Rhythm, Tilt, and Twist: An Animators Guide to Dynamic Drawing

Hello! Xena here! This week I’m here to write about one of my favorite lesser known artistic principles.

There have been only a few moments in my artistic development where a concept has instantly hit me and changed how I approach drawing forever. My introduction to Rhythm, Tilt, and Twist was one of those moments. They are the secret to creating poses that feel dynamic, organic, and whole. If a pose you’ve drawn looks bad or stiff, a lack of rhythm, tilt, or twist is often to blame.

The concept comes from legendary animator Glen Keane, who apparently learnt it from the nine old men themselves- some of the founding fathers of the art of animation. A common trait amongst older animators is that they did not study to become animators, instead, they were trained as fine artists, figuring out how to animate from their classically educated foundation. As such, these principles are useful to breathe life into still images, as well as animated ones.

In order to work in an ascending level of simplicity, I’m going to cover the principles out of order. I’ve also included a variety of examples. I’ve pulled from Glen Keane’s own work, classic art pieces, some work from fellow art nerds, and a few of my own exercises to model the principles myself!

TILT:

To put on my nerd hat for a second, the concept of adding tilt in art is one of the most foundational changes in art history. It’s a core feature of the ‘contrapposto pose,’ where a figure stands with their weight on one leg, immediately making the pose feel natural and dynamic. As a result of the stand, the figures hips are tilted, and in order to keep balance, the shoulders tilt the opposite way.

But tilt isn’t just limited to shoulders and hips. Contra tilting the head and shoulders is also very common, in tandem with the hips it creates a fun Z effect to the whole pose. And don’t forget about the third dimension! Tilt can also come from tilting the torso forward and the head and hips back, or the other way round! There are loads of ways to play with it!

TWIST:

Twist is a great way not just to make your character feel in motion, but to convey their depth. If your drawing feels flat, give it some twist! Suddenly your character is moving in a 3D space, and their body is twisting in a 3D space!

It’s also great to make a character feel alive. When we move, we’re very rarely facing the same direction all over. Even walking in one direction, our hips and chest twist from side to side. A subtle example is a character tilting their head one way and looking off to the side, an exaggerated example is a character twisting around to see what’s behind them!

RHYTHM:

Out of the three principles, Rhythm is by far the most amorphous and hard to describe. It is how each part of a drawing flows into the next. If you’re familiar with the concept of a line of action, that’s a good conceptual starting place. Rather than just focusing on the flow in the direction of the line, we focus on the picture as a whole- does each line flow into the next? Another way you might already be thinking about rhythm is composition, the way how you place pieces of an illustration can draw the eye across the illustration in different ways. In a great drawing, every part flows together like a river, each individual twist and turn making up an organic natural whole.

Unlike tilt and twist, rhythm isn’t really something you can check off a box, its much more of a skill that gets better with practice. But it’s a great principle to keep in mind in order to keep an eye on the big picture of your drawing, especially when refining from a sketch. Often times when I find my neat line art looks way worse than my sketch, it’s because I was spending all my energy making sure things looked neat, or anatomically correct, and I neglected to make sure my final lines had rhythm.