If you're not familiar with Fabien Mense then go check out his website/blog. This guy's art is amazing, fresh, and fun. Really ridiculously good looking characters!
Friday, November 29, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Skills and Practice// Challenging Exercises to do at home
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.
My second year at Sheridan Animation has been filled with a lot of challenges. Every year is very different to say the least. New things to learn and new things that inspire you as an artist. So I've been thinking about simple practice sketches and simple ways to approaching skill building your technical knowledge in drawing. Moreover, to build up your knowledge and skills in drawing you must make time for small sketches and general research. I call looking up images and new artists "research". Looking up new artists and taking the time to gather images is important. For me, as a growing artist I am always gathering new materials and such as well as casually sketching. I know a lot of people don't look at or use reference materials but personally I do it. You need to stay current and stay fresh, I feel.
My second year at Sheridan Animation has been filled with a lot of challenges. Every year is very different to say the least. New things to learn and new things that inspire you as an artist. So I've been thinking about simple practice sketches and simple ways to approaching skill building your technical knowledge in drawing. Moreover, to build up your knowledge and skills in drawing you must make time for small sketches and general research. I call looking up images and new artists "research". Looking up new artists and taking the time to gather images is important. For me, as a growing artist I am always gathering new materials and such as well as casually sketching. I know a lot of people don't look at or use reference materials but personally I do it. You need to stay current and stay fresh, I feel.
I feel you need to spend time focusing and really investigating photos, images, and anything else you can find. Other times you need to just vibe with what you're drawing and lose yourself in it. Just enjoy what you're doing and drawing. The point is you need to find what you enjoy and just learn to have fun. Find the things that interest you and also things that you haven't drawn before and draw them. Challenge yourself. Learn from your mistakes as well.
So what I'm getting to is that I'd like to post some links that I've been using and explain why I think they are useful. As I said above, I'm thinking about skill building exercises and small sketching exercises. All of the things which I am listing here are generally things that my friends and colleagues and I have discovered through our studies at Sheridan Animation. Of course, a lot of artists and students might already do similar exercises like this but I'm focusing on simple exercises that you can do at home. Think of this as homework. These types of exercises don't replace actual assignments and huge long projects but they are the skills and the casual exercises that artists are consistently doing and challenging themselves with. Lastly, all of these exercises you can do at home in front of your computer. Get used to drawing a lot!
Draw from life! But if you can't do that try drawing from websites like the one above. Drawing characters is paramount and I guarantee you that all students at Sheridan Animation are simply drawing people, generating ideas, gaining knowledge, and understanding the human figure.
Here are some tips:
- Try drawing realistic
- Try drawing cartoony
- Draw an entire page of faces
- Draw an entire page of full bodies
- Keep it gestural, loose, experiment with styles
You might think work or sketches like this is a waste of time when you have the portfolio admission for Sheridan due the next day but exercises like these help you stay loose and generate characters for later use.
Copy drawings from both of these sites! Both are amazing and have great reference material. I guarantee you that everyone is always working on anatomy and as I say a lot on this blog, anatomy is important. Pinterest is amazing for so many reasons. Get on top of that. Look for images and copy them for personal use.
Furthermore, for some Sheridan Animation students they aren't so much interested in anatomy but at least get to a competent level for their career in animation or illustration. To get into Sheridan Animation though, you need to have fairly good life drawing skills and brushing up on general knowledge above actually attending life drawing classes is a good way to keep your mind sharp.
Here are some tips:
- Do something everyday that scares you/ Draw something everyday that challenges you
- Choose some anatomy illustrations to copy from:
Such as this one below from 'artreferenceblog':
- Print out the images as best you can and then copy them until you can draw it without any reference.
- DRAW DRAW DRAW
Research. Who is your competition? What are they drawing? What are they doing with their time? Pixar artists are only a small taste of the people working in the animation industry but you need to gain knowledge and insight into how these artists are generating ideas and art.
How They Got a Job at Pixar Animation Studio by CGMeetup
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)