caricatures for character design

Caricatures are crazy – how is it that you can exaggerate/minimize features and somehow get a likeness that can – when professionally executed – be more recognizable than a photo?  This guy – Wouter Tulp – is one amazing caricature artist (among his many talents). Hanoch Piven manages to create very abstract caricatures with amazing likenesses, using objects and minimal color. Here are a few…

character design based on pose

We are starting to have really fun assignments in my character design class. They’ve been providing us with great, expressive reference photos and we were recently asked to come up with characters based on certain poses – note that the point here is to use the pose, not the character in the picture. Here are two of the ones that I completed:

museum birds

Some more sketches from my MOS days: bird-centric this time.  I love the look in this turkey’s eye – wary and slightly crazed. This owl is pissed.   Hooded mergansers have crazy serrated beaks that look like rows of teeth.

Colby Room animal sketches

Classes are starting up next week! I don’t have much left to post from my summer courses so here are some older sketches I did during my lunch hours at the Museum of Science when I worked there full time. The staff of the Collections department were always super helpful when they were working on re-cataloging the Colby Room (essentially, the recreated hunting trophy room…

smith family secret presentation boards

A couple months ago, my friend Alison asked me to illustrate these awesome books she’s written, about a boy who discovers he has the ability to make his drawings come to life. They are wonderfully written elementary-level stories and I know she’s going to have a lot of success with them.  Since I haven’t had a ton of free time to work on the…

batman boards

This storyboarding sequence spanned two modules – we were given a script for “Batman: The Animated Series” to interpret through storyboards. These are more of a progressive step-by-step production board as opposed to the presentation boards we did for the trunk monkey assignment. It was a good exercise to try to work in the style of a show, except that the school provided a…

trunk monkey storyboards

Our most recent assignment for storyboarding is to do a new take on the “trunk monkey” advertising campaign (here’s a link to the real commercials that aired around 2006). We had to create just 4 cleaned-up presentation boards to get our concept across – these are meant to be a summary of the concept for a pitch rather than move-by-move production boards. I went…

storyboarding

Classes just started up again this week! I’m taking Acting for Animators & Storyboarding. The acting class will mostly be videos of myself (& probably Nick) so I won’t be posting much from that class, unless we have some really Oscar-worthy performances.  The courses run double-time in the summer so I have two deadlines per week. I’m looking forward to the storyboarding class –…

hands, legs, faces

Just some random assignments from my figure drawing class, picked from separate weeks. Just about everything is from photo reference, although the hands are Loomis copies. from Andrew Loomis’ “Head & Hands” 

toddlers & babies

In figure drawing, we recently had a module where we tackled age differences – babies, toddlers, kids, teens & adults of all ages. Here are my toddler drawings – all based on photo references of my awesome 2-year old.