A stick figure is a very simple type of drawing made of lines and dots, often of the human form or other animals. In a stick figure, the head is represented by a circle, sometimes embellished with details such as eyes, mouth or crudely scratched-out hair. The arms, legs and torso are all represented by straight lines. There has been much debate about whether stick figures should have necks and this varies from artist to artist. However the general consensus is that stick figures do not require necks.[1][2]
Stick figures are typically drawn by hand with a pen, pencil, marker or whatever is at hand. Graffiti of stick figures are found throughout history, often scratched with a sharp object on hard surfaces such as stone or concrete walls.
They are iconic and sketched with minimal detail. However, if one wanted to show emotion, simple additions can provide facial expressions, such as inward-pointing "eyebrows" showing anger, or widened "eyes" for fear, but many stick figures lack noses, mouths, or have no facial features displaying absent or ambiguous emotional expression.
Stick figures have proven effective as a source of advertising, entertainment and as a form of storyboarding and practice for film work. This is especially crucial for creating animatics, as a film special effects team is then able to visually display the outcome of a scene by using stick figures, but saving the money, time and effort that a completed shot would require.
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The stick figure's earliest roots are in prehistoric art. Tens of thousands of years later, writing systems that use images for words or morphemes — e.g. logographies such as Egyptian and Chinese — started simplifying people and other objects to be used as linguistic symbols. There is also a modern history that traces at least in part from Rudolf Modley's extending the use of figures from Isotype for commercial use. The first international use of stick figures is in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Pictograms created by Japanese designers Masaru Katzumie and Yoshiro Yamashita formed the basis of future pictograms. In 1972, Otl Aicher developed the stick figures used on the signage, printed materials, etc. for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Drawing on those and many other similar symbol sets in use at the time, in 1974 and 1979 AIGA (commissioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation) developed the DOT pictograms — 50 public domain symbols for use at transportation hubs, large events, and other contexts in which people would know a wide variety of different languages. These, or symbols derived from them, are used widely through much of the world today.
Stick figures are often used in animations made with Adobe Flash. Stick figures are easy to draw and can be traditionally animated much more quickly than full drawings. One well-known stick figure animation is Xiao Xiao although there are many more.
Cutout Pro Stickman[3] is specifically designed for stick figure animation. Each figure is controlled with control points and key frames and saves drawing inbetweens. When an arm is moved, the whole body gets affected using skeleton simulation. Stickman has some functions for importing pictures, add control points and deform them. Users can export animations as .avi or .swf files. It is also possible to generate sprite sheets for use in 2D games and detailed cartoons. Figures can be created with a software called "Elemento" that follows with Stickman.
Pivot Stickfigure Animator is a freeware application designed for stick figure animation. As with Cutout Pro Stickman, this software allows a user to control key points/joints. The beta version allows the user to load images (sprites) and animate them.
TISFAT is tween-based stick figure animation software (though frame-by-frame animation is still possible). The user can create their own special stick figures (that can have as many limbs as the user requires and represent not only humans but other characters) or use the default stick figure, other features include the addition of polygon objects, shapes, as well as the importing of image files (sprites), all of which are animated in layers by keyframes, between which the program does the animation automatically for the user. The user can choose how many frames should the program animate automatically between two keyframes, they can also choose none (which would be a frame-by-frame animation technique). Movies can be exported as AVI, SWF and SIF and animated GIF files.
Stick Figure Theatre was a recurring segment on the MTV animated anthology series Liquid Television that featured stick figure reenactments of live-action film with the original audio and derived humor from the dichotomy between imagery and sound, a point reinforced by backgrounds made to look like ruled paper, napkins, and other random slips of paper.
A freeware stick figure animation application with features similar to Pivot. Stykz contains many features that add to Pivot, such as in-window stick-figure editing, individual segment colorization, ability to set the layering order of segments within a stick figure, etc. There are additional features planned, including sound and sprite support, and Flash-like motion tweening. It also supports importing .stk files from Pivot (all versions).
Stykz 1.0 for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows was released November 26, 2010. Stykz 1.0 for Linux is in development (a public beta has not been announced as yet).
