pretty brilliant, awe-inspiring effort :3

What you don't see, but I definitely felt, was all the artistic cobwebs/rust weighing down the whole process of sketching, drawing, re-sketching, re-drawing, re-re-sketching, etc.

I had gestured out four or five poses/variations ahead of time, one of them featuring a really nice visual spiral (flowing from the tip of the tail up the torso to one arm curled in front of the chest, like a fist-pump gesture) but couldn't make it work at full size, and ultimately "this" is what came out. The far hand on hip was adlibbed because I couldn't figure out literally anything else useful to do with it once the near hand was outstretched to hold the fire. And while it's super common to portray the knees and ankles bent (it adds to the digitigrade look), a full stand really requires the entire leg to be kept relatively straight.

And of course, digits (fingers and toes) continue to be "the Dark Souls of" anatomy planning. But that just means I need to go back in with more "git gud".

i don't understand most of this text ^^
what does gestured out and adlibbed mean in this?
i am glad you enjoyed and are enthusiastic about it at least

"Gestured" as in a "gesture sketch", a SUPER quick scrawl done as an aid to know what a given pose will actually look like, without investing too much time/effort into something that may or may not ultimately work out.

"Ad lib" is a performance term (theater/film/etc) meaning something done that wasn't explicitly part of the script. In a broader sense, it means to go off-plan and/or improvise something.

I see ^^ do you have any examples of gesture sketch? I just draw from my head then ink over that for finer detail :3
So ad lib is like improvising, but isn't that the same as scrawling? Or you mean you used references for the rest but the not hand? You felt may be confused about the hand?

Yes (albeit not here on FA -- example)
The purpose of a gesture sketch is to "test" or "prototype" a pose idea as quickly as possible (i.e. minimal time/effort) to determine whether it's worth spending more time and effort on later to compose properly. It necessarily requires you to reduce the figure down to just its essential components and nothing else.

A gesture sketch isn't itself improvised (at least, not necessarily), but can certainly be part of a larger improvisation/scrawl/free-drawing session.

References are always good to use, but not strictly required (depending on how practiced you are with whatever you're doing). In many cases I have enough experience with body composition to sketch out a plausible creature shape from memory alone, but I will definitely hunt up references (photos when possible) when I need extra help with details -- such as what features make that face actually look like a fox (and not, say, a bear/wolf/insert-species-here).

As for the "Dark Souls" mention, that's a game franchise well-known for its punishing (but also totally learnable/exploitable) level of difficulty. As an artist, when you have trouble with something specific (like hands/fingers or feet/toes) you will never really improve on it if you keep avoiding it (e.g. hands in pockets / behind back / otherwise not visible). The only way to, yes, "get good" is to actually give it an attempt, analyze/learn from the results, study/analyze a good reference, and keep trying again until you get at least something right, then build on that with each attempt until, eventually, (after however many attempts) you finally "get it" and it's actually not so hard after all.

So, like a stick figure kind of? I always have some kind of preconception of what's in my head, personally. Surely starting with a stick figure that goes against the qi yun sheng dong principles where life force is clearly defined first? The life force defines the pose, as all beings pose their body in reaction to inner and external events, how one person holds their body can be limited and how it's limited is a complex equation of weight, energy and ability. Usually, you consider the forces and the gait and balance of the figure otherwise a stick figure surely will result in rigidity or generic posing, no? Surely the life force should come first and then the simplification e.g. stick figure involves boning which comes after the qi yun.

I draw the life force and likeness first myself, if I don't know the variables of the life force in my head then surely the improvisation can lead to contradictions or mundaneness. At that point you might as well just copy a performance or model artist as they know how to move their body as the late baroque painters did. But even then, surely the life force and likeness should be the focus.

How would you go from a stick figure to a finished drawing surely you end up using reference anyway if you don't understand the posture?
I'm confused how you go from stick figure to a finished drawing, so I presume you get the life force by patchworking in references? Like iteratively and you have no conception of how it'll look in the end? Isn't that exhausting. Surely it's like juggling?

