Wednesday, December 30, 2009

MACROSCOPIC PROPORTIONS


This is my personal method for committing proportions of characters to memory- in a macroscopic sense. That is, limbs, heads, big forms that generate silhouette. You've gotta think about your character as a big paper doll, and then relate every bodypart to another smaller bodypart that's within 3x it's size- the cleaner the number the better- you don't want fractions.

For example, I think it's kind of stupid to say "a figure is 7 heads tall" . . . it may be information, but it's vague information. What kind of freak of nature can ballpark "7" in relation to 1?

It's better to just commit a general size relationship between every bodypart to memory in the first place, and bury proportions behind you.

This technique works with any kind of character, so long as you understand why you picked the shapes you did. Everything I do relates back to gesture, so when you trace a shape, you do it with the understanding that you are going to plug your memory of that shape back in when you really attempt the drawing. This is why I sort of lowtail the limb shapes around joint seams- these areas manipulate the size a lot, but the middle segment of limbs is always consistent.

LINE ORGANIZATION

This is my first post. I made this, because I realized that it's not a good idea to just draw as dirty as you want to, in any phase of a drawing, because it'll never be organized. It all starts with clean beginnings.