Sketch O’The Week
I’ve been so busy I didn’t have time to work up a real “Sketch O’The Week”, so here’s something a little different. This is a very rough sketch for a park sample of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson from the new Harry Potter movie. I stole the gag from an SNL skit. I didn’t finish it because compositionally it’s too out of whack. The drawing is too left-side heavy. I tried to compensate with the window behind them, but that won’t do the job. It’ll need to be reworked if I want to finish it. I was also thinking about having sparks shooting out of Harry’s wand if I moved them over to the right… but that would be pushing it in the family friendly theme park setting.
Incidentally, the family’s going to see the movie tonight. We are all big HP fans, and while the movies are not perfect they get more right than wrong. Movie review forthcoming… maybe. I never wrote a review of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer or Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End and I saw both of those.
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Awesome. I absolutely love Harry’s and Ron’s expressions.
This looks just great Tom. In my opinion the illustration still really works, despite the layout issues. This is one of the problems I regularly have when laying out a caricature: invariably things wind up bigger than intended, or simply in the wrong place. Do you work out the composition in a thumbnail beforehand, if so how close do you stick to that when composing the piece?
(Incidentally, the fanboys are gonna be drooling like crazy over the rack you’ve given Hermione…) 😉
No thumbnails, I just wing it when doing the park samples. I do a rough like this, then erase what I am not happy with and redraw. If the heads are too big, I scrap it and start over. Once I get an agreeable drawing, I place it on a light table (or at the park on a glass frame and use the sun as my underlight) and do a quick basic rough. It’s at this point I will move elements around to balance the composition. Then I draw it out with the kind of bold, sweeping linework we do on the live stuff, airbrush it and done.
The caricature of Rupert Gribnt (Ron) needs work. He has a very long nose and I blew that here trying to draw an upward looking angle to the face.
I will post the finished sample here next week sometime. I’ll likely do the artwork on Sunday as I am drawing at Valleyfair that day.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
Terrific caricatures and beautiful line work, Tom. I agree with you about the heaviness on the left side, though. It seems like Harry and Hermione are actually leaning to the left, as well. You could turn them a bit and move the frame of reference over a little, and take care of most of it. Or you could have Harry and Hermione switch places. (Heck, I’m certain you don’t need suggestions on what to do with it.)
Really funny expressions, BTW. You nailed Harry’s eyes/ big lashes and Ron’s super-huge upper lip. Hilarious stuff!
I’m sure I’ll figure it out.