Then came fall which always means three things for me: the Toronto International Film Festival (yay!), an increase in work at the office (boo!) and a renewed determination to become a better artist. The last usually means becoming a hermit and devoting whatever spare time is left at the end of the day to draw.

An aspiring writer friend (I’m sure she’ll become famous one day) recently asked me if I’d be interested in helping her take a script she is working on into graphic novel form. After reading only a few chapters, I was hooked but where to begin? I was extremely flattered but mostly concerned about all the work involved. Victor and I decided to get some industry knowledge by taking separate classes at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop where they have veterans of the comic book and animation industry like Ty Templeton, Geordie Miller and Scott Caple to name a few.

I chose two classes focussing on perspective and anatomy respectively as refreshers while Victor is taking Ty’s Comic Bootcamp that covers scripting, layouts and rudimentary figure drawing. The classes are already helping us to see things in a new light. I’m not sure how this project is going to turn out but I’ll do my best and we’ll see what happens. To make up for my absence here are some of my doodles, studio life drawings and character sketches from the last few months:

In the meanwhile, I’ve used the following references to aid me: Artistic Anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer, Figure Drawing – Design and Invention by Michael Hampton and Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet – all excellent books. Some of the studies are copies from these sources while the rest use my feet or photographs of feet as reference. There’s something about copying something over and over again that commits it to memory – I now know the names of all the bones in the feet!

I have also included some more of my life drawings (5-10 minute poses).

My week at work had been unbelievably busy so I wasn’t sure if I would have the time or energy to work on my version before the thread lost momentum but I couldn’t get this character out of my head and I would check back often to see so many great follow-up posts. The weekend rolled around and I finally found some time to work on it so I decided to contribute a version of my own. I noticed that most people posted theirs in greyscale and I decided to do the same even though it’s an area in which I’m a little weak especially when working from imagination. Although I felt it wasn’t complete, I just wanted to get it posted. I learned a lot and, taking a step back, have a better idea of my shortcomings in this area and what I need to improve on. This was an excellent exercise in being given an assignment that both restricted and challenged my creativity and, most importantly, it was a lot of fun!

For any beginning artists these challenges are great in showing ourselves our limitations and pushing beyond them or figuring something out to achieve the creative objective. In a real working project you would have an art director to give you feedback and opportunity to make improvements. In the meantime, communities such as ConceptArt have thriving memberships that do fill that role while we are still learning.

This is the author’s thread. My contribution is below and here is my entry in the thread.

One of the things that became abundantly clear to me is that I needed to concentrate more on the following areas:

1. Anatomy
2. Lighting
3. Perspective

As part of my journey, I will be doing self-studies in these areas and I will post some here.  On that note, attached is a recent drawing I did of a female pubic bone referenced from a photograph.  Lighting on the photograph was difficult to discern in some areas and that prompted me to look into getting a skeletal model but due to of a lack of space at home, I elected to instead get a good quality skull and I’ll no doubt follow that by buying a pubic bone later.