sketching Tag

(This excerpt is from the Pose Drawing Sparkbook, a super-charged sketchbook designed to help you put more life and personality into your drawings. Think of it as acting exercises for your sketchbook.Read other snippets here and here.) Don't limit your acting to just the face and hands. The head makes up less than ten percent of a person's body. You've got another ninety percent of...

A picture really is worth a thousand words. Tonight I saw "The Artist", a feature film getting a lot of buzz. It just won three Golden Globe including best film (musical or comedy) and some say it deserves an Oscar for Best Picture. I wouldn't quite go that far but it is a very good film. What's makes "The Artist" especially remarkable...

  Tonight I'm flying to California for the CTN Animation Expo. Can't wait! Before I leave I wanted to post a few items of interest: 1. Update on my freelancing presentation. I'll be giving a talk at the Expo on Saturday, November 19, 4:30pm, called "Be Your Own Boss: Freelancing Tips and Tricks". In an earlier blog post I said the talk would...

Well, not officially. But it will be on this here blog. At least for this year. Care to join me? Life has been crazy busy lately with no signs of anything slowing down. As a result it's been a real struggle to keep anything resembling a regular sketchbook. I still draw quite a bit but its always to please a client and...

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.