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...

Me? A comic book artist?!?

Back in high school, when all I knew was that I liked to draw, I had no idea where I wanted to go to college.  I was an avid comic book reader from the awesome decade that was the 1990's, so I figured comics were a great place to head.  Somewhere online, I must've found a spec-script for a six-page Spider-Man story and decided to draw out the pages to test my comic book skills.  Now, I had my own comic series going with my old best friend from Missouri when I was in middle school--and it was quite the hit among the relatives we would mail copies to--but I hadn't attempted anything on any professional level.  Sure, I had my über cool Stickman comic strips that I had been drawing since 1997, and all my classmates and teachers enjoyed those, but an actual comic book is way different from cartoony doodles on a piece of loose leaf, ruled paper!

Anywayz, I was cleaning-up some of my digital workspace and came across my scans of these six Spider-Man pages that I had drawn oh so long ago.  Without further ado, I present to you the reason that I am in Animation and not comic books:

To briefly conclude the story, when looking for colleges, I discovered that the fancy term for comic books is "Sequential Art".  Which lead me to SCAD.  Which--after a trip down to Savannah left a far too fishy smell in my nose...literally--lead me to animation and storyboarding at the Art Institute of Atlanta.  And storyboarding is really just cinematic comic book making, when you think about it.  I guess I wasn't totally clueless in high school.

Fall 2010 - Color Theory

Next up in my end-of-semester round-up posts is my Color Theory class with Cameron Wasson.  First and foremost, Cameron is such a delightful and knowledgeable teacher!  Her metaphors--which, for the record, she concocts in an improvisational manner--make learning fun, and her zest for art both classic and contemporary is truly inspiring.  I have made a couple of previous postings about my work for this class: my first Design Project and my analogous split-complimentary color scheme portrait painting.  Here are some of the other projects I created for this class, starting with the Optic Mix painting:

As you can see, I started with the blue bird on a branch photograph, which I then cropped.  Next, I created a black & white Value Study of the image, followed by a Color Study.  The idea behind an Optic Mix painting is that the colors are mixed in the viewer's eye as opposed to the artist mixing them on the palette.  Therefore, the final image is a series of tiny dots created with a ruling pen.  It was a mind-bending experience, for sure, and I was never pleased with my control over the tool or the limited palette we were allowed.  Next unposted project was a Color Temperature painting:

Here, Cameron gave us a box of colored blocks from which to pick and create an interesting arrangement.  We then photographed that arrangement under a filtered light, in this case a warm filter.  After the standard value and color studies, a final painting was created.  The yellow block is all but lost in this painting, and the shadows were far too blue.  Since this was a "learning" class--as opposed to a "create amazing portfolio artwork" class--I didn't choose to redo any projects.  As long as I was learning from them, I felt they were as successful as they needed to be.  And finally, we have the final project for the class:

The final project was a landscape illustration that showed Atmospheric Perspective.  I went to my not-so-massive library of personal images and found some great ones from Lake Tahoe (from when my parents were kind enough to fly out here to San Francisco to visit me and free me--for the weekend--from this dreadful city).  Following Cameron's advice to cater the image towards our Majors, I decided to use a cinematic aspect ratio, so I had to move around a few of the elements from the photograph before I created the usual value and color studies.  You can also see a rare work-in-progress image just above the final painting.  One thing I definitely learned from this final painting--besides how far I've come in my knowledge of painting with gouache paint and of color theory itself--is the importance of designing everything thoroughly in the early stages.  Lack of design (as seen in the far-to-rough value study) lead to problems with the foreground plant life and ultimately really ruined what was otherwise a very pleasing painting.  Lesson learned for next time!

Fall 2010 - Layout Design

Well, another semester has come to a close for the Academy of Art University, so that means it's time for my bi-annual (a word I'll use because "semesterly" apparently isn't one) posting of classwork.  First up, Layout Design for Animators with Oliver Sin.

Posted below are the pages from my Final Book, which compiled all the weekly "Directions" that Oliver gave us to create a layout design for.  I found this class to be a frustrating one--not artistically, but in terms of instruction--and I will definitely say that I'm not very pleased with any of the work I produced for this class.  Not a complete waste of time and energy, but I definitely did not learn anything new about layout design.  If nothing else, I will say that it's good to learn new techniques, even if those techniques aren't right for you.