You’re on the right track with your thinking, the "best" approach is to use whatever works for the reference images at hand, and use as few and as simple shapes as possible. The primary focus for this exercise is to keep your shapes organic and simple, and focus on creating cool, simple designs. Simple shapes can be stretched, bloated, indented, or curved, no need to adhere to geometrically perfect squares, circles, triangles, etc. That said, the semi circle in your example is a great design shape to play with! It’s a simplified shape with a straight counterbalancing a curve. You can even wrap that shape around the entire pose like an envelope to represent the entire simplified idea, albeit too simplified to fully express the pose is of a cat quickly pivoting direction. If you stretch and distort that shape you give it directionality, motion, and specificity, you can use it to create just about any pose! The semi circle is still maybe too simplified, so that’s where the design element comes in. By making choices with your shapes, how to bend, pinch, squash, and stretch them to dynamically capture the pose you’ll begin to develop your own shape language. Using C S I or curves and straights, you can create shapes that are simplified and specific to the pose you want to capture. Take a look at the Simplifying Shape Design livestream, Stan draws a few examples and covers this process really well. https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/simplifying-shape-design-livestream/comments If you wanted to focus on using shapes that are more universally reusable for other poses or animation, look into The Bean! https://www.proko.com/course-lesson/how-to-simplify-the-motion-of-the-torso-the-bean/assignments Also from an animation standpoint, Ethan Becker covers this and a few other elements of your question in a few videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuNdJoEhq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHhNJWzUnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLIjD-5AgWU Hope this helps!