I need a pose, now what?

Why are all my tutorial titles so dumb?

Anyway, this one is gonna be about something I also have a lot of problems with

POSES!

• Do you have a big / tall mirror? if you do, then excellent! Just put yourself in front of the mirror and start coming up with poses, they can be simple...but then, start changing a little something here, a little something there...and you'll find yourself with quite the nice pose, of course, unless you're planing on doing a white background, you should also come up with that, a simple or a difficult one?
• Work on gesture drawings. These are very quick sketches of a movement / pose / bg / whatever else you might have thought about, that quickly show the basic idea of the image. If you just thought about a cool pose, quickly, and I mean really quickly, sketch the basic lines of that pose on a piece or paper so that later you can work on a drawing based of what you just did. Believe me when I tell you, it helps A LOT.
• Now, that's the basic, and also good for people that already have a good understanding of anatomy, that can keep that image in their head without having the need of always going back to the mirror, interrupting their work. If you, however, don't have that ability (like me) it's a good idea to search for references. But there's a thing with references, you should look for real ones, like stock images, poses from posemaniacs, ask for someone to model for you, use one of those models dolls, etc.. You can also use other drawings from other artists as reference, but that wouldn't be very right, unless of course, they're ok with it. I'll explain why, one: artists sometimes change the anatomy, even if only slightly, in order to better suit the picture's mood; two: you would be using something made by another artist, something they came up with, and probably with lots of work, coming up with a good drawing and a dynamic pose can take a lot of hard work and practice, or talent; three: sometimes, due to the clothing of the character you're using as a model, the anatomy might seem different from what it is in reality, you'd end up with something less accurate.
• Never forget the "The Polykleitan Canon of Proportion", there are actually two, one says that the body corresponds to seven times the size of the head, the other says that the body corresponds to eight times the size of the head. It's a really useful method you should always keep in mind.
• For more info on sketching and how to come up with more ideas, more like, the basics on concepts, please visit my other tutorial: "How to Create"  (see? another dumb name).