At first I made a simple foreground, with the intention being that the character will hop across horizontally from left to right. This is going to be an exercise in mechanics so I want it to be almost like an obstacle course. Then I scribbled in a rough idea of how I'd like my spacing to be and in what direction I want the character to move. I doubt this image is useful to anyone but myself, but it's a way for me to visualize what my brain is thinking in terms of motion at the most basic level.
From there, I went ahead and started putting down ideas for how I'd like the character to move from place to place. Obviously there is no construction, maintenance of volume, on-model fidelity, uuhh... draftsmanship of any kind really, and for multiple reasons, one of which is that I figure it's not worth the time at this kind of stage.
It's hard to show that this dude should be bent forward given this angle and if I had drawn it dimensionally it would be more clear.
So by the end of it, like I said about the first drawing, this whole thing is mostly only useful to me. I just want to get the idea in my head to a visual place where I can start posing a character in 3d. And it's easier for me to do that if I feel like I have a plan. I might skip the last gag if I feel like I'm not pulling it off successfully, and I'm sure I'll have to move poses around as I realize they don't really flow through space well. But this is my jumping point.
