Posing, posing, and yes, more posing!

My first official assignment for Animation Mentor is complete and below is the journey I took on a simple pose I found from observing people in a public space. Below are my sketches (No I am not Michelangelo, but the idea is to feel the pose) I drew for the assignment:

From the above sketches I circled the one I wanted to use originally and started to pose, Stu, the Animation Mentor rig we're provided. It took me about 45 minutes to get the my first iteration:

I was reasonably happy but overall feedback was that the pose was hard to tell what was going on and I have a really nasty tangent on the right elbow. (A tangent is when you basically have an edge of a part of the body or object lined up with another edge and it removes depth and can add confusion to viewers). I decided to take my original pose and twist it up a bit so that Stu was more visible to viewers and I came up with the following:

Now you can see Stu in his entirety but there is still something that is bothering me with him... his balance! The overall balance of the pose feels completely wrong and is actually ends up being my biggest struggle with the pose. I tweaked this pose not once, not twice, not three times... but TEN more times before I came up with what I turned in. Below you can see the order of my pose from version three to version twelve:

At this point I'm feeling pretty good about Stu. The balance feels better and his weight is definitely place a bit better, but I just do some more small tweaking and get the final pose in order with the last four revisions:

AHHH!!!!! What the heck am I doing!? Now I am going the opposite direction. I don't like the silhouette the left arm is forming and somehow Stu's head is ginormous compared to his body... ah ha!... rendering focal lens... lets adjust that to 50 and see what happens....

Yes! I am happy with this result and this is what I ended up turning in. I completely spaced about his left arm and didn't adjust it. After getting my e-critique from my mentor I decided to clean up Stu just a bit more and my final pose for Stu is:

Can you guess what my mentor had me change? Let me know!