The line of action is an intangible artistic concept that is important in establishing the dramatic effect of your drawings. The line of action makes your poses appealing and clear, someone looking at your poses should know what is going on immediately.
John Kricfalusi says that when using the line of action, another important principle should be used: silhouette. With the poses blocked in, are the drawings understandable? To achieve clear silhouette, we use negative space which is the space between the arms, between legs, anywhere where there is empty space around the pose.
I marked the line of action in blue pencil and began construction from this line. Then following the steps I learned from constructing a pear-shaped body, I marked the center line down the form and so on until I completed my poses. Using the line of action helped me understand how to establish the poses for dramatic impact.
Note: I only bothered with drawing correct examples of line of action. I don’t want my hand to register the wrong way of drawing, I’d rather just draw the right way and avoid incorrect poses. It is pretty obvious when a pose doesn’t have a clear line of action anyway, the drawings just look wrong.
I wasn’t in my best form, so I am not very happy with these drawings but it will have to do.
I’ve been going through the ASIFA animation drawing course which is instructed by John Kricfalusi.