Not Much

I don't have much to offer today, here are some Billford sketches I did couple days ago. I'm just testing strech and squash and trying to perfect his "look." As you can see i need to work on his body, not very good.Maybe later this evening or tomorrow i'll make some posting of the Aracuan who i mentioned in yesterday's post, i was going to do it today but now i can't.

Jose Carioca

When I was a kid we owned the Three Caballero's, it was a Disney film made in 1943 as part of the 'good neighbor' act to help us gain allys during WWII. Out of it came my two favorite Disney characters created. Jose "Ze" Carioca and the Aracuan.

Right now i have depicted Jose, i like Jose because unlike many of the Disney characters that i'm aware of he was a quintessential cool guy. Panama hat, bumbershoot, and what appears to be a zoot suit, he loved hanging out at cafes, dancing, meeting beautiful women, and smoking fat cigars. He is Donald Ducks cousin (I believe, I know that they were related, the duo were commonly referred to as 'Birds of a Feather') so cartoons of him are usually with Donald explaining the beauty of his beloved country (HAVE YOU BEEN TO BAHIA?!), Jose is very energetic but suave when he's around the ladies, incredibly friendly, and is very nostalgic.

I did a quick drawing of him using constructions, I then compared it to the original and made notes regarding proportion, and made another one while refering these notes, it was very close so i made a little construction model in the bottom right so I wouldn't forget. I then started to focus on his head.
His head was pretty tricky for me because of that beak. but i think the hardest part was getting that lower part of the beak the right size and shape, what i did to help me was break some of the construction even further making only squares and rectangles to get the right angles and size, i then scultped these shapes into round objects which became the forms and molded his face.
What i didn't catch was the shape of his eye, which was too narrow and needed to be rounder and more egg shaped, which I oversaw.

Jose has only been in a couple things in the early 40's "Saludos Amigos" "Three Cabarello's" "Cafe de Samba" and "Aquarela do Brazil" he also appeared in a couple comics along side Donald. Jose is much, much more popular in Brazil and has his own comic and appears along side Mickey and he even has a superhero persona. I'd like to get a hand on some of these comics, I'll try and find some, in the mean time here's a video of him.

Donald & Some of Goofy

Another drawing, this is Donald being his typical self pouring water in Goofy's Tuba as a practical joke, haha what a bastard. This below is the finished drawing.
here are he prelimanaries, it took me a while to get the right shape, i was making his ass an elipse when it should of been a circle. I watched out for making his hand with the jug high enough I was making it level with his face when it should of been a little higher. Proportions can be seen figured out towards the right of the page, Donald is about 3.5 maybe even 4 heads high, his feet are his heads height, and he is about 2 or 2.5 heads wide (w/o the extended arm). Once i got everything done I made a clean construction model in the bottom left, and i circled it. Also on another note, a friend who's mind is always is in the gutter told me that the Donald in the upper left looks like he stroking a penis, what do you think?
Goofy on the other hand was kind of tricky. Because on the original image I didn't have much to go off. I focused mostly on the construction of the head which was very simple, i worked a little on the body, but as you can tell in the finished drawing most of the work didn't make it. The image is mostly about Donald really. the hardest part about Goofy was making sure his neck was the right length. it was usually too far away.

New.

John made a new post, so i decided to take a crack at drawing this image, It took me a while but with making preliminaries to better understand the image I got it just fine. This one was more of a challenge, so with the help of forms and line of action, i studied proportions pretty vigorously to make sure that the characters look right.
Below is the finished product.
Here are some drawings of the turtle, forms was pretty helpful but in the end, proportion seemed to dominate so i could make sure he wasn't too big or too small compared to the rabbit, it drove me crazy! I also tried some different expressions on the turtle, not sure why I did that.
Rabbit was a little trickier, in fact when i started i gave up and did some different expressions which i thought was funny. Instead of taking pleasure in how he hit the turtle I changed it to guilt and despair, "I didn't mean to hurt ya' i was just horsin' around! whaaaa!"After procrastinating with the face i decided to get down to business! what made it helpful was again, proportion, that rabbit is four heads wide, with that my line of action was more accurate, the butt goes one head high, body goes down one head, etc. The drawing on the bottom-right is him after he got shot in the face... don't ask.
Proportion, Construction, Line of Action, all helpful in achieving this drawing. I like to think that i'm also doing hierarchy but i'm still not totally sure what that is.

