Anatomy study in depth

So I thought this time I will take a lot more time over the process of an anatomy study. There is a certain way that I have developed to draw the figure that i find works really well for me. I find that its more about thinking about what you are drawing when it comes to figure drawing, not just the final drawing.

so here it is, how my brain works when I do figure drawing most of the time.

The reference

Real life drawing is so much better but as its so much quicker and I just want to learn loads with lots of different models quickly I have been using this great you tube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/NewMastersAcademy

for this piece this was the reference I used

1)  I start by looking at the model and focusing on purely the pose and proportions, drawing simple lines, the blue lines are looking at what direction the pose is going in and things like the the gravity centre point  (if that's what its called) The black lines are the bones in a way and where the joints such as the knees and elbows are. I start with the direction of the shoulders, hips then the spine and go out from there.

2) The next step I take is adding in the muscle structure, as I can't see through this models skin and I don't know the ins and outs of the human body I make a good guess from muscles that I know are there and general shapes that make up the figure. Ideally this would help a lot more if I did know the full muscle structure of a human but that will come with time and lots of studying. 

3) Then I go onto putting the line in around the muscles as if you were tracing the outline of the model and using the muscle and shape structure as a base. 

4) next and nearly to the end its the fun bit of putting in the tonal values. Again having this base of bones and muscles (well something similar to) really helps figure out why the light and shadows make the different shapes on the figure. 

5) finally I add the finishing touches. 

I don't always go into depth this much with my figure drawing but this process does go through my head, even if it is very quick 30 second sketches. figure drawing is one of those things that I feel I will never master but i hope this helps those trying to improve there figure drawing.  

The pursuit of becoming a visual development artist (anatomy drawings)

Here is a collection of sketches, some quick and some more refined, that I have done over the past few weeks. Most of these human form studies are of the male form but I am now moving onto the female figure.

Even though I have been drawing mainly just the human form for the last few weeks I feel like it is something that you can never practice enough. I will continue to practice my anatomy drawings and am still trying to hit the target of a drawing a day. 

and a few I did a while back 

The pursuit to becoming a Visual Development Artist

So I have recently finished my degree at University in animation and visual effects and its time to get a job! I had been struggling for a while on deciding what it actually was I wanted to pursue as a career within the animation industry. There are so many aspects of animation that interest me and so many areas that I have had a go at and wish to do more of but it seems with this industry its hard to get a job if you like doing everything and don't really narrow yourself down to a specific area. I recently attended the Annecy animation festival in Frace for the second time which is an amazing festival and for those who haven't heard of it or been yourselves I highly recommend it. http://www.annecy.org/home.  Anyway this was an amazing eye opener for me again and made me realise that every company is different in many ways making it more difficult for me to understand the big question, How do I get a job in animation? 

The more I think about it and the more I find out it seems like there is no set way of getting a job, obviously being good at what you do and networking is a big part of that but most of the people I spoke to at the festival and stories i have heard from guest lecturers all have a different story to tell in how they broke there way into the industry. 

For about the last year I have been following the amazing artist Chris Oatly and his online site that offer's a great deal of knowledge and advice for students http://chrisoatley.com/. Over the last few months really thinking what it was I wanted to do was stressing me out, as I felt like there was so much pressure on getting a job in the industry straight out of university. But a great piece of advice from Mr Oatly really set things straight in my head and that advice was.... simply what is it that you are really passionate about? I'm really interested in loads of things within animation and visual effects and am inspired by everything but what was it that im really passionate about? and for me that is coming up with designs of characters that audiences fall in love with, designing environments that the audience gets completely lost in, creating moods and telling stories that engage people. 

So Becoming a Visual Development Artist is by far the job that I am passionate about. I know I haven't picked an easy one to break into but the most important thing to me is doing a job that I love for the rest of my life.

For the past year I was the writer/director/art director/character + environment artist/lead texture artist and other bits for the short film Headless which is in its final stages of completion so I haven't really had the time to specialise in the visual development side of things, bringing me to where I am now. Finished university wanting to become a visual development artist and not feeling like my work is strong enough so I have decided to take thing back to the basics and get better at drawing firstly brushing up on my human anatomy skills. I have set myself the task to make sure I draw at least once a day every day for as long as it takes until I produce work that will help me to achieve my goal as a visual development artist. 


so here are the first two sketches and hopefully over time I will improve more and more. 

Drawing

Just an update on a few of my life drawings and other drawings i have been doing.

