Assignment 8: Combat!

    •    In preparation for Homework #9, read the text: Drawing Drapery from Head to Toe, by Cliff Young, Dover.
    •    Complete 1 line drawing in good proportion.

Your drawing must show two people in hand to hand combat. Your characters may be engaged in a fist fight, a play fight, brawl or wrestling match. There should be no weapons involved. Poses should feel authentic and have movement. Identify the general thrust/direction line to your attacking and defensive poses.
Your characters should be drawn without clothes.

You may use reference as inspiration for the pose you choose but make your drawing in different perspective from your source. I would suggest looking over a lot of ref, sketchbook in hand, to pick up salient anatomical details. Thus to avoid the "Made-Up"-looking bodies that plagued many Assignment Sevens.

This drawing should be roughly 10" x 10", neat with, strong simple contour lines. Take the time you need to perfect the anatomy, proportion and foreshortening of various body parts. When finished, set your drawing aside and reassess it the next day.

Please amuse and enlighten yourself with the attached illustrations of combat both faked and real! Notice that Line of Action is a huge factor in the differences between real and fake.
JH

P.S.: Note the foreshortened limbs in the last photo!

More Help on Facial Structure

From a blog for my comics class:
http://ill193.blogspot.com/2010/02/those-wee-facial-offsets.html
Thanks to pornstar Daisy for her help, albeit unwitting, in creating one of these instructional jpegs!

JH

Heads in Boxes

For Assignment 6:
The GIF here will replay automatically. The resulting face is, I'll admit, kind of odd, with its pulled-in, feminine mouth. But I'm claiming that it's the idea that counts! :)  Note the red centerline of the face and how it only touches the centerline of the box at the tip of the nose, and how there is maximum distance between round head and square box at the corners, which distance is exhibited to maximum effect on the left side. (Overplayed, possibly, but it depends on the type of face and how close the subject is to the observer. The face rounds away more serverely in close-up, wide-angle views and is relatively flattened in more distant, long-lensed views.)

Below, I did find one example of this assignment. It's a good job on the perspective setup, and a nicely human-looking human. The box is unsubdivided and too loose to really guide proportion, but it does seem a good match with the view of the head. I don't recall the grade, naturally, but I'm sure it earned a B+ at the very least, more likely an A-.

Here's the brief for the assignment:


Draw a human head in 1-point, 2-point, 2-point vertical and 3-point perspective. Make each head as realistic as possible. Use the methods you have learned so far to show the relationship between various features. Be aware that the face works on different planes and depths, the eyes and mouth are not on the same vertical plane for instance. This homework is a test of your knowledge of perspective and head proportion and anatomy.

Each head should be shown in a transparent box that shows the accurate use of the type of perspective used. Choose varying angles from below, above and the side, that show the details of the face as clearly as possible. Do NOT include beards, hats, spectacles etc. Keep hair short or away from face.

Each of your 4 line drawings should be 9" x 12" or larger.

PLEASE NOTE:

ALL WORK DONE FOR THIS CLASS SHOULD BE AS REALISTIC AS POSSIBLE, ANY STYLIZATION OR DISTORTION WILL BE PERCEIVED AS A FLAW.

Your grade will depend on your understanding of the principles and constructions involved in the assignment as well as the complexity, accuracy and detail of your drawing. Composition, line quality, clarity and cleanliness will also be factors. Going beyond the call of duty is strongly encouraged as long as you remain true to the brief. Show what you are capable of.

Feel free to draw the characters as bald to save time and show your credible handling of head shape.

JH

This stuff fascinates me...

...you too?

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1763468

Heard of the "Uncanny Valley"? This is the idea, advanced--incredibly--about 40 years ago by a Japanese theorist. He suggested that as simulations of humans approached perfection, that there would be a sudden drop-off in apparent human-ness near the more realistic end of the scale.

This effect is best exemplified by the creepy, soulless, vacant quality seen in Final Fantasy, Polar Express, Beowulf and Heidi Montag. Ha ha -- too easy.

Scientists have been reliant on using this kind of sampling (detailed scans, motion and performance capture) to claw partway up the far side of the Valley--and approach something that is recognizably human.

I suppose that such performance capture data will be subjected to mathematical pattern analysis so that common facial expressions can be placed in series in a plug-and-play way, even blended into one another. Thus we may doom the performance smarts that we can see in the best Disney and Pixar animators, who can make emotions--strong or subtle--ripple over characters faces so relatably that they seem to reveal the characters' thoughts. The skills that animators took a century building may be replaced with samples ...

JH

Distortion in a Photo

Here's a little jpeg from a real estate site that shows exactly the same kind of distortion that comes from having vanishing points in too close. How does it look to you? Weird? Nothing out-of-the-way? Notice that the squares of the tile floor are taller than square near the bottom.