ZiZi

I decided to try out another character this time female.
Using a line of action was perticuarly helpful with the pose on the left. I liked the idea and overal way the character dressed (baggy clothes and fast movements, how FUN!), but the face needed some work.
I got very close on the second try (right), and on the third I was very content with what I had drawn. Again the sketch on the left was helped with line of action, too bad it's not very good (perspective is waaaaaaaay off). On the bottom left are a bunch of possible names, I wanted her to be Eastern European, I selected Hungarain names and culture because my oldest sister's boyfriend is Hungarian and he's pretty spiffy. I decided to select the name Zigana which roughly translates to 'Gypsy,' but i think everyone will call her ZiZi for short. I might name the cat above Paliki, but i need to work on the cat's look.
Once I get a selected look that i can agree with the sketches look so much better. anyway i did a full body drawing, she's on her tip-toes for some reason. And everything else show stretch & squash and different angles. Everything to me seems fine, all i want to work with is the front, but only the hair. Oh also the scarf on the position looking up isn't in the correct perspective, i really need to watch out for that.
I traced them in Flash and added color to see what she might look like all cleaned up. not too shabby (for me at least).

I showed a friend the completed designs you see above and she said that it reminded her of the Gorillaz. I was flattered because i do very much like the band, but at the same i was insulted because even though they can be drawn from most angles going left and right, it's a little harder drawing them up and down.


Oh dear.


Do a google search of the word Gorillaz and you will be hard pressed to find pictures of them looking upward or down. I luckily, now know how to make characters without that flaw. But to be fair to Jamie Hewlett, i did go through a huge Gorillaz doodle phase where everything i drew was in that style.

Getting Closer to the Finish

As I progress and read more of John's blog, i get closer and closer to the finalization of Billford's design. This was using Preston Blair's baby head, like i mentioned a couple days ago in a previous blog entry. This design is much easier to move around, i'll make some extra poses from different angles instead of the 3/4's i constantly put up!


I also decided to trace and color them in using Flash just to see it cleaned up.


all i really need to do is work a little more on the eye shape and i should be good.

Once again. Thank you for your purchase.

Sold another camera on ebay. Drew another thank you picture, this time i was in a rush so i just used Tom Oreb's designs for a Trix Cereal commercial from way back when. Hope they like it.

Nightmare and Cowboy Elf

Okay, so i started on John K's reference drawing to see if i can apply some ideas of construction and hierarchy (which is kind of a weird thing to explain, but i think i know what he means by it) to the image.

First image is not terribly exciting it's just the lines of actions, we have the horse, elf-thing, and the big bad wolf running away, i also included the smoke trail and the hill in which our main characters are settled.Alright now i'm building up some basic shapes and forms of the protagonists.
I check to make sure that the wolf's line of action is in the right spot by measuring his distance with the original drawing using the thickest width of the horses neck. He is about 3 necks away from our characters, i have him in the wrong spot and i correct it. I also do some quick formations of the trees that frame him.
i add the forms of the smoke trails. the bushes and some tree details.
I start building up on the horse and elf, i become discouraged when i realize that the head isn't fat enough and i've venture too far.
discouraged i move to the trees and add the individual branches
I see that his hat is in the wrong spot so i move it, i also add the leaves on the tree and return to the shapes and details of the horse.
i start forming the smoke trail and the foreground bush
The tail was the most intimidatings part so i save it for last, turned out as long as i knew forms and broke it down it only took a minute or two.
All that's left now is to darken the lines!
and there you have it. I'm perticurally proud of this one, even though the faces are a tad off the most important things are in the right place and it's a clean easily understandible drawing.

Thanks for Your Purchase!

I sold a camera on ebay and i just shipped it today, i decided to make it a little more special for them that i would send them a picture too.
I hope they like it!

realization

it's the wee hours of the morning, i haven't gone to sleep just yet. I decided to check John's blog and i found a section of "cute" drawing younger, human characters. It has made me realize that the character that i drew in the previous post is FAR from finished. I think by finally getting a taste of understanding how to place forms in the correct space once again has made me over-confident, but I think a larger reason was due to the fact that i was also exhausted of drawing this character over and over trying to understand how to construct him properly while still maintaining a style that i felt was reflective of myself. I'm going to try and draw him again using Preston Blair's Baby head motif.

John's Blog is so infinitely large, i am overwhelmed by how much information is contained by only 3 years of dedicated posting. It's a labyrinth of knowledge of observations, i've stumbled upon it before, but i only started reading it 2 weeks ago.

Day 3 - Really Getting It.

So I had the feeling that i was getting it, or getting a good grasp. So what I decided to do was think about what i've been learning and apply it to one of my characters. well 7 pages of drawings later I got it.
These are the first attmepts, we're very off but we have the right idea, the character also seems to be too fat compared to his body. I do however, like the way his shirt pops out of his sweater vest.

