Pinocchio Comparisons

warm-ups

I saw "Pinocchio" for the first time online, I really enjoyed it, so much so that i snatched a bunch of stills to use as references, and boy golly did i get some good'ins! I decided to start of with one of my favorite scenes where Lampwick tells Pinocchio to take a BIG drag off the cigar. Pinocchio being extremely naive does so and suffers the consequence.

Above are my drawings, I'm doing 2 per page. Below are the original frames.

haha! Ouch, that looks painful just to look at.

Okee-Do-kee! Let's analyze this, shall we? There's actually a lot wrong. The eye left to us isn't slanted upward enough, the nose needs to be down and shifted to the right slightly, that threw off the mouth which the same needs to be done. The ear needs to be up and right more along with the hairline, the back of the head is not nearly big enough. The body isn't too bad but i need to watch out for those arms.

Face wise this isn't too shabby. The base of the nose needs to be larger, the ear needs to be shifted down along with jaw line and the back of the head needs to be extended further out. The Cigar however is waay off, and so is his bow-tie.

Ohhh! Is he gunna blow chunks??

Ewww. He sallowed it, gah-rose!

The major problem with this one is that the body is way too big (or the head is too small?). Otherwise in the face the main features seem to meet up just fine with the exception of the eyebrows and ears. Again the head needs to be extended in the back, the hat is too low in the front. The cheek on the left in just a tad-bit too big but not that bothersome to me.

This would be a pretty decent drawing... IF I FUCKING MOVED THE BACK OF THE HEAD AND EARS FURTHER BACK. That seems to be a huge problem. Along with that the jaw needs to be moved down further, and the tie moved in more. More minor issues would be that the left eyebrow needs to be shifted up and to the right a tad and the brim of the hat a little but up.

I loved this part, his eyes fill all the way to the top with tears and then when he closes them a huge waterfall pours out of his eyes. But right before it pours out the tears squash down like they do below.

Awesome, I know. Kudos to whoever planned this out.

WHOA! The head and ears are allllllmoooossst where they need to be, they're still off though. The eyebrows need to be placed further down, and the mouth needs to be scaled down a bit. The neck is way off and therefore the rest of the body even then the back of the collar is not at the right angle and needs to be facing away from his body more.

First thing i notice is that the neck is too long. and like the previous drawing the collar needs to be going away from the body more. The ears are near perfect! But the back of the head... you know. The jaw line needs to shift up and the left eyebrow needs to move left more. The mouth is placed too high. As for the nose, down more and larger.

Love the above expression!

Hey! What's the first thing you notice? EAR AND BACK OF HEAD!! everything else is either where it needs to be or close. For example the nose is too long and so is the cheek. The right eyebrow is a little high as well as the hat.

I am not sure what's going on with the hat so let's ignore it. Once yet again, ear... back of head. The jaw is down too low and the nose needs to be smaller aswell as the wrinkles. The body is too big and the bow needs to be upwards and over to the left more.

PHEW! There is a lot wrong going on in these pictures. Obviously I need to watch out for the ear and width of the head. Second i need to be cautious of the size of the head or body making sure one isn't too big than the other. My next issue I would say would be watching out for the eyebrows, nose-size, and jaw. The neck is also a problem. Those are the major ones that i notice right off that bat and what i'll start working on. I'll be posting more Pinocchio stuff, i got lots of stills of the lead, Gepetto, Jiminy Cricket, Figaro the Cat, Honest John, and Lampwick.

ALSO, if you have any critiques, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE post them!

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.

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.

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.