Posing Your Character | 03 |How to Pose the Male Figure

how to draw a cartoon male body gesture drawing

How to Draw a Cartoon Male Body: Establishing a Line of Action

To learn how to draw a cartoon male body and pose the male figure, you should begin by defining the major line of action. In this video you’ll use a simple “S” shaped curve to create the figure of a man standing.

You can imagine this line as the spine that travels down the characters back and then extends down to the feet.

The major sections of the body will all attach to and use this line as their center point.

Balancing the Shoulders and Hips

Rarely will a character have even weight on both legs, so to show that one leg has more weight on it than the other you can push the hips up so they become tilted like the character’s left leg.

As the hips tilt, the shoulders will also tilt, but in the opposite direction.

drawing a male cartoon body angle of shoulders

To really understand how this works, go stand in front of a mirror and shift your weight from leg to leg and see how that affects the tilt of your shoulders.

drawing a male body tilt of shoulders

Finishing Up

Complete this study on how to draw a cartoon male body and posing the male figure by detailing out the arms, chest neck and head.

Remember that with this style of drawing of a male to use more angular strokes to define the major parts of the body.

2 thoughts on “Posing Your Character | 03 |How to Pose the Male Figure”

  1. anil kumar thapliyal

    Brief but hit to the point to make understand the budding cartoonists the dynamics behind drawing figures in action. This could have been with few more examples right upto finish stage. My sincere thanks for this great lesson which is very practical and stimulate the mind to go fastly ahead towards a successful cartoonist.

    1. Hi Anil and thanks so much for taking the time to leave feedback – we really appreciate it 🙂 I’m really glad you enjoyed this blog post – we actually have a daily figure drawing workshop going on in our community right now, with live drawing demos every Monday at 8PM EST. You’ll find all the info about this on our Community page 🙂

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