Waiting Rooms

I ended up sitting in two different waiting rooms yesterday, so I got a lot of long sitting poses. I was told after the fact that the guy in the bottom right is NASCAR driver Mark Martin. You can tell, can't you?

Mall Sketches - 8/ 27

I was noticing people's sizes a lot yesterday. The basketball-player-sized husband and his stout wife, the mother leaning over her son, making sure he doesn't fall in while tossing a coin in to the fountain. I also saw this particularly buff guy and his young son. I tried pushing his shape, focusing more on what I felt than what was right there in front of me.

It's still a hard for me to get comfortable when I'm sitting out in public just, well, staring at people. I always feel at least a little tense, worried someone's going to take umbrage at my attempts to draw them (or worse, ask to see my sketchbook!). Eventually I loosen up and stop agonizing so much, and I get some good sketches. It's just as much an exercise in getting comfortable watching people as it is drawing them.

Sketching Girl

From photo reference.

New Storyboard

Two guys arguing over an egg. I'm happy with the flow, and I had a lot of fun drawing these two characters. I could probably be a little more ambitious in my initial camera placements though. I have some extra time before this is due, so I'll probably fiddle with it before turning it in.

Ladies with swords

Drawn from photo reference. I'm trying to be conscious of silhouettes while drawing the figure, using negative space to break up the shape and add visual interest.

Hands

I spent yesterday afternoon copying hands from various model sheets, trying to learn by doing. Then I filled a few pages with hands out of my head. One of the lessons I learned was to remember that the middle, not the index finger, is the longest finger on the hand. It seems so common sense, but I always had a habit of making the index finger longer and shrinking the others. Just this one little fix went a long way towards improving my hands.

A Brief Introduction

This was one of the original ideas for my first storyboard assignment. I decided to make it anyways as an exercise in showing movement and action in my boards.

Hurricane Fay is on its way here...slowly. Hope I don't lose power tomorrow.

Shot Class

Just finished my second storyboard assignment. We had to basically dissect a scene from a movie or TV show, explaining how the shot choices helped create whatever emotions the director intended.

Originally I was going to do a scene from Star Wars, but decided at the last minute to challenge myself with something more character, rather than action, driven. I chose a scene from Ocean's 12, near the beginning when Terry Benedict shows up. I went shot by shot, drawing a sort of reverse storyboard, trying to figure out what each angle was trying to say. I don't know if I caught everything, but I really felt like I learned a lot about the scene and how the shot choices helped tell the story.

I probably spent way longer than necessary drawing out the storyboard. I think I only needed to block in shapes rather than draw out stuff like faces. Ah well. It was still good practice.

Here's the clip:

Jessica reading

Jess just blew through the first two books in that Twilight Saga everyone's talking about.

Mall Doodles

This is the last weekend before school starts, so the mall was packed yesterday. In the middle of the mall is this big bungee jumparoo thing for kids, so it's a good chance to draw children.

I'm reading over Walt Stanchfield's notes again. They're a great resource for learning to draw gestures and distilling the essence of the figure.

More Olympic Ladies

Volleyball was on last night...

Verbs vs. Nouns

I'm learning to think more about clarity of the figure over accuracy. I pulled up some videos of Olympic events on YouTube and tried sketching the actions being performed instead of just copying figures. The punch instead of the arm. The verb instead of the noun. The results are, as always, a little mixed. It's hard to ignore the part of the artist brain trained to see life in terms of muscle, bone and gravity. What I want, ultimately, is to improve my storyboarding, where the figure is of secondary importance to what it's doing.

I'm hitting a plateau in my art again but I've learned the fastest way to move forward is to take a step or two back. Entering unfamiliar territory means accepting the role of the neophyte who doesn't know everything yet, and letting go of approaches and solutions that had been working for so long.

Storyboardin'

I started my storyboarding class with Kris Pearn at Schoolism.com last week. Our first assignment is an open-ended, "How much do you know" kind of project. This was my first real storyboard since college, so most of my time was spent figuring out an approach I would be comfortable with.

My first attempt was with panels almost as large as a full page. I figured it would be easier to work large and loose, avoiding the chance of an overly cluttered, unreadable panel. I'd scan in each shot and put in simple tones in Photoshop. After some trial and error, I settled on an approach that I was sorta kinda happy with.

I flipped through my finished storyboard and felt, quite frankly, kinda "blah" about it. There wasn't much energy in the drawings. The shading was more distracting than helpful. The pacing felt wrong. I decided to scrap the whole thing and start over. This time I shrunk down the panels, cramming eight to a page. I also grabbed a warm 30% grey marker for my shading. This time around I felt more energy, more life in what I was making. The panels didn't feel so big and intimidating, so I was more relaxed, adding in and taking out panels with relative ease. I knocked out my entire 20-shot storyboard in about thirty minutes, and putting in my tones felt much more natural with the marker over the computer.

I'm not saying my work is god's gift to storyboarding or anything--I haven't even scratched the surface--but it was a big achievement for me personally just to overcome those first hurdles and I'm looking forward to the next challenge.

Patchwork Kitty Painting

My girlfriend started a new blog on Blogger so I whipped up a quick painting for it. She's an amazing seamstress, and you should all take a moment to peruse her portfolio.

Dragonborn

The new edition of Dungeons and Dragons is out. One of the races you can play is the dragonborn, which is just a fancy way of saying "half-dragon". It's been so long since I've played D&D as a character. I'm always the one behind the Dungeon Master's screen, so I don't get to play with the new races and classes like everyone else does. Maybe I'll find a group to join wherever I end up next but until then I'll just doodle some half-dragons.

New blog and some zoo sketches

Took a trip to the Sanford Zoo yesterday. The monkeys were fun to draw, though you only had about five seconds before they started jumping around their enclosure. They clearly had somewhere they needed to be...