Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

a bday card from ‘05

so i swiped this bg from a mickey mouse short and tried to grt the character to fit. it kinda works, it was a fun experiment.

Monday, October 30th, 2006

another birthday card come and gone..

i’m going to carry on the theme of the caricature by showing another birthday card i made recently for a friend from work. i don’t want to use my drawings as examples of caricature and design, instead this is to show the process of ruff to the finish. most of the time i only have time for one shot at the end result of a card, this time i made two and i stuck them both here. in the coming weeks i hope to show examples from others who i think do a great job of getting personality and design and disect them and how it well it will relate to cg and 2d animation.

when getting started i mash out a dozen or so drawings playing with porportions and attitude of the person. very ruff..

once i get something i like i nail it down, not too tight but enough so i can paint on it in photoshop.

after a couple of color choices i land on this, its no Kiraz palette but it just seemed to fit. but i wasn’t sure i wanted to give this one to her so itried the one below.

seemed funny to me because the look was a clear juxtaposition to her personality, we ended up using both.

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

Friday, October 27th, 2006

you know for kids..

what 2 posts so close in days.. iknow, i know i can’t belive it my self…well
this drawing seemed like a good idea when drawing it up, i mean it was for a friend to congratulate him on the birth of his new child. in concept it’s a no brainer right, he likes anything military and kids.( he does have 4, i think) im thinking that this should be an ad for the ar-15, anyone with me?
lo

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

gesture as an exersize.

it’s been awile and i have alot of backlogged posts to put out. over the past year i’ve been attending this gesture class. when you say gesture class and life drawing class i used to think they were kinda the same, i come to find out they are vastly different.
example: in ife drawing classes of the past you would have 30 sec poses and in that time you wanted anatomical accuracy, in the gesture class i get so much pencil milage trying to get the feel/action of the pose that at first i felt it hard to keep up. i mean come on a hour of 30 sec to 2min poses where the focus is on the expression of action by means of animation principles.(squash & stretch,etc.) believe it or not it changed the way i approached drawing completely. its all about developing a shorthand and exaggerating a specific but clear action, real Walt Stanchfield stuff. here are some examples from this past year, i hope to post more in the future, as i feel ive learned something new..
by the way i like to use a tombow brush pen because i can’t be too sketchy and indecisive, plus i can’t erase..