Sitting and Standing Pose Reference: What to Study

What to look for in sitting and standing pose reference: weight, hips and sit bones, plus a 20-minute drill. For figure and character artists.

Good sitting and standing pose reference shows where the weight goes. A standing figure puts most of its weight on one leg and tilts the hips against the shoulders. A seated figure rests on the two sit bones of the pelvis, and everything else hangs from that base. Study those two facts before you study style.

What should you look for in standing pose reference?

Look for the leg carrying the weight. In a relaxed stance most weight rests on one leg, the other leg stays loose, and the shoulders twist off-axis from the hips. Art historians call this contrapposto, and the earliest known example is the Greek Kritios Boy , made around 480 BCE ( Wikipedia: Contrapposto ).

The practical check is the tilt. If one hip rides higher, the opposite shoulder usually drops. When you copy a standing reference, draw one line through the hips and one through the shoulders first. If the two lines are parallel, the figure will read as stiff, however well the outline is drawn.

Three things to note on every standing photo:

Which foot is under the head. That is usually the engaged leg, the one carrying the weight.

Which knee is softer. The free leg bends slightly and often turns outward.

Where the ribcage sits against the pelvis. The torso compresses on the side of the engaged leg and stretches on the other.

What should you look for in sitting pose reference?

Look for the base. When we sit, the weight rests on the ischial tuberosities, the two bony points of the pelvis commonly called sit bones ( Wikipedia: Ischial tuberosity ). Find those two points in a seated photo and the rest of the pose becomes easier to place.

From that base, check four things:

Pelvis angle. A figure sitting upright has the pelvis near level. A figure slouching rolls it backward, and the spine curves to match.

Thigh direction. Thighs pointing toward the camera are foreshortened and look much shorter than they are. Draw them as cylinders first. Our guide to foreshortening reference for artists shows the method on an arm, and the same logic applies to a thigh.

Contact points. Note exactly where the body touches the chair, floor or wall. Those contact points flatten the soft tissue and give the figure its weight.

The surface itself. A chair back, an armrest or a stool changes the whole line of the pose. Draw the seat as a simple box so the figure has something to sit on.

Why do sitting poses look floaty, and how do you fix it?

Published 2026-10-04 on the Refimages blog.