ChickenFox- Animatic v3

So it is about time I post an update on the ChickenFox progress, over the last week, here is an improved version of the animatic. I will post later the changes I've made and the changes that still need to be made, as discussed with my lecturer- Derek Hayes, I have changed a few scenes, few cuts and a few camera angles. But as I said I will talk about all the changes when I post the final version. For now here is the work in progress: 

Life drawing- looking at form

Today's life drawing, was focused on different representations of form, and we were given several exercises, such as representing the figure as basic geometric shapes and using parallel hatching, as a way of depicting form. I didn't want to do the box exercise, as I didn't feel it was challenging enough for me, it seems quite boring, but I did try the hatching technique and actually quite enjoyed it. Here are 3 drawing's from today's session, the first two took 40 minutes each, and the last one was 25-30 minutes, because the model was late, we got less time to draw this week. 

I think the most successful one is the hatching drawing, as it really gives a sense of mass and volume, which was the aim. It is good to get out of your comfort zone, when it comes to drawing, because that way we force our eyes to see differently, we start drawing what's actually in front of us instead of drawing what our brain thinks something should look like.

More poses, drawing.

Today I had my, animation life drawing class, where we get to draw a variety of VERY quick poses. The objective behind that technique, is to learn to capture and represent movement, through very quick poses. Such poses, although sometimes very frustrating do focus your mind on capturing the line of action and the weight of the figure, which is very important in order to represent dynamic movement. 

I find that in longer poses, I spend more time on details and less on the overall "feeling" of the pose.

Below are examples of some drawings from today, and because the poses are extremely quick, I always have more drawings from my Wednesday sessions. I didn't annotate on each one how long the poses were, but generally the really simple line contour poses are 15-30 seconds, and slightly more detailed ones are 10-15 minutes and finally the one in colour takes a lot longer and this one in particular was 40 minutes I believe. So without further a do, here they are:

Experimental life-drawing

This is going to be my experimental life drawing post from Today. Ashley, my teacher, wanted us to focus on form, rather than shape. The difference he explained, is that normally we draw Shape rather than Form, an most common linear outline drawing of a figure expresses its shape, but looking at prints of sculptures for example the form of the figure is much more evident. After showing us a few examples, of how different artists portrayed form through drawing, he set us an exercise: to draw the figure using an imaginary string that wraps 360 degrees around the shape. It was very hard to imagine, and even harder to express, and despite my reluctance i gave it my best try. Here's my first attempt:

Which wasn't the right technique at all, as I had to express the form with one continuous line/coil. So I tried again, focusing on the lower torso and legs:

This was much closer, to what was asked of us, and although I didn't quite see it in class, looking at it now I realise how much closer to a three dimensional form that drawing is. I tried the same technique on the hand, and then using fewer "coils" to remove unnecessary information:

The next exercise was to try and draw the pose, using as few geometric shapes as possible, to simplify  and represent the pose, as a cardboard prototype:

And the last drawing, is just a sketch i did of the model's profile, after i finished the polygon pose.

Life- Drawing, a skeleton

I have just come from another life drawing session, which was quite different to all the rest, as we didn't actually have a model. As a solution, our teacher found a skeleton in the cupboard :D and posed it ,as best as he could on the stage. The exercise was very difficult, as i found drawing skeletons to be much more meticulous that drawing flesh. It was much easier to measure however as all the joints and bones were visible. We did an exercise in accelerated drawing, so our first pose was 40 minutes, second was 30, and etc. until the last pose which was only 5 minutes long. The less time we had, the less i concentrated on drawing the skeleton structure and more on the actually pose and shape of the body. These poses are quite different, in an unrealistic way. Most real human poses have a sense of weight, which shows through the figure, whereas the skeleton is supported by its stand, and therefore hangs weightlessly or rather limp, when stood upright. Here are my drawings from this week, in the order that i drew them in :

Life Drawing- male figure

I've just come back from Life Drawing, and thought I'd post an update with today's drawings. 

We started off by doing warm up sketches - five 30 second and five 60 second poses. These are designed to get you too assess the line of action withing a pose- the weight of the figure. These are usually dynamic poses and look very rough, I hated them at first, but kind of got used to them over the course of my study, I see now why they are so useful. 

We then did another exercise, which i have grown to appreciate over time- contour drawing, and as you can see I am not any better at it than i use to be , except I draw with a different attitude now, instead of frustration and giving up, I try and try and try to get my hand-eye coordination to be better. 

And last but not least, we did two 30 minute poses, which has to be my favorite  exercise, as my 'perfectionist self' suffers a lot less, as a result. The first one, i was quite dissapointed with at first, as I thought the pose, from my point of view was quite dull and undynamic,  however one of my life drawing teachers taught me to always persevere and make the drawing better, rather than give up and start a new one, so I did, and in the end , it had some nice quality to it. The last drawing, is my favorite as it had the most interesting lighting out of all poses. The main overhead light was turned off, and my favourite type of drawing on black paper seemed just ideal. I really enjoyed it, however i noticed that, once again i concentrated on the torso, which i find the most interesting and neglected the feet :).