Hi all :)

Today I played a tiny bit more with colours (the carpet is now purple) and added and posed some figures. So I thought that I would tell you my philosophy about posing figures. It is based upon my little bit of experience in amateur theatre. You see, back in the 1980s I had this cunning plan to meet girls. The plan involved being one of a small number of males amidst a much larger group of females. The obvious place was amateur theatre groups. So here are a few pictures from those days:

In the top picture I am the guy at front of stage in the white pants. Below in Godspell I am the bloke in pink overalls behind Jesus (the clown figure). I must admit, I loved acting. Turned out that I was quite the ham. Interestingly enough, I did not get a single date from doing this. LOL

So what did I learn from four years of acting. Well, the major thing was that actions and cues need to be exaggerated. One example is the old back of hand to the forehead and a slight backward lean to the head to suggest sorrow. Or the shaking fist to suggest anger. To really understand, try going to YouTube and looking at some old silent movies. They had the problem of having to display emotions without sound.

OK. So you see what I mean. This makes everything clear for the audience. It’s not like television, they cannot see a close up of the actors face. So the body language is really important.

I try to do that in my digital art. Exaggerate body stances.

This said (and given that I am writing this at 1am) here is my first attempt at posing the figures in my scene. I’ve had to shrink it quite a bit to fit it in this blog, and I must admit that as a smaller picture the poses lose their impact. Damn! Nevertheless I hope that you can see what I mean.

I need to sleep on it and decide whether or not I am happy. If I am, then the next step is post-production in Photoshop or Paint.NET or GIMP (whichever the muse calls me to).

Thanks again for reading. :)