Final Life Drawing Portfolio...EVER

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.

Hippie

Been super busy with my film as well as those damn electives lately. I haven't had the opportunity to work on my film as much these past few weeks due to the amount of work that piled up for them near the end. Bit of a bummer since all I want to do is work on my film. 

ANYWAY...less electives complaining since that happens too often at school, here's a doodle of a hippie I made today as a warm of that is sort of based on a life drawing to tide you over until I post thesis film stuff again. 

I'll post film stuff very soon such as my animation tests. I'll also probably post during my winter break of a description of my film! The break's in a few weeks and although I'm excited for it, I'll be spending those 3 weeks still at school in the studio working on my film. 

NO BREAKS UNTIL I'M DONE!

Life Drawing Dump

Just a small life drawing dump. This semester has been really relaxed when it comes to life drawing. Now it's all themed costumes and focusing on character personalities within the drawings as well as exploration of different mediums to draw. This semester has been so liberating and it's mostly been a "Do what you want!" kind of attitude it's great. 

Here's just a snippet from one session involving the model dressed as a butler. That was probably the best session I had so far and had a lot fun and neat drawings from gestures to sustained ones:

Here's some from a session with the model as a cowboy using marker!

I really like the contrast between these last two. One being a more realistic approach to drawing the model and the other a simple graphic caricature of him.

Hero & Villain - Fashion Designers

We had to do another one of those things where we take a life drawing and push it into a character, our direction this time was to make a hero and a villain. So rather than do a cliché hero and villain in a sci fi or fantasy setting, I wanted to try something different and I decided to do characters based off fashion models/designers. 

I've always been fascinated by how outlandish the designs are of haute couture fashion and always thought their designs and approach could be applied to character design the same way their designs are distilled into typical clothing. I looked mostly into Alexander McQueen's stuff since they tend to have very striking imagery, unusual texture, and extremely strong silhouettes. I also just really wished more mainstream animation took designs tips from haute couture fashion, some interesting imagery could arise from it. Some films have that feeling such as The Fall thanks to Eiko Ishioka's wonderful and creative costume designs and many of Coleen Atwood's work. 

Anyway here's my villain Eloise Von Snoot:

Former fashion model turned fashion designer and couturier, Eloise has become one of the top designers in the industry only second to Lillian.

Top left is the original life drawing done in ink. Originally a hero stance and a typical medieval-fantasy like character, it slowly evolved into something more sinister. It is really fascinating to see the slow evolution from the original to the final. Eloise's silhouette is taken from one of Alexander Mcqueen's Savage Beauty designs. Ever since I came across that image I just had to incorporate the silhouette somehow into an evil character at one point. 

Meet Lillian Forsythe:

Lillian has been a model since she was 3 for children's clothing. At the age of 16 Lillian started her own fashion label which quickly rose to popularity in a couple years. She was declared the #1 Top Fashion Designer for 3 years in a row. Lillian is known for modelling her own designs down the runway.

Here's the original drawings and some roughs that got to the final. Her clothes are a mix of a ton of fashion designs I looked up as reference. I think it turned out fine, I just wish I had more time to refine her design and maybe push it even more like Eloise's. 

Caricature Sculpture

We got to sculpt the model and caricature him! It was a ton of fun and extremely relaxing. The time flew by as we did it and I heavily enjoyed the process.

I was on the fence about adding eyes but I really liked, from my position at least, how the light was coming from above and casting a dark shadow because of the eyebrows I made. I decided not to put any and (if lit correctly) gives it this feeling he's looking pretty far. I really digged this assignment!

Royal Winter Fair

Some drawings I did from The Royal Winter Fair!

We had to make an illustration based off a drawing we did while we were there. My friend and I wanted to go see the sheep herding event, so we did and we drew. It was also very entertaining and cool to see how the border collies were so well trained to always move the sheep towards the owner. 

I found the way the sheep reacted and moved to be humorous. They always looked extremely scared and whenever they moved as a group, they always created this nice flowing composition that directed your attention back towards the dog which is what I did for this illustration. I made sure the bunched up sheep had some sort of flow that pointed back towards the dog. 

And the page of extremely rough sketches of the sheep herding event.

Some sketches from The Royal Winter Fair.

 Lots of sheep because there weren't much animals out when we went for some weird reason apart from the sheep. Even then, there weren't much sheep out either. I was looking forward to drawing birds but the entire area where they would be was just empty cages. I was sad.