This was a short action sequence but really fun to do. Something I had learn, was that not every board or sequence needs to be the best sequence ever. You need to be able to pull back, so that the important battles and scenes have impact. If EVERYTHING is awesome, then nothing stands out, and as a result NOTHING is awesome :P
You can see I always put the most effort into the close up shots, the wide shots are pretty rough :P This is why it's so important to develop your drawing skills for storyboarding, the more you can put down with minimal lines, the better and faster you will be.
I never posted much from what I did when I worked for AXIS on this cool action show for Teens. This was the biggest learning curve in my career, where I really feel that effort trumped skill. That's all that we can do sometimes as artists, to be ready when an opportunity comes our way and then put 110% into it.
So I've been spending time on using the Loomis Mannikin in my studies. What good is it right?
Well, it allows you to break down your characters in a simple form, it's quite easy to change the proportions.
I then looked up a few poses and drew the simplified mannikin:
And then finish it off by drawing on top. This is quite a good approach to figure our your character too. If you only draw poses form imagination you might draw uninspired standing poses.
Also updated stat sheet for My School for the Ungifted. So far I completed 50 pages of studies for the Mannikin, heads and hands soon to follow!
So to test what I wrote about yesterday, I challenged myself to drawing a page of skulls with no reference. I have drawn a few pages of skulls (not actually that many), and I wondered if I can draw it from memory.
And I as actually very surprised that I was able to! I mean, they are probably very inaccurate..but considering I've never really been able to draw skulls, I was happy with this :)
So this video was recommended to me by the YouTube algorithm, and as I was watching it, it realised his approach to learning is what I've been doing in my ARTacademy journey. But this is from an actual great artist, so check it out! And if you need motivation to keep doing your studies, then start counting each page you fill as EXP! I think it's a great motivation to track your progress!
In his video he is telling you how he studies from Bridgman. And the approach is :
1) first you start with the basic shapes / gesture. So in my own mapped out journey, this is the Loomis Mannikin by Loomis (but you can find this in many other places like How to Draw comics the Marvel way, FORCE drawing by Mattesi, etc..).
2) You now start copying the poses in the figure drawing book that you are using, in his video it's Bridgman. In my mapped journey I had chosen Andrew Loomis, but also my chosen comic artist to study from.
3) Now you also start copying the anatomy drawings from your figure drawing book. These are usually broken up into segments (arms, neck, torso, feet, etc..) So that's why I have different parts of the anatomy as their own challenges, for me the most expressive parts of the body are the hands and the head, at least for acting in storyboards / comics (The camera is rarely focussing on the lower part of the body :P )
And the most important step that he shows is to first copy the drawing, THEN draw it from memory. And do this over and over until you have made it yours. (my suggestion is 50 pages => LVL 5, but at least 10 pages => LVL 2)
Still continuing this strange experiment on myself, to level up my drawing skills. I've completed 3 badges in total now, and each badge represents 50 sketchbook pages of studies in a subject (Hands, Mannikin and Heads in this case). My studies are on my other blog here.
Here are the challenges broken down with the material I have been studying:
Below are the books that I referenced:
Below are the comics I am using for my artist studies of Buscema:
I remember at the end of the course the teacher was on holiday, so the lectures got pushed further, which overlapped then with my own holiday. So I didn't really get to put in much work at the end. But that's the way things go, it's hard to try and manage coursework on top of a job and life. Either way though, I had a ton of fun with this course, and I would recommend it for anybody who is interested in character design.
On an interesting sidenote, I did all this work using Storyboard Pro. It has some really great drawing tools!
