adding layers of complexity on top of those initial few lines.
We can go much deeper into this.
We could start breaking them down into more individual muscle groups.
Okay, moving on to the back.
The head is hidden behind there but the angle of the shoulders downward is really
important.
Look at that center line, look at the spine.
By the way, this is really convenient for us.
We got a center line in the front and we got a center line in the back.
And that center line shows where it's going, it's showing the twist, showing a
lot of great things.
From there, find where the sacrum is, that tailbone in relationship to this.
Maybe like that.
And then just kind of find the curve that I'm seeing there.
I can exaggerate this but I feel like that's pretty accurate or close enough.
And then from here
I'm seeing something like this.
Just an arc following the side, another rhythm here, and then the hips.
And again, remember, when I try to find where the hips go, I see, oh, where does
it go?
Does it go into here?
Kind of, actually.
Like, in this example, if I keep it going, it kind of goes right through the
bottom of that arm, which is going to be like right here.
Voila!
Right there, that's where the hip is gonna be.
So, very similar to the front but now we have the spine that we're looking for.
And in this case, I'm seeing a real nice rhythm across right here.
It's actually visible, there's kind of an angle from one side of the hips to the
other side.
And in this case, just to kind of show another example of the neck, it's just
going right through there, right into that shoulder like that.
The important thing that I'm trying to capture in this specific pose is this
twisting rhythm.
It's a single line, it's really important to capture the accuracy of that line.
Don't make it too straight, don't make it too wobbly, don't make this portion
really long and then this portion really short because notice how this piece is a
little bit longer.
This bottom curve is a little bit longer than this top curve.
Okay, and then just quickly, I'm gonna show you a side view.
So, from the side, you can't see either center lines unless there's a twist then
you're gonna see maybe even both.
But from the side, I usually start by looking at the front curvature and then
I'll kind of find the back on both pieces.
And this is kind of a beam but there's no compression in the back.
The spine is a nice flow and it's gonna be kind of this W shape because then the
neck
Comes in like that.
Very simplified.
This is the person going like this.
If they're not, then the curve goes this way, like that.
The first rhythm from the side that I try to find is this curvature of the torso on
the front and then in here, I'll just break it up into the pieces and say,
well, I'm seeing a curve here, I'm seeing a curve here and those are isolated
rhythms.
All right, I feel like that's enough for one lesson.
I'll pick this one up in the next episode where I'll show you how to draw the arms
and the legs using Rhythms.
If you don't want to wait, the full version of this lesson and a whole bunch
of other lessons are all part of the Drawing Basics course over at
proko.com/drawing.
I also have projects, demonstrations and critique videos to get you better at
drawing.
You don't have to be a premium student to participate in the community.
Click on the link in the description and participate.
And also, on that same page is the downloads tab where you can get the
reference to practice this stuff.
Link in the description.
See you guys!