The same concepts that apply to individual drawings can also be used in actions - the differences between separate poses. Some differences are subtle, others are more dramatic. You need a variety of differences between successive poses in order to give focus and pacing to the different ideas you want to convey through the characters.

BTW, look how little space in the head that the face actually occupies. Most of your head is empty space. Mine too.

Both Post and Fitzgerald are good at drawing clear silhouettes. The difference?
Post's 2 characters are on one flat plane lined up right behind each other - which is not a criticism, just an observation.
In Fitzgerald's sillo, each character is

1) in a different pose,
2) is positioned at a slightly different distance from our viewpoint and
3) each inhabits all 3 dimensions.
4) Parts of them come towards camera, parts recede,
5) parts radiate all around the bodies. That's extra impressive to pull off in just silhouettes.

Owen Fitzgerald was a multi-dimensional cartoonist. He also had a great style-but the style was merely the final polish on top of a lot of knowledge and skill.

Roberto asked in a comment if it's ok to cheat because most good artists do cheat.

Yes it's ok to cheat - knowingly. On Purpose.

But there is no substitute for knowledge and skill. The more you know, and the more deft your hand-eye-brain control is, the more control you have over what you want to say with your drawings. How many times have you had an exciting idea in your head and then ran to your drawing board to draw it - but gave up after a half hour of struggling because you couldn't draw the thing the way you imagined it? How frustrating is that?

If you can only draw a head from one position, or just one position of a flat hand - that really limits what you can do.

The younger you are, the more important it is to learn as many principles and skills as you can. You can develop style later, after your ability to learn new things slows down.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-1-construction.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-2-squash-and.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-3-how-to-check.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-lesson-4-2-legged-characters.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-5-line-of.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-lesson-hands.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-lesson-6-construction.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-7-when-generic-is.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-8-proportions-affect.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/animation-school-lesson-9-_116873606139658339.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/animation-school-lesson-9a-tom-and.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/03/animation-school-lesson-10-copy-old.html

Drawing principles is not easy. There are so many to balance at once. I ask students to copy good drawings from old cartoons or from good comics just to see how pro artists use principles.
The next step is for the student to try drawing those characters in their own poses to see if they can apply those principles themselves.


Here, Geneva tried her hand at doing some poses of Tom. My critique was that they were good construction but didn't have clear silhouettes.I said to use negative spaces to make the poses read better and she redid them like this:

Now they are much better because you can read them more clearly. So construction is very important, but it is just step 1 to being able to control your posing.

See how Harvey Eisenberg does it:

http://comicrazys.com/2009/08/10/red-rabbit-red-rabbit-comics-1-1947-harvey-eisenberg/
This cover is a masterfully controlled collection of drawing principles all in perfect balance and clarity. Everything is solidly constructed and there are negative spaces separating each visual element - making them all read at once.

One of the things I like about this style of animation is how direct it is.
Unlike some Disney animation, the story actions aren't buried under a mountain of extraneous secondary animation principles - like too much squash and stretch, too much non-stop action, too much overlap etc.
You can see all these poses clearly and each pose and action carries us through the story without distraction.



Not every part of the character is moving an equal amount, so we know what we are supposed to be looking at.
In some "full-animation" the characters never stop moving and each part of the body moves as much as the rest at all times. Toby Tortoise stands out as a very direct cartoony Disney cartoon. Maybe it was an experiment, who knows?
A lot of the actions are funny in themselves. They aren't moving just for the sake of being "full-animation" or to show off the budget.






















http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Dis/36/TobyTortoise/3fight2AssWhupping.mov

The posts on staging so far have had to do with the storyboard and layout artists' jobs. The big picture of each scene - composing the background and characters together.





The ingredients of a good Silhouette are :

LINE OF ACTION:



The general overall pose of the the character tells you the direction of the character which in turn can tell you many other things-his attitude, what he is doing, which character is leading the action...

NEGATIVE SHAPES:



The negative shapes within your pose tell you what the character is doing.

HIERARCHY OF DIRECTION:



Some part of your pose is more important than the rest of the pose. Maybe a character is pointing. Then you have to make that part of your sillo more obvious than the rest of the body. Draw attention to it.


Don't distract from the pointing by having other parts of the body stick out of the silhouette as much as or more than the pointing action. Have the rest of the body being pulled along by whichever part is causing the action.



When everything is moving all the time, it becomes hard to tell what is happening. You can see this problem in many late 30s cartoons, when animators were outdoing each other by having the characters constantly change shape and each part of the body had secondary actions, overlapping action, tons of squash and all the animation tools happening all the time and competing with each other for attention. Watch some "Captain and The Kids".

By the 40s, most top animators learned that good clear poses were more effective in selling a story than constant random motion.

Strong and obvious lines of action and silhouettes were very popular and expertly done in the 1940s.

40s cartoons based the entertainment more on action, while 50s began focusing more on dialogue and design.


By the 50s, many animators began toning down their lines of action and bold silhouettes. They didn't abandon them completely, just made them more subtle.

Brilliant 50s Jones design- full of classic principles and tricky contrasts.

The more "modern" character designs tended to have more straight lines and angles, so it naturally makes an animator tend towards less obviously rounded organic posing.
Characters tended to stand up straight more. These Harvey Eisenberg 60s comics still have all the classic drawing principles evident, but the balance of them has changed. The poses are less obvious, but still very clear.


As the good animators toned down their principles, new animators came into the business who didn't understand them at all and couldn't see the subtleties in the more experienced animators' work. This led quickly to the disappearance almost altogether of lines of action and clear silhouettes.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/upa-vs-wally-5-upa-bred-worse.html


Now and then, someone will write in the comments that young artists don't need tools. They just need their own God-given creativity and their beautiful natural-born styles. They needn't hamper themselves with knowledge and techniques that were learned through trial and error by experts over decades. The young genius artist wants to start from scratch and make all the same mistakes that thousands of more talented artists had long ago learned to correct.

Every artist of course has the right to do whatever he wants. Every builder does too. You could poopoo hammers as cramping your creativity and try to punch nails into wood as you attempt to build a house in a completely new way without even a plan. It's not against the law or anything. - But good luck in ever finishing it or having it stand up by itself.

But it eludes my reasoning why anyone would want to choose to have absolutely no control over their finished products. Skills, practice, knowledge and tools put you way ahead of your competitors.

You have a much wider freedom of creative choices if you understand the basic tools of your trade.

Being able to clearly and creatively stage your poses, makes you more capable of getting your audience to feel and see what YOU want them to see. Posing is one of many important tools that gives you more control.

To rebel against tried and true effective tools when you have never been able to handle them yourself in the first place seems very self-defeating to me.

It's one thing if you are Picasso or John Hubley and you want to veer off into abstraction, but it's not the same thing for a smelly little graffiti artist who just can't draw but wants you to believe he has a unique style.