and in this video we're going to be drawing a fighting scene

and I'm going to show you the principles I use

when I'm composing a scene of two characters fighting.

So I started off drawing a rectangle, that's going to be the frame of our scene

I'm going to start off with dividing the paper into thirds,

or this frame into thirds,

and I'm going to draw one of our characters on the right third

the idea with this scene is going to be

one character is going to be leaping at the other,

kind of, catching him off guard and it's going to be an up-shot

so if you saw the video of drawing characters in perspective in an up-shot,

you'll see some of the tips and techniques that we used in that video.

So I'm starting with the head,

and tilting the shoulders slightly, curving it because it's an up-shot

and here we have the general guideline for the up-shot.

Remember, it gets more narrow towards the top.

Using simple shapes, not focusing on details,

this stage of the drawing is all about finding the pose

and the best way to do that is to use simple shapes

I have the head torso and hips

the head is going to be much smaller than normal

and the hips are going to be much bigger than normal

below the hips I draw the legs

and you can already see the angle that I'm after

he's slightly tilted and those horizontal lines

of the shoulders and the waist are curved

like sad faces because it's an up-shot.

So next I'm going to draw the shoulder that is closest to us

with a curve and normally the elbow, which I'm going to

draw with a circle, normally it's at the bottom

off the rib cage

but I'm going to draw it slightly higher for this view

because of the perspective.

And for the elbow I just use a circle, very simple.

And now coming out at an angle,

I'm going to draw the forearm, just two lines

really easy

and for the hand, it's going to be a square

or a rectangle and he's going to be holding a sword

and so I'm going to draw the hilt

and the sword's going to be angled towards the upper left.

I'm not even worried about what kind of sword this is

or what the details of it are

I'm just worrying about the position

and that's all I'm focused on, is the position.

to make things easy, oh,

first I'm drawing in his other arm

again, circle for the elbow

and getting more narrow as we head towards the wrist

because this arm is going away from us.

And just like in my videos on hands,

I just try to find the palm shape first

and I'm just placing that for the hand.

For his head, I'm going to erase it and

redraw it because I want to make sure that the head is

smaller than normal so we have that perspective going for us.

And I also want to point out that

his left arm, the top part of the arm is

shorter than the forearm

on the other side, it's the opposite

the forearm is smaller, shorter length

than the top part of the arm.

So now for the other character,

I'm going to draw him on the other third at an angle

and for this scene to have a dynamic feel,

I want to create depth, so this character

is going to be smaller

and I drew his head and tilted his shoulders.

He's also going to be viewed in an up-shot

so just like the first character,

I'm going to draw in his shoulder.

This time, I'm going to use a big circle for his shouler.

Zoom in a little big so you guys can see it

And he's going to be mid swing so

he's going to be coming out all epic-like, mid swing

so his arm is going to be coming across his body

using a circle for his elbow,

and now his forearm and a square

for his hand that is grabbing the sword.

So now I'm going to place the sword,

just like the other character, thinking about

the angle that I want it to have.

And I'm leaving room for the other fist

which I'm going to place with another square

right there, and for that arm you just draw it

behind the first arm, down to the elbow

and coming back up towards the shoulder.

so after this we'll move on to drawing the legs.

The idea for this guy is that he's going to be

leaping at this guy in the foreground

kind of like, surprising him or something.

So I'm drawing his legs behind that sword

down to his knee.

Since he's leaping, his lower leg is going to be...

you're not going to see it so it's just his knee

and then another shape for his foot

and then his other leg is going to go behind the sword

down to his knee

and then, just to vary it a little bit,

you're going to see some of his lower leg,

right there, and below that is his foot.

This stage of the drawing is all about using

these simple shapes, right?

really easy geometric shapes, circles for joints

and what I like about it is

it's vary easy to erase and find new poses

and you haven't really invested a lot of time

into the drawing

Imagine if you spent maybe ten minutes

or twenty minutes drawing an arm

and it's looking great and there's a lot of

detail in it but you continue your drawing

and you realize that, hey, maybe this position isn't right.

and you want to change it but there's a part of you

that's like, "Man, I spent so long on that drawing..."

and it's almost a lose-lose situation.

The pose isn't strong, in your mind, but you don't want to change it.

But with this method that I often do, I use simple shapes

and I haven't invested a lot of time in it

and there's no detail so I'm not really worried about erasing.

so when I'm searching for the pose, like I'm doing here,

it's not really heartbreaking to erase it.

so here I'm trying to find the correct angle of the sword

and just to capture that feeling of-- he's in mid motion.