My theory is that we can accept this distortion near the edge of a photo or drawing. But this is quite a lot! (The truth is, I didn't know this could occur in a photo -- at least to such a degree -- till I noticed this photo.)

This is the result of the poor real estate agent's trying to make the dingy little bathroom in this place look roomy by using a very wide angle lens. Short lenses "force" perspective, exaggerating scale differences between near and far, and provide a greater feeling of depth. In theory.

(BTW, the photographer's use of available light has put the shadow of someone's arm and side in the frame--possibly his own. A flash naturally creates only shadows that are about 99.9% concealed from the lens.)

This lens is short enough that it gives a fisheye effect: the long verticals at the left edge of the frame bow outward very slightly. You can actually see this in a lot of snapshots if you look for it, as in the storefront pic.

Remember that the degree of fishy "bowing out" has nothing to do with the distance of the object from the lens, and everything to do with how far the object is from the center of vision, laterally, in the picture plane.

JH

Assignment 5 -- PLEASE MAKE IT BORING!

I swear I've never assigned this in such a way, but one couldn't prove it by the results. Completed assignment 5s generally range from serviceable to sleep-inducing.  Maybe it's because I used to call for "inanimate" objects instead of man-made. I've refined the wording, at great cost to brevity, to try to spur you all to finer work. Below is the text.

The accompanying Assignment 5 examples are file-named for the grade each earned. The B one would have been an A but the VP for the slats of the table top wasn't on the horizon. Perspective assignments often go bad because the artist, wittingly or no, introduces unneeded VPs or --worse-- an extra horizon, as in this case. Go with the horizon you've got. One was enough for the world; it should suffice for your drawing.

JH

Homework #5

Using both two-point vertical and 3-point perspective, complete a drawing of three manmade objects. For some reason everyone always reads that as “household objects” and produces their most boring, unfinished drawing of the semester. Remember these objects can be any size. They can be race-cars, spaceships. Anything man-made and interesting that has some straight lines (Extra points for handling ellipses properly). 

The objects can be anything you please but each must be different from the other two.

Two objects should be drawn in three point and the third in two point vertical. All three objects must work together IN THE SAME DRAWING, same reality. The key to this is: They must share the same horizon and the same nadir or zenith. Please contact me ASAP if you don’t know what that means.

Remember that in 2-point vertical, one vanishing point must be at the center of vision on the horizon the other should be directly above or below.

With 3-point perspective, two points must be on the horizon and the third should be above or beneath, placed an equal distance from the other two forming a triangle with equal sides. For more advanced students, the Chelsea handout shows how a 3Pt setup alters when the center of vision is moved closer to one of the VPs.

HORIZON SHOULD BE OUTSIDE YOUR IMAGE OR NEARLY SO.

Special attention should be paid to the scale of objects in relation to each other. Please produce a drawing that is complete and interesting on its own terms. That is, if it is just a line drawing, make sure the lines are neatly drawn and there are indications of texture and that the objects are not depicted as blank and boring, but rather have some features of interest.

Your drawing should be 9" x 12" or larger. You may add value if you wish. Please provide at least minimal background to put the objects in context.

PLEASE NOTE:

ALL WORK DONE FOR THIS CLASS SHOULD BE AS REALISTIC AS POSSIBLE, ANY STYLIZATION OR DISTORTION WILL BE PERCEIVED AS A FLAW.

Your grade will depend on your understanding of the principles and constructions involved in the assignment as well as the complexity, accuracy and detail of your drawing. Composition, line quality, clarity and cleanliness will also be factors. Going beyond the call of duty is strongly encouraged as long as you remain true to the brief. Show what you are capable of.

Welcome to Drawing from the Imagination!

Deep breath, and we're off, double-time, into the worlds of perspective, shadow plotting, figure proportions and a few other disciplines. All to make sure that will make sure you leave the Academy actually knowing how to draw, really draw.

Here's a screencap I made from Ghost in the Shell 2 this morning. This background nicely illustrates three of the major areas we'll be getting into this semester: perspective, shadow plotting and reflection. While you won't need to finish your work to this degree, this is otherwise a nice example of an artist making a somewhat fanciful, futuristic scene look believable and impressive.

Ask yourself, would you know how to draw the shadows on the floor of this room? By the time you've completed this course, you'll know. (You might even be able to say why the horizon is not in the right place and why the shoulders are incorrectly oriented in the standing woman's shadow. Even now you may rightly wonder how a curving structural element could cast a straight shadow!)

My background is in comic books. To be really good, a comic book artist must be able to convince the reader he or she knows how to draw almost everything. The same can be said, probably even more truly, of illustrators like yourselves. So I'll be teaching you all how to construct heads that look dimensional and attractive, to form and pose bodies that look graceful and convincing. We'll learn how to draw the folds in clothing too.

This is a tough course for most, but I think it ends up being enjoyable for a lot of people. Check in here often--I'll often post the assignment details and helpful illustrations here.

Pencils ready!

JH