Posts Tagged ‘character design tips’

12 results.

The Mentor Experiment: Silhouettes and Animal Anatomy: Part 1

by Krishna on March 13, 2012 at 9:34 pm
Posted In: Mentor, News

For the past several weeks we have been looking at drawing humans. This week we turn our attention to creature design, by way of silhouettes. Many of the fantastical creatures you’ve seen in comics and movies have real animals as their primary influence. How do we come up with interesting and unusual creature designs? One method is to graft different animals together and explore different options of the grafting by way of silhouette.

I asked a few folks on Twitter which animals they’d like me to use for my example. Below is a duck grafted to a hippo. With this design, I chose to mix and match pieces of anatomy from one animal to the other. On the left, we have a duck-faced hippo. On the right we have a hippo-faced duck, and below we have hybrids of the two.

animal anatomy Part 1: Hippo and Duck

Next is an otter grafted to a caribou. You can start to see some interesting possibilities when you mix and match parts, right?

animal anatomy Part 1: Otter and Caribou

Part 1 will focus on developing silhouettes from some interesting animal hybrids. Use references and focus on the silhouette. I used the lasso tool in Photoshop to “carve” out the shapes. Using this approach is quick and easy – because you’re not focusing on details, just the silhouette. You can add or subtract color with the Lasso tool by hitting (Option-Backspace or Alt-Backspace) once you’ve made a lasso selection. Similarly, you can select an area of the silhouette and cut elements out (via Control-X or Cmd-X).

Your assignment is to create hybrid creature silhouettes for the following:

1. Tiger and a monkey
2. aardvark and a kangaroo

Part 2 will focus on tricks to push the designs even further.

Good luck!

-Krishna

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Mentor Experiment: Week 5: Barry’s Critique

by Krishna on February 9, 2012 at 11:25 am
Posted In: Mentor, News

Arm Studies: Week 5: Barry's Critique

(Click the image above to embiggen.)

Barry’s work is continuing to improve and I’m excited to see his weekly progress. There are two main areas Barry needs to target when drawing hands and arms. The first is to show tapering of the arms by way of lines, really emphasizing curves against straights. Many of Barry’s arms show elements of parallel lines, which tend to flatten out the overall form. The other area that Barry needs to address is simplification of the fingers. The fingers taper, and if we look at them from the side we can see that the top of our fingers is essentially straight while the bottom of our fingers are curved. It’s also important to keep in mind that there is a perceptible gap between where our fingers originate from our hand, and where our thumb originates.

If we were to imagine looking at our right hand (palms up) as a trapezoidal shape, the fingers emanate from the top of that trapezoid, while the thumb emanates from the lower right side of the trapezoid. This demarkation needs to be clearly indicated when learning to draw hands. My suggestion would be for Barry to focus separately on hands and arms: i.e. draw the hands by themselves – and draw them big. Do the same thing, with just the arms.

Overall, I think Barry’s giving it a great effort – keep it up!

-Krishna

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The Mentor Experiment: Week 5: Arms and Hands!

by Krishna on February 2, 2012 at 9:41 am
Posted In: Mentor, News

Drawing hands: Week 5

This week, we’re going to look at drawing hands. Hands are incredibly expressive and add a great deal to a character’s pose and attitude. Hands can be complicated to draw without an understanding of the underlying forms that make it up. The palm can be thought of as a wedge. The fingers can each be thought of as a set of tapered cylinders.
The knuckles of the fingers, when looking at the hand face up or down, form an arch. In the male hand, the knuckles are usually emphasized. In the female hand, the knuckles are usually de-emphasized to heighten femininity.

The arm itself has three points of articulation: the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist. To make the arms look volumetric, I consider the tapered cylinders to have a curved side and a straight side. Playing curves against straights makes the arm have depth.

Study the visual notes and practice drawing hands by breaking them down into simplified forms. You’ve got two great references right in front of you: your own hands!

The assignment this week is to draw a total of 10 expressive arms. You can represent the torso, but the focus should be on the arms and hands. The arms can be male or female – ideally draw 5 male versions and 5 female versions.

arms and hands

Apprentices: Don’t hesitate if you have any questions! Good luck!

-Krishna

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