Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Had some people asking me for tips about posing and composition, so here’s three basic tests that I run my pictures through which I find helpful.

1) Silhouette; Can you tell what is happening in the picture? Can you tell what the characters are like, what they’re doing? If you cannot ‘read’ a character’s pose as a simple blacked out shape, then the pose probably isn’t working. There are some exceptions, like foreshortening, but your picture will always benefit from a strong silhouette, and it makes you push your poses to the extreme.

2) De-saturate; I have a huge fondness for black and white films, but one of the strongest lessons they’ve taught me is that if an image doesn’t work without colour, it usually doesn’t work at all. Always think about the tonal values; if you de-saturate the image, does it still look good? Is there enough contrast between the characters and the background? What about shadows- are you using them to help the picture? Are they in the right place? Where is the light coming from? How solid is an object? This is a good test to make sure the lighting is working as a whole.

3) Atmosphere; What do you want the picture to convey? Do you want it to be stark and dynamic, or soft and dreamlike? Having a set colour palette is a good way to strike a particular mood, and don’t worry if your character has a set colour scheme of their own; colour is contextual. No skin tone is the same in two different settings. Even putting the same colour against two different backgrounds makes it look like a completely different colour. Don’t restrict yourself to one scheme and remember that the environment will always affect the object- don’t let your character’s colour dictate the world around them!