Thursday, March 22, 2007

Lesson One: Construction of the Head - Bear

I've never drawn animation-style characters before. Whenever I've drawn in the past, it's been more "realistic" stuff, like the Karloff sketches. And since I've never had any art training, I've never actually followed any principles like the ones Preston Blair describes. They sure make a lot of sense - they not only allow you to place features in the correct spots onto a head, but they also allow you to see what is a 2-dimensional character in 3-D terms.

It's taken me a while to get through this first lesson, but that's because I'm following John K's and Preston Blair's instructions quite literally. I intend to learn from this course, not just try out a couple of sketches. What surprises me is that I have found very few people doing these exercises actually follow the instructions on PAGE ONE of Preston Blair's book: "draw these heads in every position using the above egg as a guide". To me, this was one of the most challenging parts of this exercise. You have to take a drawing of a character and then imagine it in 3-D. This means that you need to envision it so that you can draw it from 10 different angles. So, from the initial drawing, you have to know things like what the moustache man's hat looks like from above, how far out his moustache goes, and where does it disconnect from his upper lip. You have to know what the old lady's nose looks like from above, below, and the side, and have an idea just what her crazy hair looks like from different angles. This stuff is hard, and I couldn't always get it right, but I tried.

Anyway, here is the first part - the bear.



It'd been a while since I'd actually drawn anything, and I could feel my confidence growing with each bear. The first ones are more sketchy and aren't very good, but by the end, I was starting to get the hang of it. I don't believe any of these exactly match Preston Blair's, but for me, this was a warm-up.

The other parts of this exercise are being posted separately.

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

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