Art Journal 021: Motion

I know I say a lot of things are my “favorite part” of making comics but for serious, motion is probably my most-favoritest part of making comics.  It’s an illusion; a magic trick where you simulate motion in a motionless format.  This week I’d like to talk about how I approach motion in my comics, so without further ado I’m going to jump right into it.

The first and most importing thing to remember about motion is that you are not capturing a snapshot in time, but rather you have to condense a stretch of time into a moment.  That moment has to convey what has just happened, what is happening and what will imminently happen all at once.  Imagine time as a filmstrip zipping through a narrow window; now imagine you’re widening the window to see a wider swatch of time as it passes, but you’re not seeing individual cells like a filmstrip, it’s a seamless undulating snake and what you’re perceiving at a given moment is as much a summary of the wider window of time perception as our current narrower eye can see.  If that all makes sense to you, wonderful!  If not, well, you’re averaging more variables into a result which represents the whole set of numbers.  That’s motion in a motionless medium.

In my comic a lot of the major motion events that happen are running and fighting so I’ll be using those things as a reference here.  To illustrate my point above about motion as a moment I’ve made a Goofus and Gallant of running for you to consider.  Goofus (A I) is a stiff artist. He understands there is a head and a body and the limbs are moving to convey the idea of running but he doesn’t understand the way the body actually hinges and moves.  He only knows how to draw a head in ¾ perspective so that’s what he does, and his arms are loosely positioned in the way that hints at motion. His spine does not bend and his soles are rigid.  Gallant, on the other hand, has a strong grasp of the body’s articulation so drawing a jog is a breeze for him (A II).  He gives the soles of his feet a slight curve to indicate the roundness of their motion when they approach, press into and push off the ground, and he gives the toe a bit of stretch to describe the direction and pull of his legs.  He doesn’t draw the legs stiff either, he gives the fore-reaching leg a gentle bend to indicate it coming forward and then down, while the rear leg is curved to describe how it pushed off of the ground and is bent and prepared to pull forward and become the next step.  Gallant pivots his hips and puts a twist in his torso, understanding that the opposite-side arm and leg are the ones to come forward together so the body can maintain balance as it pushes forward. The body leans forward to control its momentum so the neck leans forward as well, and the head points in the direction it wants to go.  The arms don’t simply bend willy-nilly either, the one in the front has a more acute bend at the elbow than the one at the back, and angles in across the torso, while the trailing elbow is more obtuse, but both biceps flow into one another.  The positioning of the arms in this way gives a sense of motion, like wind blowing against a flag the forward arm is pulled back a little bit and the trailing arm is pulled moreso by this invisible wind; both arms are prepared to switch places, pumping back and forth.  While a body in motion may never actually strike this exact pose the body’s features describe everything a body in motion might do, and the eye reads it as being lively and energetic. We have created the illusion of movement!

It’s all well and good to know these little facts about one particular way of drawing one sort of motion, but it’s also important to have a fundamental understanding of just how we walk around.  Bipedal locomotion seems simple in concept but if you break down what we’re actually doing it sounds fairly silly: in order to walk a human body will deliberately unbalance itself and fall forward while simultaneously catching itself before it falls to repeat the process again (A III).  Walking and running is a controlled act of falling over, unbalancing ourselves in the direction we want to go and keeping ourselves from kissing the pavement.  When we walk our body will unbalance to some degree, and if we don’t capture that in our illustrations then our figures will just look like they’re standing on one foot.  In the illustration above I’ve used a wooden triangle on a pivot to illustrate the inherent off-balance of the figure drawn in A II.  We can see the angle in the neck, spine, torso and trailing thigh  reflected in the tilt of our angular mockup, with the fore leg ready to catch our stumbling body.  But the body doesn’t alway need to tilt forward to show locomotion.  Different angles can describe different demeanors and moods for how we walk.  Like, for example, a gentle backwards lean can serve as a stark contrast to the energetic sprint above; in this case our figure is very lazily ambling along, letting their feet carry them wherever the wind might take them and the rest of their body is just along for the ride.  Both figures show a sense of motion but neither’s center of balance is straight vertical. Whether it’s frantic of mellow motion is always about unbalance!

Careful posture and balances decisions are a great way to simulate motion in our drawings, but they’re not the only element at work!  If you’re reading this blog there’s a pretty strong possibility that you’re an anglophone, and thus you read from left to right, top to bottom.  Our brains are wired to scan pages a certain way, not just for words but for all information, and we can take advantage of that mechanical act of scanning to simulate motion without actually animating anything.  For example: we have four panels of a figure walking forwards (B I).  The context for this could be a character speaking or thinking to themselves as they walk down a sidewalk so the camera stays in front of them as they move, to give the sample a thematic context.  Instead of just drawing one walking pose and copy/pasting it across all four panels, what we can do instead is imagine we’re actually animating a walk cycle in four frames, and in each panel we use one of our animation frames.  Doing this means when the reader’s eyes scan across our row of panels, from left to right, it will read each figure in sequence and their brain will fill in the gaps between panels- as a brain is wont to do- and animate the four panels inside the reader’s own mind!  Like magic!  This is also useful if you spin the camera around or just draw anyone walking through multiple panels; by using an animation sequence in your illustrations you give these separate panels a sense of motion basically for free.

