art Tag

It's been a while so I thought I'd take a minute to shamelessly plug my website store. I plug a lot of stuff so there should be something of interest to everyone. First, you can download The Best of Head Hunting, a PDF containing over 100 of the best portrait and cartoon sketches from my two previously published sketchbooks. Includes a...

Last week I mentioned that I was cleaning out my studio closets and selling a few misc. art and animation books on Amazon.com. I received some requests to know what I'm selling, so here's the list. If anyone is interested, just click on the item to buy. There's some good deals if you don't mind books that are slightly used....

The human form is one of the hardest things for an artist to master. It is incredibly complex—the hundreds of bones and muscles in the body can twist and pull into an infinite combination of expressive poses. In addition, people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It's important for an artist to study different body types so he can convincingly illustrate characters with variety and personality The best way to master the human form is simply to draw it...again and again and again. To keep my skills from getting dull I regularly attend drawing co-ops in my city (a co-op is simply a group of artists getting together to draw real live models). Although I'm a cartoonist, I consider life drawing to be one of the most important and helpful exercises I can do. The more I understand the human form, the easier it is for me to simplify and exaggerate it with cartooning. It's hard to understate the value of drawing from life. Photographs can be helpful, and there are some good reference books out there for artists. But because photos are 2D they tend to flatten the form. Also, because a photograph is permanently frozen it can suck some of the life out of a pose. For the serious artist, nothing beats the freshness and energy of drawing from a live model. Drawing from a photo is like eating reheated leftovers rather than fresh food hot off the stove. However, as much as I believe in it there's one part of the life drawing tradition I've never understood.

I'm a huge collector of reference books. Among the dozens and dozens of books in my studio, there are a select few that I would highly recommend for any professional illustrator/character designer/animator to own. If you make your living drawing, this stuff can inspire you, boost your skills, maybe help advance your career or even increase your income. As part...