Heyo! I am honestly in awe of your art style it’s so good!! Do you have any advice on compsition/how to make your pieces more dynamic?
Hey Sunsketcher (love this name btw)! I love your art too, you inspired me so much. Honored to get an ask from you!
I will explain my own drawing process when it comes to composition and dynamicness, hopefully the wording is ok and it helps you.
1. Think of movement as a dance. A dance telling a story.
(What is the character experiencing? What is the mood of the piece? What kind of emotions are they feeling and what kind of poses convey those emotions?)
(Usually, dances have grace, strength and balance, unless you are purposely creating an effect of disharmony and disjointedness)
2. Line of motion. This is something that goes along with my above point. In animation, the characters are always doing something, and there is a specific line that goes through them, showing it. In the python art, you can see the two main lines (apollo and python's, curving towards each other, with a sub-line of Apollo punching contrasting that curve. The act of punching is disharmony so that's why it is crossed over the curves.
3. Considering anatomy at the beginning of drawing makes drawings stilted unless you truly feel like you can manipulate the anatomy like it's your own. Instead, try to imagine the movement and the "beat" like you experience in animations. Imagine your art as a still frame shot of an animation. Try to use your strokes to capture the essence of the movement and then later fill in the anatomy. In the messy sketch below, I disregarded anatomy and just was trying out as many different lines as possible to see which one expressed the beat and dance I had in my mind.
Another example are these horse sketches I did. The anatomy is completely wonky in some, but the essence of the horse can be represented in a few lines. This works for humans too.
In this art, I wanted to show how Apollo's wings were spreading on the ground, in a sort of grieving elegance. And the dead son in his arms is limp and has little balance or smooth lines, unlike Apollo. I did this to create a sense of disharmony between the always perfect Apollo and the mortality of the son. It helps accent them both. And then the scorch marks draw the eye to the duo.
4. Composition wise: think of the foreground, middle ground, background when creating your artwork. Use the foreground to immerse the viewer into the piece and direct their eye to the subjects. I used the rocks and part of python's body (blurry part on top left) to draw the viewer into the scene. This is similar to anime and movies, so if there are any shots or scenes that you felt were particularly well done, try to look for how they do the foreground, middleground and background and put that into your art.
5. Use color as an additional layer of contrast. Bright colors draw the eye and are able to highlight important subjects (characters, objects etc.)
6. If you start to draw and have no idea how to pose the character, I recommend looking at some dynamic fight scenes in manga, anime and art. I also love these two posts in particular as I find them really good sources of inspiration:
Battle scene composition:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/838091811920322288/
Sword fighting composition:
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/95842298307452250/
(The author, EtheringtonBrothers, is on tumblr but because they have like 1828248 art tip posts I cannot link it for you as I can’t even find it XD)
Anyways, thank you for reading, feel free to ask more questions if you need clarification.
Extra: Another art where I did a quick analysis to show you my thoughts
blakekathryn
vaporwave
gamechangershow
titsay
