SOTD 03/26/10

Yesterday I spent quite some time at the coffees shop while my wife was in a meeting. Thank goodness I had the trusty old sketchbook to keep me sane. A lot of students ask me how do I come up with different shapes and what do I look at. I do the following: 1) studying old masters to see what they have done in the past helps and 2) look at nature. Now when I say nature its basically studying life, people in reality have different shapes to their bodies and heads which aids in showing a bit of their personality. Before I would just sit in a coffee shop and draw out of my imagination which is fun and really important to do as well. However, now I spend the first half hour or so studying people and shapes to add to my vocabulary and creature variety in my drawings from imagination. A rule my teacher once explained to me was that its quite difficult to make up what you do not understand.



Now here are my sketches from imagination. Combining shapes from my studies with my imagination I started to do some thumbnails and character designs for a new illustration I am working on. This one was supposed to be for a CG Society Challenge, unfortunately, I missed the deadline but I am still going to continue with my Zombie School Kid piece. Here are some studies for the kids and for some of the scenes I plan to use.



For complex illustrations I really after establishing the overall thumbnail I move around and do studies of the the characters and main action areas to keep the rhythm and flow moving. This is where I really figure out the shapes I want to use as well. I will be posting more progress of this in future posts.