Quest for Glory: So you want to be an artist?

[2ma2]

Well, drawing is a two edged sword. All I can teach is how to improve your technical knowledge, sadly that removes the core of your expression, namely the naïve values of your work. You stop being unique as soon you pick up a pencil in the pursuit of mimicing some other peoples work. Nothing wrong about that, people tend to mimic what they like, and few people study so hard they remove the sense of individuality within their work. But every exercise takes away a bit of you. Bear in mind that before you proceed. There are a hundred people that can draw like Rembrandt, but only one that can draw like you.

Step 0: There are two parts of drawing. One is technical advancement in your hand; the way you can move your tool in the way you want it to. The second is experience; knowing HOW to achieve the effect you want. We'll focus this pre-step on the first of the two, namely TEChniCAL ADvANCEMENT(!!111). I had the great honour to study under Baron Yoshimoto, and his first lesson was brutal but effective. None of us followed it, but it is suitable if you are so called "unable to draw". The exercise is making lines on a piece of paper. Only lines. Long lines, short lines, wavy lines, straight lines.. Do this for a month, only to train up the eye to hand coordination in your hand of choice. Yes, I know, none of you will do this, but that is what differ inbetween people you find talented or not: eye-to-hand-coordination; the way of making lines where you want them to be. This is hard work, and you don't get it for free.


Step 1: The usage of guides. None of you demands that you make a good drawing from scratch. Step 0 helps you make clear sketches, nothing else. Use stickmen, because everyone can draw stickmen. Yes, even you. And you. But to draw GOOD stickmen is another situation all together. Firstly, with the stickmen, work with posture. Notice how this stickmens joints are juxtaposed? That is the no. 1 posture in nude drawings, because it gives dynamics AND relaxation to the body. Not saying that you MUST use this posture, it is only there to portray how the joints can be manipulated into delivering a mood. When your stickmen works, only then put some flesh onto it. I will develop this further on later.

Step 2 is proportion - AND how to mess with it. Whether you strife for realism, surrealism or plain cartoons, the proportions is your friend. Some people will disagree and spoke that the expression is above proportions, but I say, a solid expression made with correct proportions is to strife for. So what is proportion. It is how large parts of the body are compared to each other. THIS IS EASILY TRAINED USING STICKMEN.. again. Start with the head, for realism, make a body about 7 heads. 8 is the ideal, but none of us are 8 heads tall. Really, it all smells race biology. The Indy sprite in FoA is 5 heads. Still realistic. My other example is 4 heads. Big heads, smaller bodies (even though that looks like a baby, but with adult proportions of the torso and legs). The reason you often enlarge the head is that the face is the key element of characters and expression, you deliver through facial expression and exaggeration. Well the face and hands actually, but the face is what brings us to...

Step 3: Face proportions. This is how parts relate to eachother on the face. The eyes are middle, and one eyes width apart. Mouth ends by pupils. Nose placed about middle inbetween chin and eyes etc etc. But lets mess with that. Because frankly, that face is boooring.

Step 4a: Here we use the face proportions correctly within weird shapes. And this is not only an experiment, always work with shapes before adding detail (Step 4b). Remember our stickman? Give your stickman different shaped heads and different shaped bodies. We then destroy the proportions in our lower examples where the forehead is removed, but the ears still follow the eyes. Or the opposite, a abnormly large forehead.Ã,  To maintain a sense of proportion within the warped piece, always start from correct proportion and stretch some out while maintaining others. There are no rules about this, only the experiment and decision whether the result is appealing or not. I will develop this further aswell later.

Step 4b works with 3dimensional shapes to form a fablelike creature. The core is here that several shapes are formed together to produce a whole. Regarding your pieces as a 3dimensional shape helps you portraying your character in all angles, and all actions. And remember SIMPLE IS BEST. Always..

This is Part One. If you want to reply, do this ONLY to debate elements of the lessons. Please don't fill this with "Wow, thanks!" or "You suxx0rs.." please.

[2ma2]

Allright, lets get back to Step 1, using stickfigures.


Here we have several moods depicted WITHOUT any usage of facial traits or symbols to deliver them. The first is a confident posture, the second a rather gloomed view of life. Then we have two gentlemen, the first suave, the second scared. By using the shoulders and stance to deliver, we could easily remove the hat and cane, and have simply a man/woman either relaxed or far from relaxed. Then we have a curdled stance and finally someone either really pissed or having the worst case of gas ever.