"The life force defines the pose"
Oh absolutely! That is in fact entirely what you are aiming for when doing gesture sketches -- not just does it "look" "realistic" but does it feel realistic, does it communicate the kind of energy you can see in your head? Yes you can tell, even at this super early, low-investment stage of the process. Part of it is (indeed) because the small scale and lack of details forces your mind to fill in the gaps on its own, but if you can't feel any energy from a stick figure, you're probably not going to feel it at full size either, and that's the whole point of the exercise -- if your concept is going to fail then let it "fail faster" so you can avoid wasting time on something that just isn't going to work out. It's you as an artist telling the idea to "let's just be friends" now, instead of getting engaged, proposing, only for everything to fall apart shortly before (or worse, after) the wedding.

I totally know what it's like to spend a lot of time on a pose only to look back on it when done and it feels ... empty, missing a certain spark or energy or something. Heck, I'd even say it happens literally every time during my drawing process, that I consciously have to work around it.

And it's definitely not just a "me" problem -- even actual, professional industry animators struggle with it too! Just take a look at certain CGI films like The Polar Express or 2019's The Lion King and, while the rendering looks nice on a screenshot/static basis, once you see it in motion, you can't help but immediately feel that something is ... subsconsciously "off" about the results, even if you can't explain precisely what it is.

"How would you go from a stick figure to a finished drawing...?"
1 - Well, first and obviously you gesture it out at full size, with one eye on how it fits the available composition/paper space. The stick figure is essentially (and almost literally!) the "bones" on which the rest of the body rests.
2 - An intermediate step is to establish the character's overall silhouette or contours using simple shapes -- circles, ovals/rectangles, triangles, pairs of lines, etc. (I sometimes call this a "sausage figure" due to the rounded rectangular shapes I use). Just like the initial gesture sketch, this is done quickly and with as little exertion as possible, but keeping a careful eye on whether it still conveys the same feel or "energy" as the original. (Because, again, if you can't see it at this point then stop, go back and find where it got lost)

To pull a few more examples from my dA account:
1 - Okami - link
This was a quick 3x5" sketch and you can see that while it isn't technically a "stick" figure, it is still super light and quick on details and with almost no erasing. The important part is how it establishes the overall contour/silhouette of the character while keeping an orderly, logical underlying body structure. (It was one of several made during a single session, and I marked it with a star to indicate that it probably had the potential to make a full-size drawing of. Even though said drawing never actually happened.)

2 - Dinosaucers - link
I would do these WIP multi-scan montages a lot more back then, than I do now. On the left are the original quick sketches used to test out poses (done in very little time/effort on a trusty 3x5" sketchbook). Immediately to the right you can see which of the poses "won", so I sketched it out very similarly except at the full (9x12"!) page size. From there you can see how I iterated over it, erasing and re-drawing individual portions and segments (often "from scratch") at new positions or angles and gradually adding more levels of detail overall as I go.

And there's no way around the fact that: the overall sense of energy DOES evolve/change as you progress from a quick stick/block figure to a fully detailed result. This is why you have to keep an eye on it during the process, because it won't stay exactly the same forever but you want it to at least feel consistent or approximately "the same" now as then.

Note that the contour/silhouette stage of a drawing applies in ANY media. For example, I did a piece of pixel art once where I saved screenshots approximately every 15 minutes (example) and you can tell that I started with a super ugly sketched-by-mouse silhouette first, then filled in details starting with the most important area first (the face), frequently tweaking and changing things as I made my way down the body. Even learned a few new aesthetic techniques along the way.

