June Sketches 03—

This was weird. The National Portrait Museum/American Art Museum has a Tuesday program where you can come in, they give you drawing supplies, and you can sketch from the plaster casts that they have— it’s a traditional learning technique. Recently they did an expansion of that program and had a live model. It’s the same deal as the Tuesday session, but apparently this was a “one off”. They might do again, but not a weekly thing as I hoped it would be. One interesting point is that because it’s in a public space, the model had to be clothed. I’ve mentioned my desire for that before, but I would have pushed it more and had her in classical  robes looking all Roman/Greek or something. Oh well, it’s a start.

I went back to the toned paper for these, and both are 30 minute sketches.

No she’s not floating, I just chose not to include the stool she was sitting on.

 

 

 

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June Sketches 02—

Sadly, I found out this model is moving to the west coast. That bites, I enjoy drawing her. She recently started running a lot and it was fun to see how her body changed with the added exercise. She was never out of shape, but her form changed, with areas tightening up, and gaining tone. Stinks she’s leaving.

5 min—

I tried something new this time around. I recently got back from Charlotte Heroescon and was doing marker sketches on white paper. I had been working on toned paper so much that I was having a hard time making things look right. It’s easy to get lazy, knowing that the mid tone of the paper will carry a lot of weight for you, where in these the white of the paper is your base, not just something you add in later. In some ways they look better, in other ways, there’s no where to hide when you mess up. I like the second one the best.

20 min—

30 min—

June Sketches_01

June sketches are in…

Couple minutes–

10 min—

20 min—

This was a 30 min., but she didn’t hear the timer go off and went for another 15. I kept going when I should have stopped and packed up, so I ended up overworking the face- ugh.

If you follow animation, you know Disney let go most of their “traditional” animators… stupid. The logic was that 2D is dead, despite the level of success 2D still has on TV ::::cough/spongebob::::cough/gravityfalls::::::cough/adventuretime::::::: Perhaps Disney should consider the problem isn’t animation styles, but rather the fact that they always want to force a stupid musical number into every 2D film, something they don’t do in their Pixar styled cartoons…hmmm? Or it could be that the last few stories have stunk, and it has nothing to do with the animation at all?

Anyway, one of the animators that was laid off posted a pencil test he did for Wreck-it-Ralph. I’ve always been partial to the Disney cartoons that were done right after they developed the process of xeroxing drawings onto cells, because I love the feel it maintains of the original drawings. The sketchy quality, the constantly changing ticks, and without everything being so damn predictable in their movement, but what the hell do I know. Nothing apparently… as people so often tell me.

If you don’t see the video below visit the original article at Cartoon Brew where I found it, and read the article concerning the animator Nik Ranieri.