Body Built From Rounded Or Circular Forms (2 of 2)

Tonight I had a bit more energy than I did last night, so as I finished page 3, I paid more attention to the proportions of the bodies.  I seems two things got me into trouble.  One was when sketching the heads, they often didn't end up in the same place as in the original drawing... too high, too forward, and so forth.  The second thing again was differences in the book between the guide sketch and the final sketch.  In reality, if you are going to copy somebody's work, the guide lines won't be there, so my focus needs to shift to visualizing the guidelines in the finished work.  Tonight I will post all four comparison drawings from tonight's work.  They're fun to look at.  Seems like half of them were really close, and the other half were off, for whatever reason.  Most had more aligned torsos, so I will take it as progress.  Thanks for looking.  Please leave comments below :-)

Body Built From Rounded Or Circular Forms (1 of 2)

Tonight I moved ahead to drawing some dogs using circular forms.  With this exercise, I tried drawing larger than what I was looking at in the book.  I got myself into a bit of trouble as I was trying to blow everything up.  I missed proportions and in some cases, made body parts a bit puffier than they were supposed to be.  Making accurate copies was harder than I thought it would be.  I'm posting two pages of work below, along with a scan of the lesson so that people can see where this is going (and so they won't wonder why I drew a cowering dog... I didn't make this up on my own).

I looked ahead in John K's lessons and can see that I skipped over his exercises in drawing toys.  I will give that a go once I wrap up this lesson (I'm about half way through the "bodies" lesson.    In looking ahead, I also noticed that he wants people to check the accuracy of their work, so I took a stab at it tonight with a couple of the dog drawings.  It's pretty obvious I messed up a lot of proportions, so at some point I may try to do these over.  I will most likely go back and check some of the previous work

I've also been shopping around for toys to sketch.  I mean, I have tons of superhero action figures, but no actual toys related to classic animation.  I will have to remedy this!!  More soon!!

Squash And Stretch On Heads

This was a fun exercise.  The dog in Blair's design is adorable and has lots of personality.  I rather enjoyed drawing him.  I admit I was quite intimidated by this exercise, at least at one point in the past.  The more I draw, the more I can see my thought process changing as I look at the book and make the sketches.  And that change in processing is coming through in the pencil.  The lines on the paper are beginning to flow a little more freely, and I like that.  More to come!

More Heads Constructed

I'm learning that there are subtle differences between each of the illustrated steps in the lessons.  For example, the illustrations of guidelines and framework vary ever so slightly from the finished illustrations.  I'm learning to look ahead to the the finished drawings to place my guidelines on my own paper, so as to avoid having to change things I may have already committed in my own drawings.  So here is today's exercise... more heads. 

Construction of the Head

These are two parts of the same initial exercise, learning how to draw an egg-shaped head from multiple angles.  I think mine are a bit to oval-ish but I'm learning a lot already.  Much of this is challenging because for me this is a totally new way of drawing, and I don't mind!!

Animation School

I've had this idea kicking around for a couple years now, that in my spare time (you know, all that spare time that I have just lying around, doing nothing), I would fashion together my own Animation Self-Study program, for no other reason than to teach myself how to make classic cartoons.  About a year or two ago, I actually sat down and made a list of books that I would want to get, most of which were used by animation schools in North America.  I recently revisited the idea of doing this, and in my travels, I stumbled upon a blog here that basically outlines everything that I wanted to teach myself, and much more.  As I dug deeper into the blog, I discovered that it's written by John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy, and that his starting point was the same as mine: follow all the lessons in the original Preston Blair books.  People following his online animation school are encouraged to blog their results, so I am joining the party because this is something I simply MUST do!!  If it kills me!!  By some accounts, my brain is much too old to be learning any of this, but I am just ignoring this and plowing ahead.  I believe I have the raw ability to animate; I simply need to draw, and draw, and draw.  So this blog will document my progress... I'll be doing my best to finish ALL the exercises and not skip over anything.  And if I'm really, really lucky, maybe I'll get to hear from JohnK.  Wish me luck!!