The core elements here are neck, shoulders and hips. The feet is placed where gravity needs them to be - if not, the person will seem to be unbalanced. The head is a continuation of the neck, and the torso just follows the shoulders and hips. But the CORE ELEMENTS are NECK, SHOULDERS, HIPS.

We have three lines; one being the neck, following down with the spine. The others move from shoulder to hip, creating a flat torso. With these, you can easily produce stances and posture, aswell as twisting and turning your flat shaped stickman into the desired results.

Now, here you can take a photograph and trace these lines; the neck+spine and the shoulders to hips; in order to analyze the posture.

I personally love the girl traced in orange. Great posture, confident, selfassure. The green girl looks a bit troubled, her stance points all over the place. The blue boy is simply a normal stance. Nothing special at all. Oh and look. There's young Helm in the back.

Let's get back to our first two postures and work with them. Perhaps not realistic, but exaggeration can be used to increase the expression, WHILE NOT ruining the proportions. If you look, there is still the same proportions within the body, but the expression is even greater. The first is confident as hell, and the second is in total despair.

Now, when we like our posture, we flesh the stickmen out, and ONLY then. I manipulated the confident stance even more with a wide chest and square figures, making a rigid and powerful superhero (even though that stance is now a parody). The second got a cone head and a round beer belly.

To fleshed out your stickman, still work with basic shapes. Circles, spheres, squares and cubes. They bring you a sense of form for your character, making it easy to portray the same character in every angle possible. It is like modelling in Bryce, only with a pen and fixed camera. When you feel confident about form and shape, you can skip this and model down more complex shapes such as the legs or hands.

This was Part 2; focusing on the Posture and usage of Stickmen.

[deadsuperhero]

Very good! *claps*

[Scummbuddy]

Don't congratulate 2ma2. The narcisist came back only for us to send birthday wishes.

Btw, Happy Birthday! Really nice work you've posted here. We always love an intoxicated little bunny.

[2ma2]

So let us discuss faces. Because faces are what makes characters. Well, not really. What is a face?

<- this?

._. <- this?

I think the latest try gives a rather good idea of what a face constitutes of; eyes and mouth. We are narcissists the lot of us, we see our face in everything; cars headlights and grill, the smileys, even an outlet. But the face main importancy lies in EYES and MOUTH. Yes you can skip nose, ears.. but not eyebrows, they are a vital part of the eye.

The japanese aren't that stupid. Behind those weird stylization lies focus on the EYES and MOUTH. The anime and manga stylization focus on making characters easy to relate to, with their slightly blank appearance spiced with a specific character trait that brings them apart.

What can be achieved with only eyes and mouth? Loads.

But even more can be accomplished with eyebrows.


When we've gone through these exercises, it is time to work on the face of our upcoming character. First thing is to get our basics down.

Remember this proportions? No? Eyes in the midde - nose and mouth get along in the space inbetween - ears from eyes to nose - mouth from pupil to pupil. Eyes one eyes width apart.

The most common error is to place the eyes to high. This because we focus on EYES and MOUTH. The forehead is completely useless information, and our inner vision of the human anatomy tends to get rid of the useless bits. Get a hold of childrens drawings - they are wonderful peeks into their inner world of symbols and stylization - and you'll see that a human is a face resting on two legs and with two arms, and LOADS of digits. How many is not important, only that they are many. Oh, and the sexual organ is peeing aswell. That is very important at that age. The child get's rid of the whole torso, because frankly, that is useless information.

But let us talk faces. We work with different shapes:

And mess with the proportions. It is usually wise to exaggerate only ONE trait and let the others follow. In our first example, we lenghten this forehead and fatten the eyebrows to make a grim appearance. The whole face has been squeezed downwards.

The black-metaller main traits are his sharp teeth. They don't show at all in the normal proportions, so we make the mouth 1/2 of the face and voila. Forehead is unimportant, so let's get rid of that, and the nose-ring is a somewhat important object so the nose need to be presented with that.

Then the baby. Let's do nothing but fatten the eyebrows and presto; a more adult appearance.

So, the key is to fiddle around with ONE or perhaps TWO elements of the face, depending on what is important for your character and their characteristics. And make sure the rest of the faces proportion follows your warped imagery. Or stick with the real proportions. It is your choice.

For my last example I work up a character from scratch, with a rather unusual shape, a triangle. I cut the corners directly making a hexagonal shape for my character.