It's just a square and two lines for each forearm

and I just keep erasing it, keep changing the angle of the forearm

and the sword, until I find the correct position.

and the same thing goes for the legs.

It's maybe circles for the knees,

you can see that I'm just trying to find the angle

and it's really easy to redraw

and so this drawing [laughs], I really had to struggle

with this sword arm for this guy, and it's really frustrating

and a struggle some times but don't settle for something

when you know it's not working because

you may think that adding detail will save the drawing but

the pose is really the most important thing,

and so here I realize that it starts to feel better

when the arms or at least the fists are further away

from his head so it feels like he's swinging

and the feeling is what I was after.

So I'm pretty happy with this position and now

I'm going to zoom out and you guys can see

the shot, the scene that we have, and even with

just simple shapes and anatomy, the scene has,

in my mind, captured that feeling that I was after

of an up-shot, we have depth between the front guy

and the back guy and the guy in the back

is in mid motion of his swing.

So what I'm doing now is [laughs]

I'm erasing everything and starting all over, no,

what I'm doing now is I'm using my kneaded eraser

and I'm just gently erasing the hard lines

so that what I have left on the paper is what I like to call

"the ghost of an image"

What this does now is it gives me a solid foundation

for the next stage which is going to be

adding in all the detail.

So now I'm going to into a timelapse and I'm just going

to be adding in armor for both of these characters

and I guess what I wanted to talk about was

just the concept of drawing in different stages

and this is something that I learned in college

that I hadn't done prior to school

and so the first stage that we did was, remember,

it was just about finding the pose

we don't think about detail, we just think about simple shapes

and the position of characters

Often, I like to think of it like we're directors for a movie

and our characters are the actors and we're telling them

"okay, maybe you stand there or when you swing, swing like this,

or maybe stand more to the right or more towards the left

or closer or farther"

and we're constantly moving the character around

until we have that framing and positions of characters that we want.

At that point, we don't really want to be thinking about detail

because the details, they don't... I mean they matter

but at that stage they don't matter.

What matters is finding that pose and that camera angle

that's going to give you that feeling that you're after

And then once you add in all the detail, it's like icing on the cake

and you have a strong pose to back everything up.

So that's what I'm doing in this stage... I'm sort of...

I did a video for Evan at the CartoonBlock and in it

I was sort of talking about these concepts and I said that

once you reach this stage, the second stage where you

add in all the details, it's like you're chilling

and it's like smooth sailing because you can turn off

that part of your brain that is worrying about the pose

and you can now focus on all the detail

so when I'm going through the armor here

I'm not really worried about oh, is the arm in the correct position?

and stuff like that because in the last step, the last stage,

I've already decided that, yeah it's working and

I like where it is so I'm just focusing on the armor and the detail.

And this part is really a lot of fun.

You can just focus on drawing texture and detail and

a lot of my inspiration for this armor was from Miyazaki's Nausicaa.

Some of you know Miyazaki. He did Princess Mononoke and Castle in the Sky

and Spirited Away and before he became an animation director

he actually made a manga called Nausicaa and it's really epic

It's super epic, quite brutal too but it's amazing.

And so I've been reading that recently

and I'm getting a lot of my inspiration from the armor

that he drew in that series.

So this guy near to us, I'm thinking more like...

He's more barbaric. He's got sort of a samurai inspired armor and

he's going to be weilding a heavy sword.

And I'm going to try and contrast that with the guy who

has leaped out at him and caught him off guard.

This guy is going to be wrapping up pretty soon

and we'll get drawing on the second guy.

But what I like about Miyazaki's manga is he uses

a lot of cross-hatching and a lot of texture in his drawing

that I don't really see nowadays but when I work on my own story

and my own manga, those are the things that I'm going to want to try and add.

So now I'm working on the guy who is leaping out

at the first character and I'm thinking that he's going to be...

I'm trying to make his armor different than the guy in the front

so he has your typical knight armor but I'm going to give him

a breast plate and on the breast plate I'm going to give him

some kind of insignia, like maybe it's an eagle or a dragon

and then I thought, maybe I'll give him dragonscale armor

which would be very different than the front guy and

maybe kind of cool. So I'm having fun just drawing in all the detail

and when I get to his face, I wanted to mention that recently I had a request