SerpentineLupine

A long ass beginner level tutorial for all of you comic folks who want to start using sketchup for your backgrounds but don’t know how to get started.

“Symbiosis” will in the future be available as signed and numbered limited edition of prints. It will be run of 300 with no reprints.

Quick question ovid

which brings me to my question: how would you say your characters carry themselves in action scenes? alinua in particular intrigues me as shes the only gang member who i imagine is in no way accustomed to getting in fights

Good call! Alinua does not have the muscle memory for combat. She mostly stands like she's poised to run.

She usually curls up, shrinks away from things, tucks in her arms - she's almost never expecting a fight. And when she commits to combat she doesn't usually enter any kind of fighting stance, she just plants herself in one place, opens up her arms more and focuses entirely on offense instead of defense.

Erin is the other token non-combat combatant, and his body language is rather different. At his most extreme, he's almost like a dancer or a conductor for an orchestra, engaging his whole body in big sweeping motions as he reshapes the battlefield around him.

Similar to Alinua, he's rarely expecting a full-on fight, and will sometimes carry himself like he isn't in combat - but where Alinua becomes more physically confident when she commits to the fight, Erin is more confident when he's controlling the situation and doesn't feel mired in the combat. If he has to actually fight, something's wrong. In the above example he's purposefully drawing attention to himself to buy Alinua time. In more standard situations, he distinguishes himself by not showing any effort or perturbation.

To him it's like a game, and he's making the right moves to win.

When things go south, however, that attitude tends to crumble. He doesn't really know how to handle close-range threats in any practiced or calculated way, and has a tendency to respond to them with borderline self-destructive panic-moves just to get them away from him.

And he tends to lightly toast Falst in the process. Speaking of whom, Falst is the physical opposite. He is pretty much always ready for a fight. He's a big ball of tension 24/7. Even when he's not actively in a fight he's coiled like a spring, shoulders tense, knees bent. He's always ready to jump, run or throw a punch.

Falst is almost always hunched over, and if he's expecting any sort of fight he keeps his arms up to protect his face and chest.

It's pretty rare to see him standing in any sort of straight-limbed pose, and he shifts into defensive positions pretty readily.

He keeps his limbs free and open and is pretty much always ready to lash out or run in any given direction. The worse he’s feeling about a situation, the more he hunches his shoulders and torso, approaching an almost animalistic crouch.

Kendal’s another point of contrast. Unlike Falst, who is a grab bag of combat skills, Kendal’s one thing is Use Sword On Problem. If he’s willingly not using the sword, he doesn’t consider the situation to be a fight.

He uses clear, precise motions to accomplish his goals - no wasted energy if he can help it. He becomes more focused when upset, but will always default to talking first - if there’s ever an opportunity to defuse the combat with words, he’ll try taking it. It takes a lot to convince him that fully won’t work, and when it does happen he tends to get a little scary.

Most of Kendal’s proper combat is, unsurprisingly, centered on the sword. He’ll follow the line or curve of its movement with his whole body.

Behind it all, there’s a certain easy elegance to the way Kendal typically moves. Even if he’s kind of on the ropes there’s a grace and confidence to how he carries himself.

Tess’s defining posing is centered on her shoulders, like Falst, but hers is almost the exact opposite to him. Tess’s shoulders are always back and open, like she just finished a really good stretch.

She’s just having a good time. It’s a combat stance - she’s ready to fight - but there’s no fear in it. She plants into a solid stance and waits for things to try and hit her.

Dainix is unique among the posse because he is physically a basically normal person like Alinua and Erin, but he’s also got actual combat training. He can’t tank the kinds of hits that Falst, Kendal and Tess are prepared for, so his combat posing tends to highlight mobility and speed. He also can’t jump crazy high, so he has to dodge attacks by going low or sideways - he can’t pull a Falst and just fully flip over the bad guy.

He uses weapons and armor for their actual intended purpose - blocking attacks and dealing damage. He can’t afford to showboat or approach combat in a casual, chill way - he’s fragile in a way the other heavy hitters aren’t.

Staff and spear combat is pretty close to second nature to him at this point. Even while deteriorating, the muscle memory still carries him through a lot of the fight.

