Animation with a moustache

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

Tagged: life drawing

Life drawing obscurantism 2

Drawings / Portfolio

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Life drawing obscurantism

Some time ago, my friend Annes sent me a link to a different Life Drawing class that I would possibly enjoy more than the one I am currently attending and everything finally made sense.

In life drawing, there seem to be a predominant “school of thought” that believes in learning by pure academic observation. That “London Atelier of Representational Art” (LARA) in Clapham Junction, even goes to the extreme of forcing you to draw using a “Sight-size method”. As they describe it, here is how it works:

“the artist first sets a vantage point where the subject and the drawing surface appear to be the same size. Then, using a variety of measuring tools – which can include strings, sticks, mirrors, levels, and plumb-bobs – the artist draws the subject so that, when viewed from the set vantage point, the drawing and the subject have exactly the same dimensions.”

I think “academic observation” is very valuable when drawing from the model but as Glenn Villpu implies it in his theory and instructional material. This is just, one tool!

How long is it going to take you to finally be able to work as an animator, illustrator, storyboard artist and draw from imagination then? Years and years and years and years!

Why not instead, add more tools to your toolset. Why no try to understand the underlying structure of the figure? What about learning proportions and the different parts of the skeleton but also the few muscles that shape the surface of the skin? How to represent the figure in simple geometric shapes?

What about learning … the Structure!

The big problem with the “Academic observation” approach is that you only discover the elements of the structure through experiencing them, this can take a very long time. It is what I would call “brute force life drawing” teaching. But there is a smarter way!

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer published a great paper a while ago, about “the Role of deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”. The paper is a bit dry so you would be forgiven to skip to something a bit more approachable and that great article from CNN called “The secret of greatness”.

What those articles try to demonstrate is the importance of having a plan when learning and focus your practice on specific areas. This is what they call “Deliberate practice“. “Brute force” learning is great but it is definitely not the deliberate practice sort of approach.

Where can we learn about structure? well Glenn Villpu is the obvious start, then all the AWESOME blogs, Dreamworks storyboard artist and life drawing teacher, Rad Sechrist, is part of!

Rad How To
Analytical figure drawing
Advance figure drawing
The Art Center

Reading those blogs and learning what is on display should help you improve tenfolds!

I would also recommend Andrew Loomis pdfs as a start actually and this great 1890 book by french Dr Paul Richer
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205846w.planchecontact.r=richer.f145.langEN where he shows the relationship of the head height to the rest of the body.

To finish this post, here are my two last drawings from my thursday class:
Contains nudity
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“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

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!