2D-graphics, theory and application I – Week 1
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First week with the new course 2D-graphics, theory and application I. This week we started with life drawing first to learn to quickly capture the movement and dynamic of a pose and then constructing it with the basic shapes that make up the human body. I haven’t done life drawing before and the principles we learned this week resolved a lot of issues for me, like creating more interesting poses for my characters and quickly capturing the essence of a pose. I also realized I’d gotten lazy and most often skipped the construction stage in my drawings to get to practicing colouring which, in hindsight, was just bloody stupid since the pictures always came out slightly off. These are some of the sketches I made that first week:
We did 1 minute-poses, 3 minute ones and in the end 5-minute ones. (Or so I recall) Guess which ones are which. My main problem here is still mainly a lot of excessive lines. It’s not visible in my digital works because layers and CTRL + Z but it’s something I need to work with. Also the poses could be more exaggerated to enhance them. For our reflective assignment we were expected to read chapters from Walt Stanchfields book “Drawn to Life” (excellent material by the way) and write a reflection on how we’ve used visual components in our drawings this week and what we thought of Walt’s approach to drawing. Two things that especially stuck with me were the use of angles to create composition and focus in a picture and to focus on telling a story rather than drawing an overly detailed character. The second part of this week’s assignments was to start on our character concept. We were given two descriptions to choose from and then we had to create 20 different quick thumbnails for our chosen character. Drawing the thumbnails we had to think about how the character was described, what kind of game it would be in and what the character’s world was like. Finally we had to reflect on our choices as part of our reflective assignment. These are the thumbnails I drew for the concept “Princess Bella and her Umbrella”
The princess is described as brave, colorful, strong, not shy and as a fan of adventure and animals. So for the most part I tried drawing her doing something and being active rather than just standing up and down. I tried to include animal motifs in her clothes and accessories to reflect her love for animals. The general idea I had for her was not your typical european flowy-locks-look-at-my-pretty-dress-kind of princess and I tried out different sources of inspiration. For example, the top left corner designs are inspired by traditional Kazakh clothing, the ones to the left on the middle row are a mix of budhist/hindi influences and those to the right on the fourth row are (surprise), inspired by samurai clothing. In the end I did 10 very different concepts with two variations each because neither my brain nor my drawing hand were feeling it anymore. All in all it was an interesting and intense week. Peace out!
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