For our very first piece of work, we had to go off and study the underlying forms and shapes of three animated characters of our choice. Alec had provided sufficient examples of his own work via MP4 files and a PDF example on Blackboard, along with lectures and articles and videos to aid us with our task and make sure we understood it thoroughly.
There were a lot of characters I had ideas on studying, but i had to start off with something i could handle and not get too ambitious. I usually draw animals- mostly canines- so i decided to use Balto from the Disney animation “Balto”, Shirou Ogami from “BNA” a new anime I recently got into, and to mix it up and try push myself out of my comfort zone, Lucifer from one of my favorite anime’s “The Devil Is A Part Timer” as he has a human form and features wings too.
Along with studying the forms of characters, I had to understand the forms of simple shapes such as circle, triangle and rectangle before progressing any further. To do this I first drew out the simple 2D shapes, then making each one into a 3D shape by drawing them on planes and squishing/stretching/pushing them in any way i could think of to try get my head around how their 3D forms worked. I did struggle a little with the triangle though.
I also practiced my line work to improve my drawings and sketches with various exercises such as drawing lines both horizontally and vertically for as many I could fit on the page, filling the page with circles and drawing as many circles as possible inside those circles. I also had to practice my pressure line work by leaning heavily or lighter on my iPad with my Apple Pencil to create different points of pressure in a continuous line.
At the end of this homework, i was more aware of the 3D forms of shapes and had a better understanding of how to turn a 2D shape into a 3D one, helping me to draw better and more interesting forms for my designs and sketches.