i always find the more modern professional animators to be very jarring yet rigid and over-exaggerated without subtlety so it makes sense that they would use very striking stick-figure like poses. i suppose it has its entertainment purposes to the rajasic people since the younger western audiences particularly enjoy nervous stimulation rather than art that owes more to inner bliss or spiritual (e.g. non-verbal) communication. but when it comes to fine art i think the spiritual resonance, the determination and gait of the character is more important than making random active poses. to me it's far more important to capture the subtle personality of a character, their life resonance, their glow in a way that isn't just big-eyes baby type glow, and the slightness of how every person uniquely holds their body or their expression. i feel like modern animators blow that apart by animating extremes and it just feels very unpleasant and unrealistic to me.

like say it's very easy for me to imagine a man or a feral lion pushing a boulder uphill, my empathetic side of my brain can "feel" where the character is putting their centre of weight by sympathising how it must feel, the strain. i don't understand how stick figures can convey the initial willpower, they're not four-dimensional so to speak and seem to only work with side profiles as well. how a stick figure and character visually holds a boulder is very different and stick figures don't seem to consider nor describe the energy of the weight shifts unlike the feng shui of qi that builds force in ripples and resistance. traditional greek, chinese and italian classicists and animators used qi yun to an extent but only in their golden ages, to me those are the best. they drew in masses and never stick figures, also you get the "wind stalk" effect when you start to impose the masses onto the stick figure. it's better to visualise and craft the force than the idea you can just think in your head. that said stick figures may be useful sometimes in getting the order of posture right in a side profile sequence since visualising motion and timing can be more difficult, right?

for (1) isn't it straining to compensate the proportions along a line? how would you handle this if the line receded in space. surely in perspective it's easier to control and coordinate the volumetric silhouette? and isn't it better to cohesively design the volume of the character than search for it with sketchy lines? surely this can devolve the form and the proportions, especially with paper.
and as with (2) doesn't this devoid the graphical composition surely the masses should adhere to the envelope of the figure rather than construct it, "sausage" sounds like an antipattern as it sounds like not how real volumes are.

i mean the subdividing in your dinosaucers examples makes sense, but at the same time, this feels like it's very limited to specific shapes and style, since using that method would only be powerful if you wanted a subdivided appearance. if you wanted something more abstract and fine the outer envelope would flatten because you wouldn't be able to rely on the subdivisions to describe the form. but it's interesting how you don't show the stick figure in these two examples. i tend to go more graphical and make the overall masses a single volume using the laws of closure rather than breaking them into separate forms at every part as wood-like carving of every form like the romanticists often did seems to stiffen the appearance of non-human e.g. fuzzy or more convex characters. so it's a case by case need i guess. i try to make sure my lines are aesthetic, even if loose from the get go i think this makes for the old age adage that "a good drawing/painting looks finished with every new stroke" that way i don't feel forced to "fill in" seemingly incomplete parts rendering my work unfinished if i take a break. eastern painting is like that, it's finished at the point the artist gets bored of the work, but that doesn't appeal to consumerists perhaps, only to hobbyists like me.

I am not exactly good at discussing art theory (especially ones that are deeply entrenched to specific cultures) but I think we actually agree on a lot of underlying points here. One of the big ones is that effective expression relies relies on subtle details that are just not easy to learn (let alone express). Indeed, while it is easy to imagine a simple motion (like waving a hello with one arm) as being isolated to the part directly involved, in reality it does subtly affect the rest of the body in some way, so in art, that needs to be expressed/represented too.

"isn't it straining to compensate the proportions along a line? how would you handle this if the line receded in space."
Well, for one the guide "lines" are only just "guidelines" (to use some wordplay) not actual "rules" you need to be following to the letter. One popular adage (which I don't know the origin of) is "you must learn the rules like a master before you can break them like an artist", in that the rules we think we're taught tend to focus on the process of it, and it's so easy to get caught up in that that you lose sight of the larger picture, the end goals you're trying to achieve.
Two, there's a technical term for rendering objects that logically recede/protrude relative to the direction of the viewer (i.e. "toward" or "away"): foreshortening. There's no way around the fact that this is a difficult thing to learn, requiring a sense of how objects work in a 3D space and a heck of a lot more practice. And I actually didn't really understand this myself until the PS1 era: those early 3D games with sharp-edged low-polygon models were SUPER easy to observe the specific motions of, and it took basically only one game (Spyro the Dragon) for me to learn how to represent logically-3D shapes on a 2D canvas from almost any angle. Sure, my early drawings weren't so much to look at compared to my drawings now, but it felt like I had finally learned something universal that I could apply to anything going forward.