Then I place the eyes accordingly to the correct proportions (middle and one eyes lenght apart). And the chin is important so the nose and mouth are raised somewhat. But the chin is really important for this character, so I lenghten it even more and make it slightly wider.

Then I add eyebrows, not too relaxed, I want him to be focused. Then I work on the chin even more, making it big and rigid. To finish it up, I add hair and 'burns - the burns being a juxtaposed angle to increase dynamics within the face. Done.

This was Part 3, about Faces and proportions.

[Mordalles]

here's a great heads tutorial to go with it. 

http://www.anticz.com/heads.htm

[Buckethead]

this makes me wanna draw characters with peronallity 

[2ma2]

Let us discuss shapes and tension.

These figures all represent a tension - the first being loose and mellow, the second sharp and energetic. The square is steady and rigid and the circle is plain and bears no special tension.

The usage of tension in your conceptual designs are an important feat - it bears with them energy and perhaps hostility or tranquility within their shapes. It all goes back to ourmost primal urges, where something round and mellow is regarded as friendly and blissful, and something jagged or sharp be regarded as dangerous or confrontational. NOTATE that the same is featured within colors where a highly saturated color may witness of poison or alure, where a blend, mellow saturation witness of earth at is kindest, or simply something that do not want to be found. The signal colours are a complex matter however, and so are shapes and tension. It is not easy to try to fit it into a compressed text, but let us give it a try.


Here we have the blend circle, with simply different hairstyles. The hair is useful for portraying different tensions within your character, and here we have different approaches deriving from the same blend core.


The same can be used within the bodies - shape of head and conjoined lines in the torso to produce different energy within seemingly same character.


BUT, often the best results comes from a combination of BOTH tension and looseness within the same piece. In this, the hair, chin and burns all work with juxtaposition in order to get tension and energy. In the same design, we have the round hair and head shape to dempen the energy and provide ease. It is not the best example ever made, I grant you that, but it serves to describe a way to make good energy without overblowing the piece with tention. Let us work with two examples.


First we work with stickmen, as before. The pose is here unbalanced, which is fixed in the second take.

Here we work with mellow shapes - roundness, no sharp edges. A lull and tranquil piece.

We finish it up, adding clothes and socks. Still very lull and peaceful.

So we return to the stickman and do another take:

Here we work with jagged lines and sharp corners. It is ammeaditly a more uptight version, not only because of slightly raised shoulders, but tension throughout his entire body.

We finish him off aswell with clothes and take a look. It is rigid and tense.
Now, both these takes may serve a purpose, but they are perhaps not the best pieces of imagery made. So let us combine the two and make the tense luller and the lull tenser.

Again, the hair is easy to work with, and so are clothes and shoes. Both characters still bear with them difference in tension, but at a lesser level. It is wise to combine both lull and jagged designs within the character, to achieve both balance and tension at the same time - not overdoing the tension, nor making a character that blends into the background.

This is ofcourse a matter of balancing both energetic and mellow shapes into the tension desired. There are no rules, nor tricks for achieving this, only practice and experimentation.

[Ghost]

Very interesting post, 2ma2, I really hope you'll extend this further.

Especially the article about the faces reminded me of  "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, which I'd like to put up as a small reading suggestion.

[Evil]

I agree. The previous posts seemed too beginner, but this Shapes and Tension was very interesting. I've always had a feel for the concept, but your post has some extremely good examples. I hope people reference these in the future and I hope to see some more of these myself.

[2ma2]

This update will be much text and little imagery. I apologise.


Let us discuss some aspects of the conceptual design of characters. Or better yet, the creative process behind conceptual design. If we start out with a tabula rasa, and empty slide, and work upon this. First off, this is not a blank, there are aspects even within a semi-naked body that brings forth characteristics and value - the body is male, thus assigning male characteristics (whether they be queer or brute) and fit, assigning some sort of athletic capacity. But the finer tunes of the design remain unspoken of - who is he, what does he do? What does he like, what does he strife for? What does he hate, and loathe? This is a matter of identity, and the answers are not easy to come by. The complexity of conceptual design to bring forth values and ideas throughout visual stimuli alone is immensive, but let us try to narrow it down to 3, or better yet 2, since the third being facial design. But let us leave faces behind and focus on the other 2, namely fashion and props.

