Life Drawing PART THREE - Squash and Stretch (OUAN404)

Drawing squashed and stretched poses helped to solidify my understanding of one of the twelve principles of animation for the same reason that drawing pushing poses helped solidify my understanding of animation. I can apply what I've learnt to my cartoons, thus making them more dynamic and lifelike.

I drew these poses in five to ten minutes (not the jumping ones, the other ones). I like some aspects of them, such as the mark making which I think is nice and bold. I wish that I had taken some time to consider the emotion of the pose and tried to embody that through my drawing. I drew the poses and they look alright, but they are a little bland and stark. I wish I'd thought about why the characters are so stretched out or squashed in on themselves. Are they full of joy? Are they feeling particularly confident? Could I have exaggerated certain elements of the drawings to convey these emotions to the viewer? I guess I will never know.

This sort of ties in with the series of ten second drawings I did, where I had to sketch a lot of very dynamic poses in quick succession. I quite enjoyed this and found that since I didn't have the time to think too much about the pose, I immediately drew the figure very exaggeratedly to capture the general feel of the stance, though the drawings may not have been correctly proportioned.