Avoiding common mistakes

Creating a convincing pose is a matter of caring for small details. It is a painstaking job of making subtle adjustments. One way of identifying those adjustments is to use a human reference and study each element of the body accurately. Taking photos of ourselves with a camera phone can be a great way of obtaining references for natural poses.

Keep a level head

There are some common pitfalls that can make our pose to look unnatural. The position of the head is one of those. If we take a look at photos of people involved in activities such as surfing, we can see that we humans try to level our head as much as possible. The head just doesn't stick out from the shoulders in a perpendicular fashion. To illustrate this point, let me show you an image of the model with the chest positioned almost at the right angle, but with the head unchanged from the default position.

There is an unnatural stiffness to that head. Just a little bit of rotation and side-to-side bend...