Online Life Drawing

So now the new portfolio and show reel, are all done and dusted and ready to go off to Annecy, and the fact that I am between projects for a couple of months, I made a conscious effort to really motivate myself and collect lots of resources ready to really boost my learning and drawing skills.

I ordered David Colman's Art of Character Design DVD, (which can be purchased through his personal website) and watched that this week....and WOW! How it has opened my eyes. I had never before considered a character design to need composition like a painting or whole concept piece needs, I thought I was pushing my designs enough but he showed my how and why it should be done. I highly recommend this DVD to anyone interested in character design, it's on £18 including postage but priceless for the information he shares.


So, with this new found knowledge and inspiration, I wanted to get drawing again. New stuff this time. I really loved the tutorial he gave on drawing information from a life model in order to create a story an appealing character.

Pixelovely has a wonderful website, designed especially for gesture drawing. It has a stock of photographs of life models, male, female, nude or clothed, as well as animal photographs, which also allows you to choose an amount of time you want to view the model for, e.g. 30secs, 60 secs, 2 mins, etc.

The models are exceptional and if you can keep the poses displayed for a shorter amount of time you dont lose any of the spontaneity you get with a real life model.

With this awesome tool, I tried to tackle life drawing with all the things David Colman spoke of and I really did notice a change! Unfortunately only for the clothed models, I am still struggling adding character to the nudes!

Here is a selection of new sketches. Some stayed within the 2 minute margin but shhhh...I did pause some of them to get more details in!














Ill be excited to take some of these poses into Photoshop and create a finalised character based on them. I can really see a diffference in some of the drawing just since watching the DVD. If you've got time, go back and see some of my gesture drawing from a few months ago. Big step! Yey! I'm learneding!

After Annecy, I will be taking Stephen Silver's Character Design course, so hopefully this time next month Ill be shit hot!