Figurative Concepts - Week 4

Inspiration: Bruce Timm Edition

As previously mentioned, for my Character Design class, the artist whose style we had to emulate this week was Bruce Timm.  Bruce is best known (from my childhood, at least) for being the driving force behind the look of Batman: The Animated Series and all the shows that followed it.  His style is deceptively simple, incredibly appealing, and has definitely defined the look of all the DC Comics cartoons that have come out throughout the past couple decades (and even the recent Marvel ones, really), even when he wasn't the character designer.

This was another week of my own style getting in the way of the artist, but I also found myself naturally following a lot of what Bruce does.  It was an odd sort of nostalgia drawing Batman for the first time in a good many years.  Since Bruce comes from a comic book background and therefore does a lot of brush work to clean up/ink his work, I thought this would be the perfect week to try my cool new Pentel Arts Pocket Brush Pen!  Let me tell you, it works awesomely!  I can't say I've tried any similar permanent ink brush pens, but I like the results I got with this one.  I definitely have a good deal to learn in terms of controlling it, but I will for sure be using it in my own work in the future.

Anywho, so here are a few pieces I created in Bruce Timm's style (-ish), then cleaned up with my new brush pen, then colored in Photoshop.  Long live the 90's!

Character Design, Weeks 1-3

As I had mentioned previously, this semester I am taking a Character Design class, taught by Michael Buffington.  He's a long-winded fellow, but he does have some good points.  And though I don't particularly care for his drawing style, I do appreciate his mentality when it comes to drawing.  I mean, anyone who sets out to draw 1,001 heads (and accomplishes it, then decides to draw 1,000 more) clearly must love what he does.

Anyway, for this class--at least to start with--we have a weekly artist whose style we must emulate.  Week one was Phil Bourassa:

Week two was Sean "Cheeks" Galloway:

I will admit that, as Michael pointed out to me, I'm letting my own style interfere with replicating the artist's style.  The above three were the drawings he said he liked, even though they aren't exactly in the style of the artist.  Something to work on in the coming weeks.

During class time, there's a live model who puts together cool outfits and does 2-3 minute poses for us to draw from.  That's been fun.  It's been a challenge to figure out drawing from the model in pencil (as opposed to charcoal) on 8.5x14" paper (as opposed to 18x24" newsprint) while altering the model's look and pose to make a better animation drawing.  A new way of thinking, for sure.  Here's a sampling of my progress on that front from this past week:

This week's artist is Bruce Timm, which I believe means that I legally have to watch the 90's Batman cartoons as I draw.  This is clearly a tough career path I have chosen...

More conceptual figures

Week 3 of my "Figurative Concepts" class.  I think I'm finally starting to remember how to draw real people again.  We've been using charcoal pencils (I favor the 4B), but I just had to whip out the vine charcoal this week.  I like using it to quickly block in the figure and line of action, then rough in some tones before switching to the charcoal pencil to really dig into the form and details.  Kind of like sculpting, I am to understand.  I'm still too "heavy-handed" overall, but it's getting better.

Well, go figure(ative concepts)!

New semester.  New classes.  New drawings to post (...and then eventually not have time to post).

This semester, I am enrolled in Developing Story (an MPT class where we--you guessed it--develop stories and talk about story development), Character Design and Drawing for Animators with Michael Buffington, and Figurative Concepts with the Academy's resident superstar, Nicolas Villarreal.  Following in the mammoth footsteps of my fellow student/friend/undoubtedly future coworker Adam Knight (check out his blog if you haven't--you're in for a treat!), I have decided to post some of my figure work from the first two weeks in collage form.  So, without further ado or name-dropping, I present Naked Chicks: Weeks One and Two...