Wednesday, August 19, 2009

DAY 3 - the illusion of life






A little something different today. I was planning to continue working from Alim Le Tanneur -but it got late, and so I found a different spot to draw at. The result was that I couldn't balance the 11 by 17 inch photocopy paper I have been using very well to do the comic pages. So I opted to draw sketches from an art book.

Overall, the drawings came up horrible, which is great -because it teaches me that I have a lot to learn and re-teach myself. The upside was, that I had a lot of fun drawing them. In fact, every day so far has been a lot of fun. I heard from one person following the blog today that said he couldn't believe how much fun doing this is. I encourage anyone reading this to try it.

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For those not familiar with the Illusion of Life -it's probably one of the most inspirational books out there for an animator or a would be animator. Not only is it full of awesome drawings, layouts etc.. but the stories are extremely interesting and educational.

What was really different about working from this book versus the last one -is the type of characters. In the last book -all the characters were human and so working with a 3 step approach that has gesture first, then volume and finally detail -didn't work quite the same way here. Even though its possible to force a strict skeletal type gesture on some of the cartoony characters in this book - it seemed a lot more natural to blend the gesture drawing with shape drawing. How does shape drawing relate to volume? That's a question I hope to answer as I work through it here on the blog.

To give you an idea of where I am heading with this, check out the last image above. In it you will find an unifinished gesture of a dog and a goose. I left it in this state, to help show what I am talking about. I am going to try exploring this a bit more tomorrow and see what what happens.

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