✨ Form and Shape ✨
On week 1 we were tasked with studying form and shape! We used simple shapes like squares, triangles and circles and then made them into cubes, pyramids and spheres to get us thinking in 3D forms. Here’s some examples of mine below!
You can see where I tried to use some perspective with the cylinders and cubes. I tried to do some really fun bendy shapes too, it’s really interesting to me how you can create such bizarre forms from basic shapes just by adding some contour lines, this was a super fun excercise!
The next excercise we did was sketching some flour sacks, which are created from a sphere and a cube. This excercise was to get us used to drawing the forms in characters by practicing with something made up of only two shapes. I drew mine in some pretty silly poses and with little eyes, I wanted it to look super cute! : ]
After these practice excercises, we were assigned a homework to choose three of our favourite characters and block out the forms and shapes in them. I blocked out the shapes, and then copy pasted the shapes making up the form to redraw my characters as practice, I tried to pick three characters with really different styles and shapes.
First I drew Hatsune Miku, she’s drawn in an eastern anime style and as such her proportions are crazy exaggerated, in my redraw I did my own take on her proportions to try and make her limbs make a little more sense. Her pigtails and outfit were super fun to draw!
Next I did Leo from ROTTMNT, the animation in this show is super angular and exaggerated, so I was super excited to block out the shapes in the character’s forms. The turtles are very rectangular, especially their heads which are basically just two cubes, it’s super fun to draw their little snouts. At first drawing them didn’t come very easily to me but once I broke them down into simpler shapes I find it so much easier to get a grasp of their proportions and anatomy.
Finally I drew Rodimus from MTMTE/LL in Jack Lawrence’s style (top left) and Alex Milne’s style (bottom right). This one I was cheating just a bit, as I draw Rodimus a lot and I was pretty comfortable with drawing his forms, but I’ve never properly broken all of him down into cubes like this. He’s basically just a lot of boxes on top of boxes with lots of pointy details! So much fun to draw.
I realised afterwards that I broke all my characters down into boxes, rather than using squares and circles like other people in the class. This is how I usually approach any character I sketch as it keeps my anatomy right and I’m usually trying to avoid my characters looking flat, but I wound up making myself worried that I did the homework wrong.
Despite this though, breaking characters into cubes helps me personally better visualise 3D forms, and I think I’ll continue to work like this, if it isn’t broke don’t fix it! (Maybe this is a side affect of how many robots I’ve been drawing as of late, hm…)
I did a little more work than was assigned to us, but I thought it was a really fun homework and I enjoyed the practice! (These are also three of my favourite characters ever so it barely felt like work at all hehe!)