Madame Cecile is coming to life!

Really got to work hard on this character this weekend, and I think that I'm starting to really get a sense of who she is. Designing the face is so damn hard but I guess it is the most important feature for a character!

What do you think? What kind of person is she coming across to you as?

Les Visages

Some different head designs for my Madame Cecile character. I have the terrible habit of drawing one face shape and then drawing the same face over and over and over again, thinking that Im exploring different ideas, but really Im not! Here Ive really tried to explore various head shapes, facial proportions and expressions. What ones are you feeling?

Madame Cecile Poses

Candles

Parc Merveilleux - Luxembourg

Last weekend I went to a local animal park (not technically a zoo...I dont know why) and I wasnt expecting much but it was actually brilliant!!! A cracking array of animals on show. My favourites were probably the Raccoons, they were so sweet, in particular a really old one who couldnt quite walk straight and sporadically feel over. So CUTE!

Hopefully Ill make a few more trips there before the weather turns mean and then try making some characters from my studies. Im thinking the Emus could be really fun. So keep coming back to see how that goes!

Animal drawing has always been a weak point of mine, so any pointers or comments would be greatly appreciated!

Fierce FX!

http://mattmantimms.blogspot.com/

Just a quick post about a wonderful short Street Fight animation featuring mind blowing FX animation by my boyfriend Matt Timms and character animation by Laurent Rossi. Click on the image or link to see the MAGIC!

Going to the Zoo

Bit of an unusual post for me this evening. In preparation for going to this 'zoo' (it's more like a small animal park, no lions or tigers or bears, oh my) weekend because the sunshine has finally come to Luxembourg this summer, I like to be a bit of a drawing nerd and research animal anatomy and do artist studies as a starting point and get myself into the mind frame for drawing. I know that there will be parrots at the zoo this weekend, so after reading Mike Mattesi's new FORCE book on animals drawing, I did some sketches and also tried doing character sketches like the ones above. Ill scan in my other with my results from Saturday's session.

Faces Progress

For those of you beautiful people who stop by fairly often, I'm sure you have noticed the abundance of facial studies I've been doing. The 100 faces was challenging and to be honest by the time I got to 40, I was pretty bored, but I knew that I had to stick as it to learn more about distinctive traits of older and older faces.

By no means would I consider myself good at faces/heads now, but as I sat down tonight to do some face ideas for my Madame Cecile character, I did notice a new found confidence in my drawing and by doing the 100 faces I discovered some useful traits that I could put in her design as she is in her mid 30s and looking a bit tired.

So I wanted to share with you 2 sets of heads I have drawn recently. The top ones in grey, I drew this evening after doing some more studies but this time just on the eyes. The ones below I drew about a week or two ago before studying heads at all. I think the difference is pretty evident!!! To my surprise! I'm feeling quite chuffed with myself cause forever, faces have been (one of) my Achilles' heel! I avoided them as much as I could but now I just wanna draw more and more!

If I can find the time...I have a little game I'd like you all to play! Stay tuned...

0 to 100

So it took my 2 days to do! Probably about 4 hours in total. Who'd have thunk it would take that long to draw 100 of something. Above is a low res image of all 100 (cause some are shockingly bad and I dont want you to see them :P) but below are some of my stronger ones.

0 to 50

As an attempt to get better at faces, Ive come back to my 0 to 100 PROJECT app, that showcases some interesting faces of people of each age, but different genders, ethnicity, nationality, style, etc. Great practise. I can feel myself getting a little better but can tell I have a looooong way to go. Ive attached this image of years 0-50, some are just terrible and hideous but you gotta show your least favourite work aswell as your most. Be nice! Next 50 tomorrow? Maybe.

Pixelovely Drawing

Inspired by my friend DAVID WOJCIK, who has started reading and taking tips from MIKE MATTESI's books, I dug up my copy of his Life Drawing for Character Design book and had another read. Whenever I read it before, I was like, 'Yeah, I get it...force, angles, easy peesy!' But I really didn't understand it! Over the last few months I've been practising as much as I can with drawing generally and last night after reading through the first chapter, I did some more online life drawing, courtesy of PIXELOVELY. NOW...I feel like I really do understand what he is talking about.

Manuel: The "Muscle"

Book Release!

It's here! It's finally here! So please if you have a computer, a Kindle, an iPad, and iPhone or an Android phone, get over to Amazon and get yourself a copy of this bad boy!

The debut book written by my dear friend Andrew Moore (also check out his film blog) and illustrated by me that has been in the making for close to a year is now available to the public for the cheap as chips price of £2.30.

CLICK ME!

Merci beaucoup!

Wha-cha!

Working on some new stuff to beef up my portfolio such as groups of characters. I might possible take Ninjas as a theme or maybe Cowboys to go with a previous design. This was based on some costumed life drawing I did a while back.

Luxembourgish Market Man

This character design is based off of a sketchbook doodle I did a few sketchcrawls ago. Every other Saturday in Luxembourg city, there is an anitques market on one of the main squares. This chap is there everytime just sitting on his little stool while tourists finger through his curiosities.

PS. My favourite thing to draw in the whole world is a larger person in stripes! Caricature GOLD!

Old Shizzle

Updating my portfolio this weekend, I tried to dig out some old sketchbooks that I hadn't scanned but to my astonishment, I couldnt find them anywhere! After a few days panic at lost sketchbooks, Matt came home and found them sitting in the corner! Yey! So here's just some doodles that I did during my time in Annecy this year...usually when the Animes were on....OOOOH...BURN! Im kidding, Tibetan Dog was actually OK. Forget Colorful though...