The animation-cycle-as-panel sequence isn’t a trick that’s limited to single-character sequences, however, this eye-scan interpretation can be used for multiple characters!  Sometimes we need to draw a row or a cluster of characters walking together in a group.  Soldiers march in lockstep and will often step in sync with one another but ordinary people in a non-regimented context would look weird if you gave them all the same walk pose, but if we use our animation-cycle trick in one panel with a group or cluster we can make magic happen! (B II).  Here we can see a group of four totally different people walking together in one frame, but their individual walk cycle states link in the same sequence we see in our individual above them!  One panel or four, the same character or many, our brain scans from left to right and assembles our animation sequence in the reader’s imagination, regardless of our aesthetic trappings! The brain will always do this every time it sees a page, so at no cost we can hitch a ride on mental mechanisms to make a whole group of figures appear lively and animated just by being mindful of how we position their bodies in sequence from one side of the group to the other!  I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it was like magic.  This sense of motion isn’t limited to walking, either.  We can create a sense of motion in a static pose as well, like a person typing away at a keyboard (B III).  Here, even when our figure is relatively motionless, by varying the position of the fingers within their silhouette from left to right we can create a tappety-tap sense of motion encoded in our illustration!  

In the comic itself I introduced a character who is deaf and communicates in sign language.  This presented a uniquely interesting challenge for me as a cartoonist: how can I capture this character’s expressions without taking a copout route and writing what she’s saying in a word balloon or some other footnote box?  The solution I came up with uses the same eye-scan manipulation trick we’ve been talking about here, as illustrated there (B IV).  I came up with a system where I would research what she’s saying, draw the different hand expressions in a sequence that they eye can scan and read and layer them so it was even clearer which order and direction the hands were moving in.  In the sample expression we have a “3, 2, 1, go” hand gesture arranged in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to mix up the order due to the hard-wired way in which we scan and read a page!  All of Donna’s sign language is authentic ASL, by the way.  I understand not every reader can read sign but if you can, the meaning should parse clear as day.

When I started this article I mentioned that I love to draw fights and that motion is a condensation of what happened, what is happening and what’s about to happen, and these two thoughts go together like peanut butter and chocolate.  When we capture a fight we want our hits to be impactful, so to achieve this effect we need to do a bit of exaggeration in the moments of time we’re capturing.  Assume we’re in a fistfight: a strike that lands right on another character’s face doesn’t have a lot of oomph to it (D I).  The fist has made contact with a chin and the chin is lifted a little bit; this would technically be the snapshot moment where Pain happens in the participant being punched, but if we simply draw that moment we don’t have any energy.  So what we can do instead is instead of just punching a face, we can punch THROUGH the face (D II).  Here we have a much more forceful blow!  Instead of capturing the moment of impact we can describe the entire strike by focusing on the moment -after- the impact and arranging our subjects in a way that describes what happened before and during the impact.  The after-moment is a very certain point; a before-moment has too much potential to be a sure shot and the during-moment is too specific to be forceful, but rooting it in the after lets us catch it all.  Here we have a stiff uppercut, where the victim’s chin is lifted up with the blow and a bit of spittle captures the motion of the punch.  The attacker’s body has a consistent line of action up and into their fist so their entire body tells the reader where it was and where it meant to go.  By using this principle of punching through the subject we can land a lot of different strikes from different angles and make them all feel impactful (D III).  As important as it is to draw the attacker’s body describing the line of attack it’s also important to consider the victim’s pose as well, since the two together are needed to convey the impact of an attack motion!  Think of the way the body twists, whether its to deliver full torque and power to an attacking limb or how the body unexpectedly twists or bends with the impact of a strike.  Our lines should show direction; don’t be afraid to stretch, overtwist or exaggerate here, since that will just make the movement all the more weighty and big.  But no matter what you do, remember:  punch THROUGH the target, not onto them!

There are a lot more ways in which motion plays a part in a comic, but since I’m primarily an action-drawing person I wanted to focus on the fundamentals of action movement.  It takes a lot of practice to develop a sense of body weight, articulation and force, but once you get the hang of it you can inject tons of life into everything you draw by expanding our window of perceived time to capture moments, not simply snapshots.

Thanks for reading!