Of course when he’s not in the throes of indescribable soul-burning fury he’s a pretty tactical guy. He’s got a lot of training and he knows how to use it, including how to deal with people during a crisis.

And he thinks about his surroundings and allies more than the rest of the gang does. He’s not a lone warrior by nature - he’s accustomed to fighting alongside other similarly-trained people. So he worries about tactical considerations the rest of the gang might not think about right off the bat, like “I’m going to try to stop that guy from getting more injured when he hits the ground.”

kitsune oc

The number one thing I got from gymnastics was a pretty intense awareness of proprioception - the full sense of one's body's position in space. I didn't realize this was unusual for a while, but an artist friend of mine once asked me how I do posing in my art without reference photos and I told him I just felt how the pose would feel and worked from there. He responded with immense confusion, and I began to realize that this skill might be more valuable than I'd thought.

My gymnastic focus was mostly on tumbling and uneven and parallel bars. This gave me a pretty solid understanding of how a body can move when it's in contact with the ground and how it can move when it's hanging from something. It also gave me a feel for what exaggerations made sense - Falst and Kendal are much stronger than me, which means they can move themselves in ways that are prohibitively difficult for ordinary humans restricted by their strength vs their weight. Maneuvers I couldn't pull off or couldn't push as far as I wanted would be doable if I could sling my own body weight around that much more easily. I knew a couple kids in high school who were absolute powerhouses in gymnastics, and they were both five-foot-nothing and solid muscle. One of them had trained in gymnastics on hardwood floors and kept bouncing a foot and a half off the ground whenever she landed on the springy tumble track because she was used to compensating for a solid impact. The other picked up ring routines the minute he saw them, even the deceptively hard ones like the one where you hold your arms straight horizontal and suspend your whole body weight that way, because he was just that light and that strong pound for pound. Personally, I always preferred routines where I stayed in contact with the ground or the equipment at all times - I had more control, and I didn't really like having to deal with large amounts of air time and potentially getting the twisties midair - but I understood the mechanics behind them.

An awareness of gymnastics changes what movements you think are efficient. I imagine freerunning does something similar when you're considering how to get from point A to point B. Sometimes it's more work to stand up and walk than it is to do a forward roll. Sometimes when you wanna lie down on a couch you dive over the arm and roll into it. Sometimes rather than walking around the outside of your bed you flip sideways into it and roll off the other edge. In contrast, despite how much choreographers love them for the drama, a backflip or back handspring is never more efficient than just walking. It's disorienting, easy to fuck up, and it endangers your skull and spine in a way forward-moving maneuvers rarely do.

So developing a feel for that stuff was absolutely valuable. Even if the characters I choreograph do stuff that's physically impossible for even extremely badass real humans, they're moving in ways I understand and make sense - extensions of realistic movements accounting for their body weight not being a limiting factor on how far or how fast they can push it.

This whole bit is basically "uneven bars, with combat."

This one's an old classic where I actually might've undersold the implied movement. The easiest way for Kendal to get up from panel 3 is to continue the backwards roll and come up that way, but I didn't include any intermediate frames to show that's what he did. It doesn't break the flow, it just could've been more clear.

Falst is the character that typically pushes this the furthest. He messes around more than the others. Falst is where I put the little voice in my head that says "pst. we could totally climb that" when I'm trying to function in public.

And of course the number one helpful consequence of gymnastics training is I can make my own reference photos if I really need them. It's rare, but sometimes a movement is too complicated for me to work out from scratch. Even if the pose will end up very stylized and exaggerated to communicate the movement, it's still good to be able to be able to see the thing flat out. I was storyboarding a scene in a future chapter where I needed someone to do a diving shoulder-roll, so I recorded myself doing a non-diving version a few times (not onto a hardwood floor, that's for darn sure) to get the basics of the movement down.

from a physics perspective, that means all the force he’s applying is concentrated at the point of contact between his sword’s edge and the target, and it moves at just the speed that breakage propogates through the material. too slow and it wouldn’t have enough force; too fast and he’d get ahead of the break, shoving the target over instead of cutting it.