Relaxed Standing Pose Reference
A relaxed standing pose reference: weight shared over both feet, arms hanging loose and head stacked over the ribcage, the baseline of figure drawing.
- Standing Poses
- standing
- neutral
- contrapposto
- full body
- beginner
Free for personal and commercial use (CC0). License details
How to draw the Relaxed Standing pose
The relaxed standing pose is the quiet baseline every figure drawing starts from: weight shared over both feet, arms hanging loose a little away from the hips, elbows and wrists softly bent, and the head stacked over the ribcage. Nothing is dramatic here, which is exactly why it is hard to draw well. With no big gesture to hide behind, small errors in proportion and balance show immediately.
Start with the line of balance. Drop an imaginary plumb line from the pit of the neck; in a relaxed stance it lands between the two ankles. If your drawing puts it outside the feet, the figure will look like it is about to tip over. Next, block in the three big masses — ribcage, pelvis and head — and notice how the ribcage sits slightly behind the pelvis when seen from the side, giving the spine its gentle S-curve.
The arms are the most common trouble spot. Beginners tend to glue them to the torso or draw them straight as sticks. Here the upper arms angle out by a few degrees and the forearms bend about twelve degrees at the elbow, so a sliver of negative space appears between the arm and the waist. The hands hang at mid-thigh, with relaxed fingers that curl naturally rather than spreading flat.
Watch the feet too. The mannequin's feet point straight ahead, but a relaxed person usually turns them slightly outward, and the inner ankle bone always sits higher than the outer one. Ground the figure with a soft cast shadow so it does not float.
Use this pose as a warm-up for proportion studies, as a neutral base when designing characters and costumes, or as the starting point for your own variations: shift the weight onto one leg for contrapposto, cross the arms, or tilt the head. Open it in the editor, rotate the camera to a three-quarter view and compare how the overlaps change.
Relaxed Standing pose prompt
Copy a prompt for your AI image generator. Pair it with the OpenPose skeleton in ControlNet so the generated character matches this exact pose.
General prompt
full-body character standing in a relaxed neutral pose, weight on both feet, arms hanging loosely at the sides with slightly bent elbows, head level, facing the viewer, plain light background
Midjourney
full body shot of a person standing relaxed, weight evenly on both feet, arms loose at sides, soft natural posture, front view, studio lighting, clean background --ar 2:3 --style raw
Stable Diffusion
1person, full body, standing, relaxed pose, arms at sides, slightly bent elbows, feet shoulder width apart, head level, weight on both feet, neutral stance, loose shoulders, front view, simple background, high detail, sharp focus
Negative prompt
extra limbs, extra fingers, fused fingers, deformed hands, twisted torso, stiff military posture, locked knees, cropped feet, floating, bad anatomy, blurry
OpenPose skeleton for ControlNet
Load the PNG into a ControlNet OpenPose unit (preprocessor: none), or import the JSON into an OpenPose editor.
Free to use (CC0)
The pose images on this page are released under CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Use them for drawing practice, commercial illustration, reference sheets or AI image generation; no attribution is required. A credit to PoseMaker is appreciated but optional.
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