Schoolism SALE!!!

We must have all been very good this year as Santa has persuaded Schoolism to do another $100 off SALE!

They've got great courses in Character Design, Digital Painting, Storyboarding, Gesture Drawing, Caricature and more!

Anyone who has been following this blog for a few months will know that I did Stephen Silver's Character Design Course and I was very good! I learned so much and he is such an inspiring teacher. I have a few friends who have also done some of the other classes and they have also reported on how much theyve learned and are glad they signed up. Well worth the money!

So if your new years resolution is to get better at design, or painting, or drawing, why not treat yourself to one of these courses with your Christmas money?

If you miss out on the sale then you can still you my special discount code to get $50 OFF!

Jerry Loomy #2

The end has come for my Stephen Silver course on Schoolism. The last assignment was to redo a character design we did based on a brief from the first assignment. The blue one below is the revised version and at the bottom one is a comparison of the two.

The course has been so good! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve the foundations of their drawing and design. He covers a lot of bases, from shapes, silhouettes and rhythm, to hands, faces and feet, the importance of a sketchbook and also tips on being a professional in the industry.
Originally when I did my first Jerry Loomy, I felt pretty happy with the design but now in comparison to the newest one I can see all the weaknesses I had at the beginning but luckily Ive been able to improve on them and hopefully I will be able to keep up the motivation to carry on with Stephen's word of advice and inspiration.

Madame Cecile

Madame Cecile, your friendly Voodoo Queen of Louisiana.

This is a plain 3/4 view of Madame Cecile, developed from the thumbnail above. Apparently it's good to just pose the character like this before posing them in character poses. Not 100% happy with this, I dont think you can quite tell who she is supposed to be. I'm hoping when it comes to posing her character will really come out.

Head Studies

I really shouldn't post the first few images in this post cause they are just traced images, but I thought I would anyway as they are part of a head study that was daunting at first but I reckon the more of those I do, the better I'll get at understanding the mystery that is the human head and its expressions!

The other images are of a semi-realistic sketch of a models face then interpreted into caricatures based on basic shapes like circles, squares and triangles. Another tough exercise but kind of fun.

Silhouettes

Assignment No. 2 of my Character Design course with Stephen Silver, is tackling silhouettes at the early stage of designing a character in order to really explore shapes and forms before getting bogged down in all the details and to really get your imagination going.

The brief is to design 2 characters with the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde concept. After reading the cliff notes (I DID try to read the whole book but I just couldn't!) and looking at some other students ideas, I decided that my 2 characters would be women (as the Stevenson's story is predominantly a wiener-fest and the feminist inside me wanted to draw) based in the early 1900s. Jekyll is Madame Cecile, the local voodoo Queen of Louisiana and Hyde is an embodiment of the evil spirit Locyta, who Cecile often communicates with to access the afterlife in order to help her community with her magic. Deep. I know.

Madame Cecile.

Locyta.

Voodoo Reference.

Jerry Loomy

This is the first image from my first assignment on Stephen Silver's Character Design Course, taught online through Schoolism. He sets a character profile with about 15-20 differents attributes and students have to produce a line copy and coloured copy of their design. This is my version of Jerry Loomy, grumpy, old, car salesman from New York. I'd go to another car lot if I were you...

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!