This one I narrowd his head a little, mostly what i tried to do was enlarge his eyes, maybe you can see the erase marks but i drew many differest shapes of eyes. Turns out that head might work if he were Asian. As you can see i did a 3/4 that i was very pleased with, that was diffenitly the look i was going for.I expanded on the 3/4, trying to break it down, it took me a while to find out what shape his jaw was and how it wraps around his face so i attempt on the profiles, not really to any success they don't make very much sense. I made a small one of the front in the upper right, i somewhat pleased with it so i work off of that for the next page.
I exaggerate the jaw in the upper right, though it was interesting it wasn't what i was going for. On this page i'm just drawing the jaw bone in different ways and trying to understand the front. I really enjoy the full body with that funny smile on him! I had to do some erasing for uploading b/c he kind of reminded me of black-face cartoons.
I really like the front on the left here, at this point i think i almost have it, when i did a view of the front looking down i realized that i didn't.
This is the page where i understood what was happening to all my drawings. I was thinking in 2d forms as opposed to 3d shapes, The whole point of this is to make your characters appear 3 dimensional and i haven't been thinking in that mind-set. I felt very silly, to think that adjusting one line would help me better understand what i was doing. it was with this i was able to get the 3/4, profile, and front to look unified, and with only a couple tries instead of many pages worth.
Everything makes so much more sense now that i have tried to use it on my own drawings, this isn't finished though, he looks a little older than I originally planned, i need to plumpen up his face a little more and try and combine my failed attempts and this completed one.

Step-by-Step?

There's a question-mark at the end because i'll be posting another step-by-step drawing and it is much easier to follow. So first up, we have some light sketches of the basic forms. A circle and ellipse for the head, ellipses for hands, weird oblong shape for the bow-tie, etc.

Here I started putting in some facial features, I started to lay out the shape of the feet and fingers, etc.finished the hands, here i noticed the his right arm is at the wrong angle, i correct the problem. i start on the hat.I finish the hat, add wrinkles in the tie, gloves and face. I draw in his wings, and darken the lines. All that was left to do now is shade in the image.
There are a couple problems with this reproduction and the original, first the left leg needs to be closer to his left hand. His left had appears to be smaller than his right hand which for perspectives sake can't be right because his left is the closest to us. And everything else would be more subtle, i need to work on the forms a bit more, and i didn't use a line of action which is also bad.

Alright, day 2 of old school doodling. I'm starting to get better, the inconsistancies have been less obvious and I've been better understanding construction. I think the Basset Hound ref is a good example of my progress.
I've started noticing that i draw a little too big for the paper...

i have pictures of the build-up of both of these i'll make a post about it tomorrow. There are glaring problems with the original, espicially the one on the right, that left foot needed to be closer to the hand and the left had also needs to be larger than his right, the perspective isn't right. The one on the left i didn't do to bad, my only complaint is that the how his right foot bends was supposed to be more curved and organic as opposed the the more harsh and angular way that i have it drawn, I like angular and harsh but unfourtunatly that's not how they did it in the 30's and 40's.

Okay, these are my favorite, I think I mentioned in my last post about how much i perfer Chuck Jones over the other animators at the time, one of the reasons where his eyes. The way he did terrified and forlorn expressions are priceless to me, the one on the left is from Mouse Wreckers, which reminded me of one of my favorite cartoons "Feed the Kitty" and the dead-inside expression Marc Anthony made after thinking that his beloved kitty was baked into a cookie. He has saggy breasts for eyes, Also the way his muzzel just slides off his face and droops really helps his expression, his hunchback is another nice touch.

Daffy's

I swear... I'm going to get into John K's Cartoon College if it means I never leave the house again!! Upon hearing the news I immediately read his postings and started making drawings of Daffy from Duck Amuck. It was pretty late at night so it was the only one i got done.

I have a Tex Avery Donald who snuck (Duck A'snuck! GET IT?!) into the bottom-right. He knows he's not supposed to be in there.



Alright, building up from shapes was pretty easy and I got a little over confident with the picture below. Daffy's head is WAY too low, and it ruins the silhouette, I really need to double if not triple check all the proportions before I venture too far into the drawing.
This is the last Daffy I drew, I can't remember who did this one I know it's not Jones, I don't think it's Avery, so I'm guessing Clampett?? Either way, I made a little boo-boo with the location of the arms, had to move them down, luckily I drew them lightly and noticed before I got too far in unlike the previous Daffy.
After doing these i realized that I really like Chuck Jones overall look as opposed to the others, I think it's because his lines are a little harsher and more angular as opposed to a more organic look that Avery and Clampett.