From the Action Pages: Rising out of Dreams

Let's kick things off in 2012 with a brand new segment of Pachi's Portrait: From the Action Pages! In these segments, I will showcase action scenes from my story exclusively. I won't be revealing the CONTEXT of these scenes, but I will give the usual linear notes as well as how I approach action drawings. These are meant to be set up as actual pages of a Japanese manga, so please forgive the crudely put-together "book" image I made here. I will do my best to improve that in later installments. I'm also trying out some new title images for sections of my posts to make things here a little more unique over just plain text. Let me know what you think!

As I said in my previous post, "The Assault Unseen", action scenes are probably one of my favorite types of drawings, just after profiles and portraits. But they are much, much harder to pull off than the latter. Many artists in the same vein as me will probably tell you, creating the illusion of movement with a medium that cannot show movement by definition is a massive stumbling block. Without the proper skill, a character throwing a punch may instead appear to be the character awkwardly holding their arm out before them. Based on my limited experience, there are two prime rules you can follow that should help make a drawing in motion convey its motion properly.

One: The more realistic the positioning of the body, the more believable the "movement" will be. By "realistic", I don't mean that it has to be a common pose. But no matter what pose your character is in, it's important to properly scale body parts in respect to each other. I have found in the past that if the legs are not realistically proportionate to the arms, they won't look like they're of the same body, and that instantly kills the motion.

Two: Use the medium and tools at your disposal to assist the illusion of movement. Sometimes it's just the little touches that can alter the intent of a drawing. Try using other drawing techniques to convey the character's movements. Making the character's outline sketchy and less defined, for example, often makes it look like they are moving from or in the process of moving into their current position. Adding "speed lines" into the background is also extremely helpful for showing the direction and intent of a motion. I used both of these techniques in varying degrees on today's sketch, so hopefully you can see what I mean. The techniques I'm describing here are slightly more geared towards manga-style action, but I believe they can be applied to other styles as well. I'm sure a more legit artist will give you more and better advice on this topic, but for what it's worth, that was my two cents.

Once again we have Sei, looking pissed off. He gets pissed off a lot, huh? In this key scene, Seikun is rising into the sky during a fierce battle for his life, using a special ability to propel himself there. This sketch was more an experiment in smoke than anything. In fact, I'm positive I went overboard with the smoke. He's supposed to be rising from a lower area with a lot of dirt/dust, but it looks more like he's dashing out of an explosion. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it's not what I intended. This was also my first time drawing a large quantity of smoke, so I tried to get creative with the layout and shading. I'm really not happy with it, but oh well. A lot of this sketch is really sloppy, but it was fun to draw. The tendrils circling Sei were a last minute touch.

The large symbols in the background are Japanese katakana characters - being used as sound effects, like in a regular manga. Here the characters say, "Goaaa~", which I've read is a sound effect used for dust settling after an explosion/unsettling motion (though I would not be shocked if it was wrong). It was the closest effect I could think of that fit the time frame of the scene in this sketch. I also tried to convey movement in the drawing of the sound effects themselves, to further establish the movement of the scene.