Adding character to characters
After a month focused more on digital art practices I decided to go with more challenging courses for April. Not challenging on a technical level, but challenging because this has always been something I've felt my own drawings have lacked; energy and expression.
One of the March courses touched on this a little, going into the importance of silhouette and body language. I felt like that course had a lot of practical advice that was easy to start bringing in to my sketches. So I wanted to find a course that would keep elaborating on these approaches. Ending up on one titled "How to Bring You Characters to Life."
I wasn't sure what to expect from the course as I knew it would be different from the typical, here's how to understand anatomy that lots of art classes start with. Thankfully the instructor started by breaking down the main parts of a character that add life to an image.
Hands and Eyes
First came eyes, putting them on faces, playing around with eye brows. I think the big take away from this was just acknowledging how alive a shape can become with very simple eyes thrown on it.
Like many artists, I struggle with hands. Found a good reference sheet of hand photos to use for these sketches and I'm actually pretty happy with most of them. Sure they aren't clean but they convey the shape I was aiming for in most cases. Which is more of the goal of this course in particular. Find the bare minimum to keep the message in the shapes.
Squash and squish
This jump sequence was done to practice 'squash and squish'. Terms that come from animation for how you manipulate bodies, faces, etc. to emphasize motion and expression. You tend to give yourself more leeway with anatomy while communicating the motion that's happening.
Squash and squish come into play in expressions to show movement in the face to convey emotions. While I understand the simple pieces to this I struggle adapting expressions to characters as I feel like I lose what makes a character face unique. In this practice I tried to ignore that fear and just push the expressions as far as I could. Which did result in some pretty ridiculous looking faces.
Bringing it together
Did some full body gesture studies to try incorporating some of the tips that were covered. It's interesting to return to gesture drawing in every course while taking in the advice of new teachers each time.
After all those exercises the final piece of homework was supposed to be to bring it all together in a character drawing. I started that but... made a bad choice of reference image that didn't offer much life.
I then got hooked on wanting to work on this piece as I was actually pretty happy with parts of it and felt like I was making decent improvements every time I went back to it. But then I got stuck on hating the face and had the realization that I was no longer practicing the material covered in the course. So instead of pushing forward on the piece I closed Procreate and went to choose a new course to try again.
Started on a stylizing characters course a few days ago which pulls on a lot of the advice from this course so I'm hoping that it will help cement a lot of what I picked up here while I continue trying to really figure out these foundational techniques.