As one more example (which I have on FA), I still consider this to be one of my personal best compositions ever. It certainly has its flaws (there's no clear connection of head-neck-torso, for one) but it also demonstrates a pose that places certain parts of the body at odd angles to the camera -- for example, her left leg (on the right) is fully outstretched and in relative vertical profile to the "camera", but her right leg is held entirely different, with knee and heel tightly bent and the leg as a whole pointing "towards" the viewer. As a result it takes up about 1/3 as much visual space as the other leg, and it is intentionally drawn larger (specifically wider) to help express that it is "closer" to the viewer. And because of these angles, you don't see almost anything of the upper thigh, just the knee, nor the length of the foot itself, just the toes in front, drawn much larger than the same parts of the other leg which are "farther back".

"and isn't it better to cohesively design the volume of the character than search for it with sketchy lines?"
This sounds like a difference in personal process that actually doesn't matter much to the end result. And the phrase "cohesively design" is itself a holistic notion that only implies the end goal without specifying any particular process for actually getting there.

And part of what makes a design "cohesive" is USING certain techniques to ensure that different parts of a piece stay consistent as you get to each of them in turn.

Well, in jianying, the depth is considered mathematically to make sure accuracy of illusion (realism is seen as different as often the end goal is produce that which is more spatially aesthetical than reality). While it seems that western modern art schools don't teach the maths behind perspective but only their inverse (projection matrices). That's probably because jingying was learned by western mathematicians much later on with the photographic and 3D era. Though, through observing byzantine artists who had a very simple idea of perspective. Western renaissance (byzantine/greek revival) artists did somewhat osmotically grasp the spatial concepts and sort of reinvented them. It wasn't until chinese carpenters brought over draughtsmanship in the late classical era you saw mathematically accurate perspective plans, though.

What you call foreshortening is explained in jianying mathematics, but I've never seen western artists use the math, often unable to verify their spatial measurements. Not that they need to, but I think a baseline knowledge is very important as it's not much of a "wow" thing to get form correct for the eastern artists. It's so common in the eastern philosophy that people end up abstracting and minimalising everything instead (e.g. zen art and orthographic minimalism). Japanese and chinese artists even in cartoon art like anime have concrete form and perspective while westerners struggle with this and get choked up on following the carpenter-like wood-carving principles of carpenter draughtsmanship.

From eastern philosophical or even classicist perspective, how modern westernised artists work is very watered down and lacks the vast diction of old art techniques. The general flow of westerners seems to be "visualise on paper" which is quite brute force and seen as naive in the east. While easterners meditatively "visualise in their head" and then transfer their mind to the paper. I think that thought pattern puts westerner artists at risk to replacement by technology because brute force creation is possible via AI. While transferring your mind to paper requires visually imaginative mind-reading which doesn't exist and can't because of the way the mind's electrons rely on the no-communication theorem.

So overall I'd say there's a different goal between many westerners and easterners, easterners and eastern philosophical artists are more likely to want to transfer more from their mind than "build" on the canvas. Mythology was much more diverse in the east for the same reason as people simply wanted to draw their existent imagination rather than craft it out. Most westerners can't mentally compute chinese epics and westerners rely on random rather than cohesive lore it's why one eastern concept artist does the job of a hundred western ones. I think western artists are better at impressionism while eastern artists are better at imagination and spatial thinking.

Heh, I wouldn't want to "measure" eastern vs. western styles strictly by numbers -- as you said, each one is better at something else.