Friday, October 27th, 2006
charactures are fun..
drawing gestures and charactures are apart of my basic drawing regimin, both i can do anywhere and in order to get character into your drawings i think you need to understand both. i would like to have a real insight to characturing like John K, Hirshfeld, Auerbach-levy, or Teddy Newton, hopefully someday, but for now this is my thinking for the drawing below. now i think there are 2 schools of thought on design: first is the design for design sake, where design is the priority, i.e. shape mimics personality or function follows form. the second is design for character(or story), it’s more about the function of the character’s personality, in other words you think about posture, attitude first or you might look to an actor or two to base the type of character on, is he more like brando. I think good character designers use both but lean on more to one side. its always about what you want out of your design right? something a bit more stylized or not. i personally find things too stylized are more distracting when telling a compelling character driven story like the iron giant as opposed to something like fantasia where the look is everything, both are examples of successful design, but i digress. this drawing below is one of the kids here at work named Justin and like most of my charactures, i drew it in a meeting. here’s a brief description of my current process, first i find his shape. it could be his head, nose, hair usually its one thing that i pick to keep it simple. once i get a good shape i play with feature porpotions, i like the eyes because to me if you get the eyes you get the person, and i try not to go with anything too obvious like a big nose or ears first, you can always add that later. next i think attitude, puckered lips, a slouch, a frown. this gives them thought meaning they are doing more than staring out with nothing to say. last, the whole time i try not to worry about the accuracy of the drawing itself, and if i’m lucky it will feel like him more than it looks like him. then again, maybe im full of sh!t.
lo
on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 10:44 am:
Lo,
thats a really good breakdown to approaching charACTOR design.
hope all is well.
>oVi
on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 6:27 pm:
Works for me! Looks and feels like him!