BLANDCorporatio wrote:I can't believe just how dynamic that ball o' blubber looks!
Awesome, and very good use of colours too.
Artists' trick: making static images look dynamic is surprisingly simple. All you have to do is draw someone/something in what is clearly not its resting state. Here's how it works:
1) People have a good sense of their own anatomy and how it works, and a well-founded suspicion that, like ourselves, most everything doesn't like to stay at rest in medias res.
1.1) As an object lesson, pick your favorite sport to play. Pick a motion you do all the time in that sport (you may want some space for that depending on the sport). (Hitting a serve in tennis or a baseball in ...baseball, shooting hoops, throwing a football, whatever tickles your fancy...) Now, halfway through that motion, stop dead. Hold that position.
1.2) Now, maybe some jacked guy in some branch of some Armed Forces could hold that for a very long time, but most of us can't. You know that. Artists know that. Artists know that you know that.
2) Like all Art, visual art ("Art") is about communicating ideas. If something in the art looks like or suggests an existing idea that someone already knows, they'll pick that up and associate the entire idea (and its anecdotal "thousand words") with the work. This is how the brain works all the time, Art simply capitalizes on it by grooming the artists to be able to pack lots of ideas in an eye-catching and appealing mixture. Technical drawing is probably the most bare-bones version of this, (and my retroactive excuse for defacing my all of my homework planners with my decreasingly inscrutable drawings of Halo and W40k and Star Wars).
3) Here's the trick, synthesized to the raw core of how it works. Know that people will empathize with the ideas displayed in the work, draw the subject in an active pose, just like someone stopped them in the middle of that sports move. People will understand the implication of motion from the empathy of knowing that there's pretty much no good reason to stop there or be stopped there. It just starts to hurt.
Now, this trick assumes a fair bit of technical skill and a good eye for what a body looks like contorted in various ways of your devising, so having a good subject (often oneself, but for the love of god don't try and figure out what a pose looks like in class. You're just asking for trouble.) is recommended. Now, if you want to show someone who for some reason is in that uncomfortable position, indicate small, rapid motions. Most positions where one isn't actively supported by something that isn't moving are an example of unstable equilibrium. Like a boat on the ocean, holding a static position is completely impractical; it's much easier to keep correcting back and forth around that position. Comic-book artists use little lines parallel to the object and perpendicular to its motion, evoking ripples on a pond, to demonstrate these small motions.
