Disney Style

Usually, even if someone didn't see the "Disney" label on a movie, they'd be able to know immediately if it was done by Disney or not. While there are similarities all Disney's 2D animated movies share (often people will say the eyes), each film features a unique look. How do the animators keep coming up with these things? Do they just pick up the pencil and voila! It's Tarzan! Nah, that'd be too easy, right? ;) No. Very important to any sort of drawing, are reference photos.

Here's some quick examples: below are the Muses from "Hercules", inspired by the art found on Greek vases and urns, among the other art from Greece. And check out how they based the "Lion King"'s villain, Scar, from African art. Notice the similarities of the eyes. Cool, eh?

Character Design Process Part 2

As you can see here, I cleaned up this second comic page, simplifying lines, the lettering, and keeping the shading strictly to black (which turned out only to be hair in order to convey a sense of color). Go figure, I simplified, and the number and design of the panels got complicated instead, heh. But I already had a particular series of things I needed to show, so I don't think I could have cut down on the panel number without splitting the comic into two pages.

The second orc is named Surtha, and he's also from Elendor MUSH, although he's the creation of a fellow player and not myself. I seem to be on a big ear pattern, hmm. It fit him in my imagination, and I loved making the ears aid with the expressions. Not much to say about the comic itself, since it's pretty self-explanatory (or I hope!). But you'll need to forget the laws of physics for the moment. Obviously that snowball would have broken up when hit with the bat. Shh, just pretend. It's a cartoon; it doesn't need to make sense. ;)



Is that color?? No way! I've been very traditional with my art, and I haven't really done anything digitally..a friend of mine introduced me to the program GIMP (which is sort of like Photoshop with some of the tools, and it's free), so I decided to check out the 'layers'. Very handy stuff! I kept the color for this sheet basic, leaving out shading since it wasn't the focus of this excersize. Instead, I went back to expressions. Now that I had been doodling ideas for a while, I also tried making sketch pages purely of mouths, eyes, noses, ect so that I could figure out different styles and whether I like them or not. I simplified (again!) the way I drew his nose (as opposed to some of the more detailed ones in the previous expressions challenge), but the rest pretty much stayed the same. I made the hair using less and smoother lines, and decided to always color it black even if the rest of the picture remains black and white. Before, I had not bothered. The eyes I'm still experimenting with. I didn't want them to look too much like manga, but a 'Disney style' approach didn't look right (closing up the lines of the eyes). For now, I chose to leave a small gap open at one side of each eye.

I had never really tried drawing cartoons (original stuff, mind, not copying SpongeBob or something), hence why I and tried to make the original Bagaglok picture more realistic styled. It was sort of an awkward transistion -- shifting to cartoon all of a sudden. I noticed that I tended to "tone down" the free-flowing and simple style of drawing them. My lines were pretty stiff and, at least in my opinion, lifeless. I had a hard time making the full exaggeration found in most cartoons. So, peeking back at this drawing after looking at the first few, I'd like to think this one is more "loose". I was more comfortable with the way I drew the character, and I knew better about what I wanted it all to appear as. Again, compared to the first expressions sheet, the expressions in this picture felt less stiff and restricted. The faces are indeed more exaggerated, with me particularly focusing on how the eyes conveyed the "mood". I ended up playing around with the ears once more, mostly with the "devious" face at the top left, and the "nervous innocence" one at the bottom left.






Okay, and here is one of the most recent ones (aside from sketches and other doodles). I'm still a newbie with digital art, but I tried out a type of "cel shading" here. And there we go, that's all folks! For now at least. ;)

Character Design Progression Part 1

Anyone who has seen my deviantart account (link) has probably already caught sight of these drawings, but I'd like to talk a little on the 'project' in any case. What we needed to do for an Illustration class was create an original character, and expand on them -- give them a name, personality, expressions, ect. How convenient, I thought! I've got a character on Elendor MUSH (Tolkien text game/RP) that I can use. ;)

Since the character already existed, I took the description of him:

"Short, lank, and filthy, this creature stands about four feet and five inches tall, a twisted figure of animalistic nature. Narrow yellow eyes glint out of the Uruk's grimy, gray-skinned face, and just below protrudes a short, snout-like nose set above a row of sharp stained fangs. An odd pale scar is marked into the right cheek, and the faded cut stands out from the dark skin; there is a cold, ethereal tinge about it. Poking out from either side of a tangled mess of dirt and frayed hair are two large, hooked, and pointed ears. Covering the top of the Malkog's head like a crude, macabre helmet is the skull of some fell creature. Long, wirey arms and legs complete the remainder of the Shaman's appearance, and each appendage is topped with a display of hideous black claws. The Orc's feet are bare.

Bagaglok wears an old red robe, the bottom edges of which are muddied and torn. The dark hilt of a scimitar is visible poking out from beneath the folds of scarlet fabric, and a rune decorated shield is hung unceremoniously about his hunched back."



Now, that's a lot of info to convey in a picture...so, naturally, my very first attempt (this is an older drawing that I made prior to the class assignment)
ended up being a more realistic shading drawing. There's some terms that are most likely unfamiliar to non-'Elendorites'. ;) But basically, the character is an orc-shaman of Mordor...simple concept..now to try and translate that into pencil and paper. Unconsciously, I ended up using Warner Brothers' depiction of the house-elf, Dobby, as inspiration (mainly the ears)




And here is the very first attempt at a char concept drawing (these next pictures were uploaded from a camera, so apologies about the quality -- next will be scanned. Most of these were too big for my scanner, so..)













Again, I decided to simplify, and change a few things. Most of it stayed the same, however I turned the style into lineart/cartoon for the expression assignment. I used the '25 expression challenge' idea from deviantart (link), which was a fantastic excersize! My printer wouldn't let me print it big enough, so I used a separate sheet to do it.









While the expressions challenge definitely was challenging, and satisfied most of the class project, I wanted to see what else I could do with the concept. At this point, I had gotten used to the 'toon' style, and could sketch Baga out fairly quick. The next drawings are rather silly. ;)











All right, so this was an attempt at a comic thing. Granted, I haven't tried comics since I was real young, so...hehe. A little bit of an inside joke with this one, by anyway, looking back on it I've decided also that I tried putting too much detail with shading. And let's see about those bold lines and stuff for the talking, and the boxes -- clean it up a bit: those were the things I decided for the future. Well, that's all for now. I'll post the final ones next time, stopping with one of the most current images I've done. Thanks for reading, and congrats if you made it this far!

Voila!

All right, I've decided to try and do some sort of art blog. Now, I'm no where near a professional, hehe, but I'm hoping to pursue a career in art some day. Right now my major is Illustration, although I'm not sure what area I'd like to focus on.

Right, so, I'm not going to bore with details about myself. ;) I think for a starter entry following this one, I'd like to show a character design process for a University class final.