That's right! I finished my last life drawing course ever this past semester. What a long journey it's been. Since my first ever life drawing course in 2010, to my heavy obsession with it around 2012, and my final course dedicated to it now in 2016, I've taken such giant strides that I'm quite proud at where I am now. I never had experience with it until I came to college for art fundamentals and it's quite amazing to look back. I originally started with chicken scratch and now here I am!
Here's my final life drawing portfolio for my fourth year in animation! I focused more on improving caricature and acting this year. Of course my final pieces could be stronger in that regard but I am still pleased and proud of what I was able to create. I was even surprised at myself while making it, I didn't know I was capable of doing some of these pieces. I made the effort to attempt many different styles and approaches with my final portfolio and it led me to expand my shape language and learn a lot of things along the way. It's important to stray away from what you're comfortable with to learn and expand your work!
Without further ado:
"Pest"
Played around with a more sketchy style with a bit of Ronald Searle, and also played with different shapes and texture that I normally don't do. I looked into some french animation for other shapes! Even though I suck at layouts, I wanted to incorporate a minimal one to give it some grounding and a bit of context sort of like Hank Ketcham.
"Cold Water"
I wanted to push the proportions of this model as well as make it more graphic. I used a lot of shapes here that I normally don't and incorporated some more modern aesthetics into the design.
"Hitchhikers"
I wanted to play around with the physical format on this one. After struggling to figure out a decent composition for these two I had the clever idea of putting them two in a polaroid and it fit with the theme and tone of the characters that I was going for! Afterwards, I even printed it to scale of an actual polaroid. The style I did for this one was SUPER loose, I was holding my pen by the eraser side with my finger tips and just scribbled and scratched until I made shapes I liked such as Raff's head tilt.
"Regicide"
I really enjoy the style of Riccardo Guassco and Conor Whelan for its beautiful simplicity and basic shapes and colours. I wanted to take a tiny sketch/composition I made into a style similar to theirs with my own flair as well. I had a ton of fun making this the most and it took a lot longer to make because I was figuring the method out as I went along. This one is the one I learned from the most and probably my favourite from the bunch!
Here's an extra one I handed in with the portfolio. My teacher liked it a lot and thought I would throw it in there as well!
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Here are some life drawings throughout the semester! Apologies for the photo qualities, they're not the best...they were just quick pics to take home so I can work off them to create other pieces. Some are the original drawings of my final portfolio pieces! So it's cool to see progress! So enjoy some scribbles and gestures from my last life drawing class:
These were two separate drawings that I was going to combine, maybe I will someday soon.
