Yesterday I took a break from my busy work load to just play around in my sketchbook. I decided to use Stephen Silver's excellent Character Design Shuffle app (available for iOS and Android). Each time you use the app it picks from several random character traits (gender, occupation, type of animal, emotion, etc.) to build a character assignment for you...
A popular exercise for cartoonists and character designers is to randomly pick from a list of characteristics (occupations, personality types, animal types, emotions, etc.) and then sketch a cartoon character based on them. Some artists, such as Chris Ayers, actually keep a Ziploc bag full of little slips of paper with such traits written on them. They pull out a...
There's a new meme for artists floating around the internet called an "Influence Map". It was started by Boston artist Matt Laskowski over on DeviantArt.com. Here's how it works: you download a template that contains a grid of white squares. Then you paste in samples of artwork from other artists who have inspired and influenced you over the years. The...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCDxaiYZXaU&sns=em] Artist Stephen Silver has put together an amazing new video that cartoonists are going to love. "The Masters Series, Vol. 1" includes lengthy interviews with three living legends: Mort Drucker (MAD Magazine), Stan Goldberg (Archie Comics), and John Reiner (The Lockhorns). Over the course of 2 hours and 15 minutes we get to see each artist hard at work in...
Here's a few YouTube videos I've stumbled upon recently from some artists whose work I admire: Dennis Jones is a phenominal illustrator. He draws very fun, entertaining cartoon characters and then paints them with a master's eye for color and shading. Here's a quick demo of him painting in Photoshop. View Dennis' YouTube channel for more videos: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAePfwfCYbc] Here the very talented Denis...
Last year I took a character design class online from Stephen Silver at Schoolism.com. One of the lessons dealt with memory sketching, which I've written about here. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhD_70XlG_o&feature=related] Here's a video of Stephen Silver doing a memory sketch and discussing it as he draws. Fun stuff. If you have an interest in character design I'd highly recommend taking Stephen's class. You'll learn...
