Sketch o’the Week
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am taking Stephen Silver‘s online class on animated character design through Schoolism.com. I am enjoying it and learning a lot, but it is proving to be a bit more challenging in terms of finding the time to dedicate to the lessons and assignments than I thought. This week’s SotW is from a recent lesson. The assignment: draw a more or less accurate drawing of this guy wearing the bowler hat:
Afterward, you put away the reference and the sketch, and using three different basic shapes recreate the face’s essentials from memory based on those shapes. The idea is not to capture a likeness again but to capture the essence of the character within radically different headshapes:
An interesting exercise and one that helps an artist understand how important headshape is to exaggeration.
Tags: caricature, character design, sketch
Tom, beautiful sketches as always. I’m curious as to whether you intentionally elongated the original sketch, or if the habit of caricature is difficult to shake even when you’re going for a more literal result. (I’ve been drawing with a very literal approach for a few years and, trying to get into cartooning, am having difficulty not drawing exactly what I see).
I can do a realistic portrait if I have to but that wasn’t really the purpose, so I didn’t try to be totally realistic. As I was drawing I could see the face shape was longer and thinner than it truly was, and I didn’t correct it but just went with it. The eyes are also closer together, the nose a bit longer and thinner, etc. The idea seemed to me to be just a tight study of the features and “persona” to see what you would take with you from memory into the second half of the exercise. So I simply drew the face without trying to “push” any exaggerations but also without working to avoid any hint of caricature… my natural drawing style ends up applying some mild exaggeration regardless.
It used to take me a week or two when coming back to art school after drawing theme park caricatures all summer to get the “cartooniness” out of my system and get back to being able to do realistic portraits, etc. These days it just takes an effort on my part not to let my caricaturing tendencies seep in if I really try and do a portrait.
Very cool! I’ve never tried the head shape exercise before. It looks interesting.
Hey Tom,
I just saw the trailer
http://www.iwantyourmoney.net/
cool
Great post as always. I just wanted to tell you I love following your blog and appreciate how much work you put into it. Ive been following you for a couple of years now and I just wanted to take the initiative to say how much I look forward to seeing your new stuff and reading your posts.
Hi Tom, great post its very challenging when you have a solid style and you have to modify some unique features to create animation, its really interesting, im doing some animation with flash with my bamboo pen tablet, its very fun cause you can see your artwork come to life, its a great feeling when you see them interact on the screen, you push your boundaries and we can see it on the MAD show, just amazing. Take care.
WOW,awesome!Please,post every exercise/assignment ,stephen give u!coz i’ve seen many people post theirs..but STILL u’re the best!
Oh no Tom’s drawing talent combined with Stephen Silver’s talent… it’s a colossal monster. It’s like if Clark Kent had Batman’s wealth and resources.