More Lifedrawing? YOU KNOW IT! - entry 1

Well, I took a break from drinking to bring you the next installment of ART BLOG...dum dum dum.

Okay. Lifedrawing, lifedrawing, lifedrawing. NEVER underestimate the power of lifedrawing. I should take my own advice and do some lifedrawing BUT with my Biochemistry (which is insanely time consuming especially if you havent done any science related work in at least 6 years), I do not have time.

Onto the art:


Again we have the one line drawings done with pen. I have posted two of these before but I was too lazy to take them off the page. :)

The "eyes" are all 15 min drawings done with mechanical pencil, the WORST medium to use for anything but line work. This was the first time we were allowed to use shadow and this was an exercise in understanding the anatomy of the eye. We were suppose to go through all the body parts but then suddenly switched focus to gouache silhouettes (which I will introduce in my next post).

Enjoy.

Holiday Card

Well, obviously Christmas (my holiday celebration of choice) is fast approaching and I had to make a Holiday card. Because of exams, I had to squeeze this one out pretty quickly. For the "artistic blog spin" on it, I am going to show the sketch and the final product so you can see how things changed during the colouring process.

The sketch:


And the final product (click on image to access the larger image):


Happy Holidays all!

My first lifedrawing term.

As promised, more lifedrawing. Dont hold your excitment in. Let it out. It's okay.

If anyone has EVER done lifedrawing at Algonquin College (in Ottawa) you will recognize these casts. Millions of us have drawn these casts. I am one of them.

Anyways, these are from first year, first semester animation. Its only outlines. Why? The philosophy behind doing only the outlines is that it shows where your weaknesses are. Shadows can be used to cover up errors in volumes. Our lifedrawing teacher was of the school of thought that shadows come later when you can bring out the object with just the outlines. I tend to agree with her school of thought, she brought some amazing work out of me.

And without further ado, The Boys:


I believe this was the first thing I drew in animation for lifedrawing. Yes, he is missing an arm. :P

Here is a GREAT way to measure your own success, draw the same cast from two different angles. He wont move. :P Here are my results from such an exercise:


This guy is missing an ear. The other one was kind of wonky and my head is weak but I am showing it because you can compare the rest of the body to my other cast drawing. The rest of the body is definitely better than the head.

And his "finer" side:


After we had finished this cast we had to recopy our drawing in pen (with a light table) and then draw the skeleton inside. The hard part? The skeleton was not posed in the same position. Not even close. We had a skeleton that we could walk around and look at but we needed to figure out how the skeleton fit inside of the body.

Here lies my bones:

Click on him to see the bigger drawing and see all the little vertebrae I shoved in there. There should be the correct number. Talk about a crash course in anatomy.

A selfish endevour.

I lied. The art I am going to post today is not something technically brilliant. Its a bit of a personal thing.

A former friend of mine told me that this embodied a lot of who I am. It was his favorite of the drawings I did. As a bit of a tribute I am posting it today. Sort of a bit of farewell. So emo. Artists are moody bunches. Maybe our art wouldn't be so good if we weren't.


I always am enthralled by simple characters. How an artist chooses to curve a line, how thick they make it, what emotions it evokes. It takes a lot of talent to even draw a simple character. A perfect circle takes a lot of talent.

This initially was drawn as a joke I had with another friend of mine. I would say "hug?" meaning I wanted a hug and he would replay with a "/hug." Silly, isn't it? Wherever you draw inspiration.

However, I think she evokes an endearing response. You want to hug her. You want to care for her and make her world better. I like her.

The "UP?" has polka dots because I thought of the Mario Mushrooms though there are probably a ton of other speckled mushrooms I could have drawn inspiration from. It's so deep. :)

An incredibly nerdy endevour

I am trying to vary what I put here. I want to slowly tease you with various aspects of my artistic past, not just shove a bunch of Lifedrawing down your throat.

I promise, after this post, I will make a more "advanced art" post.

Who has heard of Shin Seiki Evangelion? (Translation: Neon Genesis Evangelion) Any good little geek who watches anime should know the title. If you havent heard of it you have had some serious anime miss-education. Gravitation and Chobits are not foundational anime series despite what any avid fan girl will insist.

I was not in the habit of writing in to comic books. In fact, in all seriousness, this was the only time I ever did it. I think I wrote and drew this in grade 10. I believe it was then because around the same time I made a Ghost in the Shell envelope for a friend of mine who had just moved to Vancouver and I remembering arguing with my English teacher that this letter and drawings in a comic did in fact deem me "published." :D

Anyways, Andrea's first publishing:

The cover of the comic book. Not my drawing, but a nice lead in.


(Click on the image to read the letter and see the drawings - I drew the drawing of "Tira Misu" and the second "Ritsuko")

How deliciously nerdy of me! I wasn't expecting them to print the drawings. They were on the envelope and weren't very good. Thats why they look messy and have writing and postage markings all over the scans. Still makes me laugh though.

For clarification, I did not translate "Baka-chan" as "cute idiot." This was in fact the pet name my boyfriend at the time had for me and I was dared to sign it that way. Really didnt think it would get printed.

All characters owned by Ginax Studios except for Tira Misu who belongs to Xebec, Tokyo Pop and ADV.

Flashy Aye Aye.

Okay, today I am going to break away from my old school projects and show you a little pet project of mine I never quite finished. I am kinda fond of him even if he isn't the BEST thing out there.

The Aye Aye:


What amuses me about this little short, short is that a-I don't know where Aye Aye's are from and b-I wanted to make the aye aye say in a HEAVY Australian accent "What? You neva' seen an aye aye before?" Kind of random but still makes me giggle. :P I love his little leg twitch.

