For this week’s class, we went “back to basics” and completed a starter exercise that would warm us up and help improve our comfortability and confidence when drawing. I did this exercise traditionally in my sketchbook first and then repeated again at home digitally to compare the difference in the stability of line work. I am not very confident in my 2D skills so I felt that this exercise helped introduce me to a new warm-up ability that would help me improve my shaky line-art and give me a way to track that improvement.

We then moved onto why “Form & Shape” is important and how we can use these to break down complex shapes/characters. This then led to another activity where we drew basic shapes and their forms, we would then exaggerate these forms even further to make them more complex. I felt that this exercise came in handy when it came to completing the homework as it gave me a better understanding of how forms work.

For the homework, we were tasked with tracing over three of our favourite animated characters and filling in their forms. 

I had originally chosen to trace over Entrapta ( She-Ra), Trevor Belmont (Castlevania) and Pink Diamond (Steven Universe) as I felt that this line up would have a range of different proportions that I could showcase and understand. However, I feel that the way I had traced them made them all look “same-y” and too blocky which made it hard to differentiate them.

I then started over with Cleo (Monster High), Pearl (Steven Universe) and Zinnia (Pokémon). Even though they are all relatively skinny and lanky, I feel that they still look rather distinct from each other. I made sure to properly outline their forms to avoid the bulkiness from the previous attempt and then filled out their construction lines. 

Overall I found this activity enjoyable to complete and found it interesting to understand the shapes that the characters are made out of. I feel that this task furthered my understanding of forms and how they construct a character.