Life Drawing

Sketchbook work

Pre Production Project

Another update on my pre production bible. I have altered my story for the third time but now am happy with it and have been focusing on getting all the design work for it done.

I started by going back to my art that i was given/chose. The art of Robert Crumb.

I decided to move away from the internet a bit and got a couple of books from the library on this amazing comic book artist.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crumb-Fabrice-Hergott/dp/2759601927/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&qid=1385656102&sr=8-22&keywords=robert+crumb

I soon found that this book was a far better resource than anything I could find on-line and would recomend it to anyone who is a fan of Robert Crumbs work. The book was just full of a wide variety of his work, so I started copying some of his crazy drawings trying to mimic his style even more.

my sketches.

I made sure I used pen as I found that practically all of Roberts work was done using ink. at the front of this book there is some scans of his old sketchbooks and it was really interesting to see some of the lines tippexed out where he had made a mistake. This made me appreciate his work even more as there wasn't many corrected lines. showing the level of skill he had as an illustrator. I have came to love working in pen as i find myself focusing so much on what I am actually drawing and not worrying about getting it perfect because I cant rub it out anyway.

portraiture

Drawing portraits has always been something that i have really enjoyed doing since i first started doing art and I'm not sure why, maybe because i feel that i can get allot of emotion across in a portraits more than that in a landscape painting and so on. I still find it odd how popular portraits are considering we see peoples faces every day are of are lives and still find it pleasing to look at a piece of art that is of someones face. maybe its because it is something we all recognize easily and after all it is how we get are emotions across to each other. so i started doing a lot of portrait drawings mainly going for a realistic style just with pencil. First it started as just a hobby but eventually came to a stage where people paid me to do portraits.


Here is a selection of portraits, drawing and paintings that i have done in the past and recently.

 My first attempt at doing an animal portrait, and surprisingly i found it easier to draw an animals face.

 This portrait was done using nothing but a blue biro pen.

acrylic painting on canvas

this was done very quickly using acrylic paint on an old peace of cardboard.

This painting was done again using acrylic on a canvas board, but this time i tried to make it as realistic as i could using a photo for reference. 

Backgrounds

Another one of are projects was to create animation backgrounds, this was one of my favorite projects as it was more of the stuff that i have done in the past and what i really love doing.

Exterior Background

 Interior Background

Animation Layout

We had to create three backgrounds all from a storyboard that we had done in the first semester which i was annoyed about because my storyboard was set in a forest which made every background the inside or out skirts of a forest which didn't give me much to work with.  we had to create an interior and exterior background plus an animation layout.

These three backgrounds i didn't particularly enjoy doing because it was from something i wasn't to keen on but on the other hand in the industry you cant really choose what backgrounds you do. I did enjoy painting them in ways purely because i hadn't done much of this stuff all year and it was nice to have something different. 

Buccaneer Animation Project

For this project we listened to a number of sound clips that were taken from interviews of people that had carried out sea rescue and their stories of what happened. We got into teams and each team was assigned a sound clip. The idea of this project is to get us to work as a team to create a short animated film that works with the story of the sound clip.

within are group i was given the role of the production designer, which meant i was in charge of the overall look of the film and the artistic style we wanted to go for. After a few discussions we all agreed to aim are animation to be a very similar style to the short animation film The Backwater Gospel.

The Backwater Gospel

I have always loved this dark, grungy and rustic style, so i was really excited about creating a short film in this style.

Concept work

I did some research into what things would look like but first i started with some concept pieces of the things that we had decided would be in the film, like a boathouse of some kind and what characters may look like.

The first image is of what i imagines the boathouse to look like.

This digital painting was a quick one of what the characters may look like. But more focusing the style on the same as that in backwater gospel.

More concepts of various things, but again trying to keep within the same style.

The idea was to have textures in this style painted onto 3D models that would be created in Maya. The easiest and best way of doing this was to use UV wrapping. This is where the 3D model in Maya is flattened out to a net which can then be taken into Photoshop and painted. the file is then loaded back in Maya and the textures appear on the 3D object. Here is a quick test i did of a simple post with a very rough wood texture applied to it.

out of scale concept drawings

Here are three of my concept peices for the out of scale drawing project that we where set to do.

This was a quick one based on the idea of having the world in the palm of your hands  

This concept piece really came out of my passion for portraiture, and this was also based on a similar style to that of Alice in wonderland with the out of scale aspect of a small person in the palm of a giant.

Here i decided to digitally paint this piece in photoshop purely because i wanted to use a different medium to pencil. The original inspiration came from the idea of Gulliver's travels.