Obviously this is done in flash. I never did many things with flash. This was suppose to go on my demo reel when it looked like flash was going to be the next tool in animation. Instead I have a cute little animated flash vid that does nothing but sit on my compy.

There are a few volume problems with it and obviously and the background is pretty minimal. There is a pop in the tail as well. As I mentioned, the piece isn't done but I lost the project files so this is as good as it will ever get. :)

A Flying machine.

I haven't done many vehicle designs in my day. Never has been a keen interest of mine. I have never been too interested in drawing cars or spaceships. However, here is a flying machine I drew for an assignment:


I am kinda fond of it. I do like the flying machines Leonardo Da Vinci drew and as "mainstream" as that is, I used that to inspire me to draw this.

Layouts II - Outdoor scene.

Okay...this is the only other layout I ever did. Why did I stop doing layouts? Well in design we were given the option of doing either layout or character design. I ended up going with character design because my teacher told me (in front of the whole class) that not everyone was cut out for doing layouts and it might be best if I stuck to other things. So, I figured to avoid further embarrassment, the smart thing to do was characters. I didn't look back or think on it much till the end of the year when this layout made it onto the year's demo reel. I thought, "huh...made the demo reel for layouts...that's weird." It got even more confusing when my design teacher, the same one who told me that I should give up layouts, wrote in my "flip this" yearbook: "Look at your layouts - on the demo reel + for some reason you never liked your own stuff. Sorry kiddo - there are some nice drawings on there and it was all you." :| I was confused. >_<

But here is the layout that made the demo reel:

Line work:


Coloured:

Layouts I - Warehouse.

I would NEVER call myself an accomplished artist and honestly, I feel mildly foolish talking about principles of art. I am not someone I feel should teach people how to draw. But I have been through the trenches and have a few helpful hints. Here is a bit of advice for ANY artist out there. This is something that BUGS THE HECK out of me. Line quality. LEARN TO DRAW CLEAN LINES! Lines that accentuate the drawing, make it look three dimensional. Learn about line weight and STOP FEATHERING YOUR LINES! Seriously. If you don't have good lines I get turned off. It makes me go "bleh." Its a very easy thing to make your work look a million times better.

What is "feathering"? This is. This is my work before animation and I chose to use it as an example so it doesn't seem like I am picking on anyone in particular. I will just pick on myself. It doesn't mean that roughs can't be messy but there is a way to sketch without feathering. In a sketch, the lines should be confident and strong even if there are 10000 of them. :P

How important are lines? Very. How hard are they to do correctly? VERY. People shrug off cleanup artists as faux artists and just people copying others works. Not so. There is a talent to it. We had an inbetweening assignment in animation that proved to be a lot more difficult than it looked. I was the only person in my year to get over a 90 on the assignment. In fact, the head of the program sought me out and congratulated on how good the project was.

I didn't do many layouts in school (more on why later) but here is one of the two I actually finished that were half decent:

Line work:


AND

Coloured:

Back to basics III.

ANNNDDDD...the last lifedrawing post, for now.



Okay, here we are getting into some longer poses. The coloured pose at the top was done using pencil (for the outline) and water colour markers. Here is the only time we ever used colour in lifedrawing class and this was the only class we ever did it in. I REALLY liked using the water colour markers.

The three poses under the coloured pose are all done in pencil and gouache. This was an exercise in shadow. Here I did get lazy with the hands. I think I ran out of time but I am not going to make excuses. :P

Under that we have some poses in brush pen and pencil. Nothing crazy, again focusing on lines of action.

Back to basics II.

Okay, onto old lifedrawing number two. This is still from my second year animation program:



Moving onto gouache (a type of paint), brush pen (a pen with a brush like nib) and pencil (col-erase).

Hands are the hardest thing on the human body to draw. If the artist is hiding a characters hands its a good indication that they are a poor artist. A true measure of an artist is their ability to draw hands. When the artist draws the hands behind the back or in the pockets, or in a fist it is heavily frowned upon. It's considered weak. Sounds very elitist but really its about a good drawing vs. a bad drawing. I still struggle with drawing hands but force myself to try and include them as much as possible. The hands I have here are done in brush pen and col-erase.

Below that we have two different types of gestures.

The 15 second exercises were an attempt to get a "strong line of action," that is, a line that goes right through the body and denotes a movement. Line of action is important. Without it, character's look stiff and static. Lines of actions, usually "C-curves" and "S-curves", are a big part of laying down a drawing. Strong lines of action can make or break a pose.

The longer poses were done in brush pen. Just a general lifedrawing exercise. Didn't help that the model wasn't very good.

Back to basics.

Where should I begin? Only makes sense to start with the basics. ANY decent artist needs to have a good chunk of lifedrawing under their belt. Animators are no different. Thus, it only feels appropriate to show some of my older lifedrawing.

Before you start wondering, yes, the times are correct. We were timed on all our lifedrawing. The times and styles were geared towards teaching us to understand movement of the human form. Lifedrawing became a rush of adrenaline and when you were on, you were on. Days you weren't, it was best to leave and start drinking in the campus bar which was less than 25m from the lifedrawing room.

Anyways, page one:


Okay, the top half of this page is dedicated to a technique called "one line drawings" and they are just that. ONE LINE. You are not allowed to lift the pen off the page and no whiteout! What you put on paper is what you get. Most of these ranged from 3-5 min each.

The bottom half of the page is done in conte. For those of you who don't know what conte is, it's like a harder charcoal (yes...people draw with charcoal). Still frightfully messy though. The actual times are indicated beside the drawings. The purpose of the faster ones was to convey as much of the form as possible. In the longer poses we started looking at how light and shadow play. Conte is personally one of my favorite mediums to use.