How to draw characters that look alive!

When people ask me what I do for a job and I tell them that my job is to draw, they usually answer that the only thing that they can draw are stick figures. Well, let me tell you that I am usually starting ANY character drawing by stick figures. It is a critical step towards drawing a character that has some life into him/her.

It allows to give them a movement and an energy.Let’s take an example from Book 1 of Miles and Jones (the comic book series I have been working on for a few years).

In my storyboard and early sketches for this panel, running Shackleton was just a stick figure to give him a clear movement and energy.

But what I found the most interesting is that if we only look at the satick figure, it already has an urgency to it.

I believe that you can tell that he/she is in a hurry to get somewhere!

And the same applies to pretty much any scenes where characters are interacting. I have used the same stick figure approach in the example below.

Looking at the last stick figure drawing (is it even a drawing?), I can tell that a small character is pulling on the leg of a larger character while a third one also helps pulling on the same character. And finally a fourth character is running in the background.

Looking back at these stick figures, I feel like I could have exaggerated even further, and increase the bending of some of them, but the intent is there.

99.9% of the time, this is my starting point. Then I draw the characters shapes around the stick figures and only after I add details.

The stick figure sketch is a critical step of my process. And of the process of a lot of artists to give scenes movement and energy. The animation industry call this step the “line of action” which they use to clearly express a movement on each of the frame/picture composing the animated movie/sequence. Have a look at this blog post if you want to know more about “line of action”.

So well done to all of you guys who can draw stick figures, you are already mastering a key element of comic book making :)