Expression Reference Dump- Part 1
(via paperseverywhere)
A person who wants to learn how to draw contacted me with various questions and I thought it would be nice to share my tips and advices here. Enjoy! : - ] It’s quite long.
Part One:———————————————————————————————————-Some general tips:1) always always draw from your heart…
If you’re interested in storyboarding, these are things you can do to get better: life drawing, thumbnailing from films, drawing environment.
You can’t be figuring out your drawings while you’re storyboarding. That’s gotta be automatic, and automatic only comes from hours of doing.
Whether someone hires you or not, that’s not under your control. PRACTICING your craft is wholly under your control, and unrelated to job
Isn’t it great to know your skills will improve if you just put in the hours? Why would you not put in the hours??
Big hindrance to effective practice is feeling bummed because you’re doing it wrong. Do it for the fascination, you’ll learn more.
There’s no wrong way to make art (unlike math, unlike science). Everything you do ‘wrong’ is the right way to do something else.
Daniel Loxton @Daniel_Loxton @lawnrocket When folks ask abt art I often say: not everyone can win Boston marathon—but w practice, most healthy ppl can run a marathon
So this is what I produced today at the livestream session I had. What I did was to write down the very hard-to-read-notes on Michael Mentler’s sketches from his anatomy thread: “Book of Bones” on conceptart.org. About 95% of the information here comes from mentler’s knowledge, this is really just how I study stuff personally, so ALL CRED goes to this awesome dude. People wanted to see this stuff afterwards, so I made a post with the finished content.
Make sure to check out Mentler’s thread, you’ll find tons and tons of more stuff there + his drawings are hngngngng<3
anyway, let’s get started:
And here is PART 2:
Please Note: The “homework” part is something I made up myself. And by “extra weight”, I do not mean *only* pregnant women, but also stuff like carrying a heavy bag with one arm, or wearing a very heavy backpack (this would work best drawn in profile view in order to show how the mass distribution keeps the body balanced).
Also note the colors used in the last examples.
The two first have are balanced, we can see this because the cyan and red colors are more or less evenly distributed (using the line of gravity as a “border”). But on the last one to the right, there’s more red. Which also proves that the body is unbalanced, and that the person will trip and fall any moment.
(via thecandyjar)
I admit, I like to draw things that I find aesthetically appealing. I’m not above that.
That said, it’s important to me that a character is able to emote. When I’m drawing a guy, I usually know how to draw him emoting while still keeping the set of visual symbols that make the character attractive. If I only drew a ‘default’ anatomically correct face that couldn’t emote, I’d get bored. It would be easier, but, yeah. Very boring. I suspect other people looking at my work would feel the same way.
Illustrated women, on the other hand, often seem much more limited in their ability to “emote while being attractive”. Since our Western idea of what makes a woman attractive is much more limited than our idea of what makes a man attractive, we have been given a much more limited set of “attractive female” facial symbols to work with, than we have been given for men. It makes the prospect of drawing a woman really emoting daunting, challenging, and for some people, apparently not worth the effort. Since it’s so important to many illustrators that their females be attractive at ALL times, a lot of people don’t even bother with trying to give their women a little more… well, character.
I understand whya lot of illustrators shy away from drawing women making “crazy” faces. Yeah, it’s tough to do, especially if you’re concerned with maintaining aesthetic appeal. For me, as an illustrator, it’s worth the trouble. I gotta say, looking at galleries and comic books full of women making the same two bedroom eyes/sweet smile faces is incredibly boring. And asinine. It might be worth it for you to learn how to draw women emoting, too.
I think sticking with the bedroom eyes status quo is lazy. And, it’s a copout. And, you can do better. Yes, you CAN learn to do it. The alternative is that your women are as boring as paste. They look so generic that they fade entirely into the background and stop even registering as “attractive” after a while, which defeats your point entirely, doesn’t it?
These are all taken from the same Nicki Minaj video. I hope someone out there finds them as inspiring and useful as I do.
(via joannaestep)
This is something very important to take note of in any medium. It’s all about communication, and no one acts the same way to everyone, even among a group of friends.
