Heyo!
Apologies on the late newsletter! Been a busy couple of weeks but this one has everything from Disney maquette's, Zootopia character designs, drawing from invention and some art habit tips so let's not waste any more time and get stuck into my resources, thoughts, 'aha moments' and announcements from this past couple of weeks.
---------------
- Resources
Youtube Video - [New Kim Jung Gi workshop interview](
?t=466)If you've been following this newsletter or my posts for a while, you'd know how much I look up to Kim Jung Gi and his art.
And when the master speaks, I listen! This is a new interview and it was eye opening for sure.
A few key take aways...
"I wasn't mastering a theory or technique one by one, I was learning things integrally"
This is in regards to how he learnt the fundamentals, he didn't learn them one by one, but he learnt things by trying to integrate them into a single scene (perspective, story, anatomy etc).
He never initially understood perspective in the traditional sense (vanashing points, horizon lines etc)
He mentioned that he learnt perspective by trying to just draw things in different angles and using his observation skills. He learnt the technical stuff about perspective after he was already really good at drawing things in 3D. Which goes to show there's more than one way to learn things!
He uses cubes a lot to understand forms in 3D space
The first few marks he makes helps him out for the rest of the drawing
He uses these lines as guides that help place the rest of the illustration in perspective. From what I understand he's basically using his drawing as a guide as he goes.
And finally a great little quote which sheds some light on his process... "It's tragic you can't see the invisible lines I see"
-
Facebook post Glen Keane Maquettes
Saw this come across my feed and though it was interesting – a photo of Glenn using a maquette to draw Aladin.
A maquette is a sculpted mini statue that's given out to animators as reference. You can even get originals on ebay.
Aaron Blaise (21 year veteran of Walt Disney Animation and awesome art instructor) goes into detail about them in this video here
I always used to think that Disney animators (and talented artists in general) just knew how to draw things directly out of thier head (I'm sure this is true some of the time), but with a little more digging, I've found how heavily reference is actually used.
This is also particularily interesting to me be because I'm spending more time getting up to speed with 3D sculpting and sculpting my own 2D drawing resources.
-
Website - The art of Zootopia Character Sheets
I’ve been getting more and more into trying to keep characters ‘on model’ recently meaning keeping characters consistent through a series of expressions or in different poses and this resource is a gold mine!
Now I haven’t dug too far into designing animal characters yet, but this is one of the first resources I’ll be going to when I do.
With beautiful character sheets and some fascinating style guides/explanations like this one I highly recommend checking this out.
-
Blog Post - Make before you manage
This is a blog post by Tim Ferris, an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster. I've been following him for many years and came across this post.
The TLDR is basically before you start the day, before you hop on social media, answer emails, get to work etc, Just create or 'make' something. Wether it be for 5 mins or 50 mins.
Worth a read and something I want to get back into the habit of doing before touching my phone or laptop.
-
Aha moments
- Every hue has a value
A little 'aha' moment that hit me this week while working on the secret project. It's to do with colour and how every 'pure' hue ('yellow', 'red', 'purple' etc) has their own distinct values (yellow being lighter and blue being the darker). This helps a lot to understand why you can have different colour shifts and pops of colour in a painting but still have it 'feel right'. It's hard to explain here, but this twitter thread by Devin Korwin goes a little deeper on this.
Art thoughts
- A quick reminder to take a peek at any IG/Twitter/FB art posts you've saved. And maybe even do a little study of a couple of them. Saved posts are only worth saving if you put them to use! I've picked out a couple of mine to do some study this coming week.
Updates
- I've had the spicy cough (covid) for the last week which has slowed me down a little re the secret project, but I think I'm on the tail end of it and will be getting back up to speed over the next couple of days.
- I had the pleasure recently to do a workshop/demo with the Candy Crush Soda team at King which was pretty awesome! Had an absolute blast and was great to go back and forth with the team about art, process's and social media.
---
That's all from me for this week,
And as always, stay consistent, use reference, have fun with it and remember, it’s only pixels baybee.
Cheers, Ben
---
Have any questions or just want to say "hey"?
DM me on:
Twitter
Youtube
Email me at b.eblendesign@gmail.com or simply reply to this one.
