This week we covered shapes where the goal was distillation or breaking things down to their essential forms. One of the assignments was to first sketch/paint out the basic shape for each pose from the provided video with each pose timed for 30 seconds. I used to think that 1‑minute poses were short but when each pose is such a short duration you find you have no choice but to get down to the bare essentials and quickly. We were to through the video again, quickly sketching out each pose but this time using the shapes we drew as a guide. Exaggeration or pushing the pose was encouraged; it's something I need to improve upon. This was a challenging exercise and really made me see things in a different way.

In the next exercise we had to find basic shapes using either 10 paintings or photos. I decided to use the same paintings and movies I posted from the previous week and, in some cases, I reconsidered some of my main lines of action.

For the last exercise, we were asked to do 2 hours of café sketching. Because I've been asked to work on a comic involving a cat as the main character, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and instead do cat sketching. I have to say that 30 seconds now seems like a luxury when trying to draw a very active pet.

My next post will be a little late because I'm taking some time off for the Toronto International Film Festival. 😁

I know that I'm a little behind on this post due to some personal and client projects that came up but below are my 2 assignments for week 4 on 'Composition' with Thomas Fluharty.

I took a little longer on my second assignment for week 4 trying to get the lighting, poses and expressions right. For both assignments, we were given photos to use as reference and encouraged to include as many as possible using all the tools we learned from this course to create a pleasing composition. For my first assignment, I used all 4 of the provided images (dog, cat, window and flowers). For my last assignment, I used 4 out of the 5 images because I felt that a park bench wasn't necessary to the story of daredevil dogs and it would end up being too busy for the shot. I was thinking that I may do a coloured version later and possibly make a print of it.

Week 5 was an overview of gesture drawing with a suggestion to continue studies by taking Alex Woo's class on gesture drawing. I wholeheartedly agree and have already switched to his class. It's a great tool to help you see things in a new way and to keep poses from looking stiff. I will be posting more on that soon.

Schoolism - Gesture Drawing Week 2

Schoolism - Foundation Studies Course - Weeks 4 and 5

Chalk Full of Dreams