Sunday, June 29, 2014

Drawing a Wolfman, jack!

I like drawing creatures and I especially enjoy drawing werewolves. The other day in the Visual Development class I had a chance to work on a demonstration while students were doing their assignments. The idea was to focus on textures and rendering techniques as well as the concept.

Here's a 3 stage sampling of the demo. First we start with a sketch using good ol' Col-erase blue pencil...


Then we progress by building up the darker tones and line through the use of a graphite pencil...


Lastly we top it off with fine point black line pen to further bolster darks and linework giving the composition a finished touch...


If you're working the image comprehensively then you should be able to stop at just about anywhere in the creative process and still give it a feeling of completion. That's the lesson for today! Thanks for checking in.

Monday, June 09, 2014

While we're waiting - Some class demos

Getting some new pages prepped for the next chapter of the Montgomery Thump story I've been featuring lately. Why not take advantage of this window to show some recent images I've created while helping out students in the Character Design 1 class at my school The Animation Academy in Burbank, California.

This was a head rotation demo I did as an exercise in developing strong production skills. I asked the class for an idea and they came up with a little girl in the 1960s. I asked them how long they thought it would take for me to complete a standard 5 pose rotation. One student guessed 45 minutes. This as as far as I got in 43 minutes while being interrupted three times to help some of them with their own assignments.


A couple of days later another student was having trouble visualizing their character in a dimensional rotation. So I took it upon myself to show her how a very simple graphic character can be pivoted to describe form.


This past week I drew for students in helping them understand how character concept design is approached. Here's a few samples of what I came up with along a single simplified theme.


Always enjoy the opportunity of creating while in the company of artists who are willing to learn and looking to have fun in an educational environment.