Hey y'all!! With this piece I was trying to capture that enemies to friends to lovers mood, and the two main things I’m interested in fixing is how the girl’s (she’s wearing the skirt and has brown hair) face in angled and how the two characters legs are angled/interacting with each other. I’m overall working on just generally making things more fluid rather than so stiff. (After I drew this i realized that part of the problem was their spines being a bit too rigid) I love what y'all do here and appreciate it so much!!
I tilted the character to the left a little more to nudge him further towards the character to the right. This is a very subtle hint that can help communicate their closeness more.
One of your “ problems” so to speak, is that you’re dealing with very flowy or “formless “ pieces of clothing. You got the baggy sweater on the character to the left, and a long flowy skirt ( and a thick sweater ) on the character to the right. These pieces of clothing effectively erase the forms of the body, and the direction of their limbs when drawn on without adding a dash of abstraction.
So we’re going to have to “ invent “ some shapes in your character’s outfits.
As you can see above, I have nudged the various articles towards the center of the composition. Whether or not these folds and shapes are technically “ correct “ can be discussed, and you would have to determine whether you’d stay true to “ realism “ when coming up with these imaginary shapes. But regardless, adding these inward creases and curves sub contextually pushes the characters closer together, and urges the tension in the image to fall right between them, where their bodies align.
This kind of thing can take a long time to figure out, especially if you’re new to handling the spectrum dealing in technical realism and abstractions, but once you’ve drawn a good few outfits using “ liberal” folding and shaping - you ‘ll come to find that the direction of clothes can do a whole lot to add dynamics to an otherwise static composition.