2D-graphics, theory and application I – Week 3

Third week of the course we continued with life drawing and refining our character concept. We did more life drawing, this time with a male model and went through, amongst other things, what the muscles on the leg look like, how the knee is constructed, how to draw feet and how to draw heads and faces.

My legs generally turned out too long this week and the teacher reminded me that there is equal distance between the top of the head to the lowest point on the lower construction circle and from that point to the ground and that the arms + hands end halfway to the knee.

These are some of the sketches I did this week:

For this we had to read some more of “Drawn to Life” and also chapters 1-6 from the Vilppu drawing manual.

Our main assignments this week were however deciding on a thumbnail and constructing our character as well as making a turnaround of it and writing a reflection about our design choices. We were given a character background sheet to fill out and send in with our character construction-assignment.

I started out by writing the character description to get a better feel for the character I wanted to make. Link to character description. Once I was done I didn’t really feel like any of my thumbnails by themselves captured what I was going for. In the end my design became a mix between these two sets of thumbnails:

I decided to use the clothes, umbrella and body type from the lower thumbnails because they captured the energy and athleticism in the character description. I mixed in  elements from the upper set of thumbnails, like the hair and face because I liked the “tomboyish” look and thought it was a good fit for the character.

For our character construction assignment we had to do three drawings. One loose sketch, one “construction” drawing with the shapes we had learned to use in class and one final drawing with all clothing and details. For extra credit we could also add a close-up of the face.

This was my final hand-in:

There are several issues with it, like the face being inconsistent between the detailed drawing and the close-up, the hip came out a bit weird and the folds on the clothing were pretty iffy, to mention some. However it was good practice.

Here is the character turnaround:

I’m a bit more satisfied with this one but perhaps that’s mainly because I worked my hand and shoulder into drawing cramps with it took great care to keep the character consistent in all three depictions. I felt that the character had, well, “settled” better in this hand-in, perhaps because I already knew what I would draw. This led me to conclude that I probably would have achieved a better end result if I had sketched my character a few times before attempting to do the assignments.

This is how I explained my design choices for this character in my reflection:

“I did not want people to look at Bella and go “Ah, that’s a princess.” Her character description  describes her as an athletic, outgoing character with a love for animals and a dream of being a  professional athlete in paragliding. I conveyed this by dressing her up correspondingly, a pilot  jacket, a cat­-eared hat with pilot goggles, tights with knee­pads, gloves and boots. I added fluffy  cuffs on her clothes to match the aesthetic of a kingdom in the clouds. To distinguish her as a princess without forcing her into any of the traditional attributes like a crown or a dress (which  would be impractical while flying), I added a crown-­motif on the front and back of her jacket. To give her a more tomboyish look I hid her hair beneath the hat. This will make the difference more pronounced between her natural self and the “princess” she is expected to become.”

All in all a very productive week.

About Eva Sokolova

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