Heyo!
I've got character design, figure drawing and caricature for you this week, so let's get straight into my resources, thoughts, 'aha moments' and announcements from this past week.
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- Resources
Video - Figure gestures & construction
Michael Hampton is my go to for figure drawing recently, and I’ve been going through his Youtube content and these two video stood out to me this week.
Both are without sound, but are in real time.
And It’s been super valuable to see the process stroke by stroke how he starts with his gesture, then builds ontop of that.
- [Michael Hampton Figure Gestures](
&t=1020s)- Michael Hampton Figure Construction
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Video - Caricature
This was a nice little live stream from the guys over at ‘FORCE with Michael Mattesi’.
A few little nuggets that were mentioned around achieving a likeness when exaggerating features…
- Look for the differences in faces and have a reaction to them (Wow, their head is skinny)
- The idea of the bounding box
- Lean into the ‘truth’ of the shape
- Abstract features into a bounding box
- Do multiple passes to get the result you want (your first sketch doesn’t have to be your last)
Definitely worth a watch if you're looking to get better at understanding likeness.
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Video - [Proko figure drawing resource](
&t=84s)This is a recently uploaded figure drawing video that I enjoyed.
Most of the concepts were familiar to me, but you’ll hear me say this time and time again… I love learning similar concepts from different teachers.
I almost always come away with something new or a different way of looking at things.
Sometimes I find It just as valuable to be reminded of ideas/concepts as it is to learning something new.
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Video - [Tips for keeping drawings consistent with character design](
&list=WL&index=3&t=12s)This is a great video showing ways to keep character drawing consistent through out an animation, this is also called keeping your character ‘on model’.
It’s mainly focused around animation, and although animation isn’t part of my studies at the moment, animators are some of the best drafts people out there and you can learn a lot from them!
TLDW (Too long didn’t watch)
- Keep shapes simple
- Keep your draftsmanship clear
- Visualize different views (like top down) when rotating an object (or character)
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Video - Imagine FX cover painting
A great example of how long an illustration can take (this video is 55 mins sped up) and the sketch was already started.
Some interesting rendering techniques in this one, definitely worth a watch.
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Website - The Art of Mulan
Came across this gem while perusing https://characterdesignreferences.com
I found some really nice breakdowns and turn arounds of characters and how they communicated to the animation team on how to keep consistency with certain characters.
It’s not just images, but detailed notes (see why It appealed to me?) with instructions and diagrams. I love this kind of stuff, and hopefully you can take something from it.
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That's all for this week.
And as always... stay consistent, use reference, have fun with it and remember, it's only pixels baybee!
Cheers,
Ben
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