Hey, everybody.
Didn’t post yesterday because it was my husband’s birthday. That being said, I still made him this for his birthday gift:
Okay, so let’s go over how this morning went:
60 Minutes Learning
Here are a couple objectives I want to reach with this challenge:
- Character Design
- Consistency with character design
- Bad habit to break: making my heads too big
Before we delve further, let’s welcome the artist of the day, Jin Kim! A veteran artist and animator at Disney most well known for creating multiple expressions of one character design. Following Ethan Becker’s advice, I studied Kim’s work, and made multiple breakdowns of one of his characters, not tracing his work, but following and simplifying the shapes and lines of his work- figure out what he did to make his characters effective and apply it to my own art.
I did these breakdowns of his concept sketches of Mother Gothel from Rapunzel.
I then tried to use that knowledge, and draw a character from Dragonrider’s Dance, Lady Minerva of Argentfall. The stepmother of one of the main characters (She’s not evil, she’s just grumpy in part because she was told of essentially an end-of-the-world prophecy, but was cursed to not be able to warn anyone… and she’s not drawn super great).
I wasn’t exactly pleased with it. I realized that I fell back in my habit of making the heads too big (now, her hair is contributing to that a bit, but it still didn’t look right to me).
So I took it a step further and studied how Kim proportioned his character’s heads to the rest of their body. I traced a circle over a couple heads, copy/pasted the same circle, and placed it on their torso.
In general, I found that size of their heads was the same size as their rib cage. There are exceptions, but in general, that’s what I found.
Knowing this, I re-drew Lady Minerva with this guideline in mind.
Already, there is a huge improvement! And look how much happier she is.
60 Minutes Realism
On Day 5, I actually spent an hour working on this, then another this morning. I think what I’m going to do is spend 5 hours total on one portrait, then move on to a new one.
Ash Meyer Art 