HOME | DD

Description
So while the colored finish probably wasn't as nice as I would have liked, and I still need to work out some of the kinks with this new coloring approach, this is still a pretty significant image for me. I figured out a vital piece of my process that has been almost completely absent until very recently, and I think it is going to make a huge difference going forward.

In the past, I have approach characters from a purely visual standpoint. If I like how the thing looks, that has been the yardstick for it's success. But one of the reasons I wanted to learn to draw in the first place was to create characters that lived. I have studied posing, acting (for animation), gesture, force, movement as well as the usual construction and figure drawing, but I have never really felt as if the characters had that lively quality that I've always wanted. They always felt superficial to me. The problem, they had no personality. Such a simple thing, and yet I completely missed it. I'll probably go into a more in depth journal article on this in the next couple of days, mainly because it was so significant a breakthrough for me, but to sum it up here, I was basically focusing too much on the what and completely ignored/missed the who. So that's what I've been working on.

The most beneficial byproduct of focusing on a personality, and by that I mean like two or three personality traits so nothing too complicated, I actually started to picture the character before ever putting something down on paper. I can almost never do that. So I saw this guy in my head well and truly before I tried to draw him. True, I still had to design him, but those design choices were directed by the character's personality, as was the posing, which was also so much easier to come up with. Story too. Basically, having a simple personality for your character helps in all sorts of ways, and I really wish I could have figured that out ages ago.

Anyway, enough rambling, let me know what you think.
More on the way.

P.S. In case you're interested, and wasn't obvious, this guy's personality was just a two traits and a flaw. Brave, ambitious, but deathly afraid of water. Which, if you want to be an astronaut can be a problem when it comes to weightlessness training. So the addition of a goal, basically creates a story for him. Pretty simple, but really helpful.

Description
So while the colored finish probably wasn't as nice as I would have liked, and I still need to work out some of the kinks with this new coloring approach, this is still a pretty significant image for me. I figured out a vital piece of my process that has been almost completely absent until very recently, and I think it is going to make a huge difference going forward.

In the past, I have approach characters from a purely visual standpoint. If I like how the thing looks, that has been the yardstick for it's success. But one of the reasons I wanted to learn to draw in the first place was to create characters that lived. I have studied posing, acting (for animation), gesture, force, movement as well as the usual construction and figure drawing, but I have never really felt as if the characters had that lively quality that I've always wanted. They always felt superficial to me. The problem, they had no personality. Such a simple thing, and yet I completely missed it. I'll probably go into a more in depth journal article on this in the next couple of days, mainly because it was so significant a breakthrough for me, but to sum it up here, I was basically focusing too much on the what and completely ignored/missed the who. So that's what I've been working on.

The most beneficial byproduct of focusing on a personality, and by that I mean like two or three personality traits so nothing too complicated, I actually started to picture the character before ever putting something down on paper. I can almost never do that. So I saw this guy in my head well and truly before I tried to draw him. True, I still had to design him, but those design choices were directed by the character's personality, as was the posing, which was also so much easier to come up with. Story too. Basically, having a simple personality for your character helps in all sorts of ways, and I really wish I could have figured that out ages ago.

Anyway, enough rambling, let me know what you think.
More on the way.

P.S. In case you're interested, and wasn't obvious, this guy's personality was just a two traits and a flaw. Brave, ambitious, but deathly afraid of water. Which, if you want to be an astronaut can be a problem when it comes to weightlessness training. So the addition of a goal, basically creates a story for him. Pretty simple, but really helpful.