Simple Pose Guidlines

Many art and manga how-to books( Mark Crilley, I'm talking about you) seem to drown the reader with guidelines and stress how intricately you need to plan out everything before you actually get around to drawing your manga character.
My style is to forego all the extras and use guidelines you actually need.

First I create a skeleton using rough gestures where I want the limbs and circles to indicate joints, and then I flesh it out. I use this skeleton to create all my poses.

I used a blue pencil to differentiate the skeleton from the actual figure.

The girl figure has a small chest connected by one motion line/spine to the 'box'
that is her hips to create a curvy look, while the guy's torso is a complete rectangle for a more masculine body.
The other difference I make is that the girls have bigger hips and the guys will usually have broader shoulders.
Another thing to note is that the leg lines always come from the corners of the hips.
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 Because it's not a cut-and-paste guideline base, sometimes I end up putting a limb where it just can't go.

In the pose on the right, the boy's feet were in the wrong position, and I changed the right arm's placement in the fleshing-out stage.

I could keep typing, but the best way to learn this guideline base is to look at the examples above and sketch out a few of your own. So where are your pencil and paper??


This skeleton approach is also used by Irene Flores, one of my favorite How-To-Draw Manga artists, Author of the Shojo Fashion series. Go check her work out on Beanclamchowder.com