Expressive Gestures and Poses for Characters: Proportions and Expressive Gestures

Today we’re going to be drawing an original character with consistent proportions and different expressive gestures. Character artist Gerardo Escamilla takes us through this process by starting out with a colored pencil, drawing a simple sphere cut in half length and width wise to know where the features lay. He builds upon that simple sphere, adding shapes around it to create an owl in frontal view.

He extends the features lines over to another sphere and draws the owl in profile. Once he’s satisfied he traces the lines with a graphite pencil. Then following the graphite with black liner marker to outline and clean up the lines. Now, using the sphere concept we can put the character in a different pose. He draws a new sphere, cutting the sphere length and width wise in an offset angle, showing that the owl will be turned and looking up. He sketches in the features around the sphere, based on the proportions from the earlier drawings.

Again he traces his colored pencil lines in graphite, then again in liner marker. Finally he draws the owl in a new pose with a different expression. He draws the whole body of the owl, having started out with the sphere concept, again, in colored pencil, and building the proportions from there. Afterward, he again traces the lines in graphite then black liner marker. The owl has been given a more complex, suspicious expression. Now we are done practicing.