Animation with a moustache

The animation with a .... je ne sais quoi!

Category: Drawings

“can you draw the nose without the nostrils?” 0

Drawings

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“can you draw the nose without the nostrils?”

Beata

Tonight was my last drawing class for this term and once again my teacher decided to give me a hard time.

I have had two teachers this term. One that would pat us on the back congratulating us on our work: “you are doing fine”, then would disappear for the rest of the hour to probably smoke a whole pack of cigarettes or hang out at the school’s café while, I, would share the teaching of Andrew Loomis and Glen Vilppu.

The second teacher has been trained at a tough russian fine art school and would instead draw with us and try her hardest to teach us life drawing but there is one big problem, she is a very good artist but she completely forgot what it means to begin in life drawing. Very often she would come to our easel making completely useless comments. “The proportions are off, imagine you saw that person in a restaurant, wouldn’t you be scared? can you see why is wrong now?”. Of course not! If I could i would correct it! Man this drove me nuts. Luckily once in a while, the ramblings would be followed by some amazing tips….

This week, she noticed I was really struggling drawing the subtle changes of shadow of the nose and asked me: “can you draw the nose without the nostrils?”…. well of course not and why would I? When you have two big black marks right in the middle of the face, why wouldn’t use them as landmarks?

After nearly 20 minutes of rambling and argument she eventually drew a simplified representation of the nose using shaded planes…. man THAT was useful! I had seen similar drawings in the Loomis books but completely forgot about it. If you can break down the face and probably the body in term of planes, things are so much simpler and you might not even need a model anymore.

Here we go, as Glen Vilppu would say, I have now got one more tool in my life drawing toolset alongside my knowledge of anatomy, proportions, volume and “academic observation”.

I just found a great link to most of the books you need for life drawing. Check out Alberto Ruiz’s amazing blog:

http://processjunkie.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Tom Fluharty Chiustream 0

Animation / Drawings

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Tom Fluharty Chiustream

man one more amazing Chiustream interview with Oil Painter Tom Fluharty.

I never expected to hear about Rembrandt, cad reds and ultramarine on the Chiustream but yeah, they did!!!

I had never head about Tom Fluharty previously but Tom is once again a crazy inspiring artists.

“You make want to break out the oil paints and start painting right now” says Bobby. I definitely agree!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5570014

Interesting is also seem to be suffering from RSI like “Cheeks”.

Life drawing week 03 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing week 03

Here are my latest drawings. Two long poses.

I tried to think about the composition a bit more this time. The thumbnails on the top left corner are the base for my composition.

I wasn’t too happy the way things were going for the first one and restarted from scratch, which didn’t leave me with enough time to finish the pose. I had in mind to incorporate the little platform the model was standing on originally but realised that it didn’t present much interest so I decided to go for something tighter, with the feet fading away.

The second one is pretty good, but the model is way to high on the page. The foot is better than my last attempt but the hands, especially the right one would have needed more work. The quality of the line is still very poor but I am working on that.

Things are getting better and better I feel and there is definitely some improvements compared my first drawings. My skills in drawing from imagination have also dramatically improved and I can now draw different body parts without reference.

Those two drawing will probably be my last pencil shaded piece as I feel it is now time to move to Oil painting. I have been told that moving to paint would help me to improve my drawing skills and Painting is also something I always wanted to try but never found a good teacher/course until now.

Marc

Robert

Life drawing session 03 0

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing session 03

Here is the pose we worked on yesterday with Marc again. 1h40 pose. Longer poses are great as they allow for corrections and trying different techniques. I got stuck with the feet so moved on to do some shading in order to define the belly a bit better and try to create some volume.

Contains nudity

session 03

Life drawing session 01 1

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing session 01

Working in Guildford is just as good as London as I found an Art center offering evening life drawing classes. I enrolled to two life drawing classes and 1 watercolour painting class. It has only been a week but this is looking really promising. The teachers in both classes are really good artists … which doesn’t mean they are good teachers but I have some of Glen Vilppu tapes and the Force: Dynamic Life drawing for animators book which are really helpful.

I regularly sketch from memory while commuting on the train but the first drawing proved really overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start!

Hit the link for my drawings. Obviously this post contains nudity

Here are my first drawings for this week, mainly 20 minutes poses. I was trying to get the proportions right but also experimenting with different styles and type of shading and I am learning a lot!

Angouleme International Comics festival 2010 2

Drawings

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Angouleme International Comics festival 2010

Angouleme festival

Angouleme festival

Well, well, well…. It looks like I might be able to make it to the Angouleme International Comics Festival this year. It is running from the 28th to the 31st of January in the gorgeous town of Angouleme.

http://www.bdangouleme.com/

Just for a reminder, as well as some NLP and Reframing tips, here is what Bobby Chiu had to say about the festival after visiting it last year:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN3l7OTcEjI[/youtube]

Bill Presing also posted some pictures on his blog last year:

http://billpresing.blogspot.com/2008/02/destination-france-final-chapter.html

Is anyone else interested in going? I have no clue what kind of accommodation I will organize but I am sure it will be fine.

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Back from Angouleme 5

Animation / Drawings

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Back from Angouleme

Cobbled street of Angouleme

As some of you might know, during the Annecy animation festival I got myself a great gig at animation studio “2 minutes” in the capital of “Bande dessinées”: Angoulême.

Angoulême is a gorgeous historic town, ideally located between Paris and the basque country, not too far from the seaside resort of also gorgeous La Rochelle and Royan. Angoulême is a fortified town with cobbled street located on top of the “Plateau”, a huge hill overlooking the Charente river.

All the houses are made of white stone which gives it that historic middle-age feeling.

[…] (more…)

The importance of the tools when drawing 0

Drawings

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The importance of the tools when drawing

Just to balance things up a bit with my previous post here is a funny video from Sheldon Arts Academy on Youtube regarding the importance of the tools when drawing 😉

[youtube width=”470″ height=”344″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ4NsCqZ_T4&feature=channel[/youtube]