What makes a drawing feel dynamic?

The Dynamic figure

In silverman's class on dynamic characters on schoolism he shows a few ways to break down a pose in order to understand how better to recreate the figure in motion so I decided to take some of the points he was making and apply them to this drawing by Hicham Habachi

One thing he says to look for is swooping motions throughout the drawing that tell you about how things are positioned in space. For example we can use the head, hand, knee and front foot to discover what could be the action line of the pose. Below I have broken the forms down into simple shapes as well as drawn over them in blue to find the lines of action and some other corresponding lines that tell me more about how to reproduce this drawing. Another thing you will notice is that just like in many drawings weve discussed before the shoulders are at a dramatic slant which puts one arm over the other.

This adds the tension of feeling like he is moving forward since the arm that is up is also on the same side as the leg coming forward. A couple of other things we can notice about this drawing is the weapons on his back act as a counterbalance to his forward momentum since their line of action is going opposite direction.

Above I decided to try to recreate the gesture of the pose and I was able to somewhat successfully. I would say there are errors here, for instance the tilt in the hips is too far in my own drawing and of course the shape language is not represented here. But I was still shocked that I could get this close just by first establishing landmarks along the line of action and using those to draw outwards from.

 

Shape language

The triangle is represented strongly in this piece and we can see it closely in the hand of john as he holds the gun the finger shapes are nice and crisp. Throughout the rest of the piece we can feel the convergence of shapes as they move to and from the central point of him holding his gun.For example when we follow the shape of the jacket we immediately see the connection it has in its swooping shape that it becomes an s curve that connects to the figure along his belt which is a really sly move to make with the shape. It feels like it comes out of him and turns the same way his arm turns.

We can see a similar shape convergence on some of the leading lines on the dog. They all have a triangular shape that juts forward and then goes down or "back" into the image. I see back because these arm shapes on the dog are suggested to overlap the feet shapes.