Hi! This is an old character of mine, who’s part snow wolf! I was just wondering what I could improve on with dynamic poses, coloring, and character design (like how could i give him more wolf-like characteristics). Thank you!
I amped up your pose a little bit. Quite frankly all I did was to distance the limbs a little more from the character’s core and added a bend to his spine.
Usually, when adding drama to your pose you make it “ bigger” or have it “ take up more room”. Kind of like how a theatrical actor will throw up his arms in grief and wail, despite how very few would actually grieve like that.
This is due to the drawing medium in its static form doesn't convey subtle movements and ticks too clearly. So always aim to give your poses some 110% when drawing up your sketch or gesture.
There are two ways of making a character represent a certain aspect.
The physical traits: ie. Ears, eyes, tail, teeth, etc.
and the metanarrative traits: Pertaining to how the character acts and moves.
I’m personally a big fan of the latter, but a healthy helping of both can make for a strong representation.
You can see what I’ve played around with below.
For the physical traits, I’ve shrunk the ears, laced the hair in over the neck, and drawn the character with an eye resembling that of a wolf’s.
The posture, however, and the posing of the hand is part of the meta-narrative traits. It doesn't take many of these to convey a certain aspect, as we can immediately see his animalistic side coming through by the hunch of his back and the raised heels.
This is why I adore the meta-narrative level of character design, it takes so very little visuals, for us to form a comprehensive image of what sort of character we’re looking at.
I don’t particularly have anything against the colours of the original image. Although I would recommend you add a hint of blue the greys you’ve had in the image. Such as the character’s hair and tail.
using greyscale hues is alright, but your palette is going to look a lot more dynamic if you add a hint of a secondary colour into it (although I think you might have sprinkled some red in there, I'm not entirely sure if that is my screen or not though, I’d still recommend going with the colour blue, as it leads our thoughts to the “arctic/snow” aspect).
My second thought was to change the colour of the blue pants. As we already have an abundance of blue in the image. Either by tinting it more purple-ish, or changing the colour entirely to an earthy brown.
But truth be told I think the colours on yours are just fine, and for me as a critic to tell you exactly what colours I’d prefer would be considered rather nitpicky.
Perhaps, for the hell of it, you could look into colour symbolism, and create a whole new meta-narrative by using hues that communicates your character sub contextually.
(also i accidentally gave him long sleeves in my colour samples, so sorry!)
- mod wackart ( ko-fi )
Original art by: @keoncore