The fashion is a fascinating subject since it interveins the whole history within itself. Just like art, the evolutions and revolutions of garments follow a series of anti-thesises and synthesises. From the clumsy and inpractical clothes of the nobles, made specifically to NOT work in, to the practical and slick garments of the working class - these ideas follow us still today with a compilation of both thesises into a mixture of practical and impractical. Long sleeves on a slick shirt or loose veils onto a tank-top basis - we are truly living the postmodernism age and all ideas battle for recognition within our fashion designers. BUT, fashion maybe even more fascinating in the earlier days. When we look back on our history, the fashion of said time brings the ideals and minds of those living in that time, whether it be Victorian England to San Fransisco in 1969. The notion of placing your story within a specific era brings naturally the collective ideas and believs of that era, and fashion does aswell. BUT, something even more interesting can be the usage of Punk - the notion of combining eras separated by time into a mixture of modern era postmodernism and history, whether it be Goth-Punk, Steam-Punk or Renessance-Punk. In such a design, we can bring forth not only the ideas and notions of said era, but also the collective ideas and history within our modern society. This is a decision made at Step 1 when making a story - the placement of the story within history, whether it be Contemporary (a look into the present), a Historical document (history looked through the eyes of the present), Sci-Fi (a look on a possible future based on the present) or Fantasy (a brave new world through the eyes of the present). No matter what you decide upon, you will bare with you the collective ideas of the present and all the knowledge we have and have inherited in the present time. In that sence, everything is Punk, just not as deliberate.


Since the fashion history is immense, I could go on making thousands of examples. I'll make two. Two takes on our nude gentleman. The first is some plush garments, a vest and something much like the late 1800's. Rough pants and boots increase the notion of a semi-worker - not the boss and not the treadmiller. The plush is highly impractical, thus would imply a somewhat lightened workload. The boots and rough pants however make him rougher than the average pencil pusher. Our second take is wide shoulderpads, t-shirt, narrowed pants and loafers which brings us into the eighties. He's slick and aware of his appearance. These two takes have inherited the ideas of the era presented - the industrial and intellectual development of the late 1800's and the capitalist trait of the 80's. The second take also brings forth our next subject, namely Props.

Props are objects that state something - it may be symbols or made symbols but either way, it brings forth an idea or notion about the character throughout its existance. Above we have Mr. Eighties with a tiny but significant Rolex. It might not show that much, but can be put to good use with an idle animation of him checking the time now and then. It will thus imply him being stressed or just impatient. Another set of props could be a fast car, or a slick briefcase.


To work with Props, we'll make our model into Joe Average - t-shirt, jeans and sneakers.

Now, first off we give him a badge and gun. He is a copper, defined only by his props. We exchange the badge for a cross. What the hell is he now? A christian acting as Gods Angel of Vengeance or just a plain Gangbanger? The nuances of this powerful symbol is highly useful, it beats even the gun, which in all senses are a most powerful prop, and the character can now be interpreted in a multitude of ways due to contradictory props. We exchange the gun for a camera. An oldschool camera, not the digital ones. This is crucial, because it makes him much more aware of the creative process behind the photos and not only an average christian tourist. The usage of a specific (and possibly older) instrument makes the character much more interested in the prop and its usage. It also superseed the cross, since there are no conflicts within the props. So we exchange the cross for a pentagram. What is he now? Wicca, or stupid hobby-satanist? Because of the values inherited within the symbol, this once again presents a conflict within the character - what value does the put on the symbol and has it any influence on the subject of his photography? If he is a professional photographer, would he still wear such a symbol? Or is he just a bit of rock and roll? Possibly..


So, we go back to fashion for a while, with a combination of practical and impractical garments once again. There are sturdy boots there, but a bit long innit? Is that due to functional reasons, the character behind literally knee-deep in feces in his shores, or is it an impractical design? We have a strict shirt, a tie which in most cases could best be described as a symbol prop rather than functional garment. This presents order - a well placed character, properly dressed etc. Add a vest which once again brings no actual functionality other than perhaps increase the warmth of the clothing. That and wide trousers. The whole presentation breathes 50's farmer or landlord, perhaps with his riding boots on, but they're shiny, almost military in their appearance. From the bottom half down, it could easily be depicted as an uniform so the final definitions of this hybrid of garments would be some sort of countryside fellow, proper and stern. His placement within time could be from 1940 to present days, all depending on the surrounding scenery. That covers alot, just with the usage of fashion. With a few Props, who knows what we could accomplish.