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.