In my first week I learned about form and shape. I learned about 3 warm up exercises, using Photoshop, that help before beginning any work. For the first exercise I had to fill a page with long straight lines, then with circles and finally practice ‘S’ lines in a continuous stroke. These exercises are useful when warming up before starting work, to build muscle memory and to build confidence in my line work.
I found this exercise was helpful to do before work, practicing line work to make basic sketches much easier to do and also speeds up practice work by making it looser.
The next task was learning about basic geometric shapes, that can be broke down to create general ideas. These shapes are a circle, square and triangle, which in turn can create 5 forms; sphere, cube, pyramid, cone and cylinder. Combine these shapes and they become any basic planning of any object I wish to create.
From this I then completed an exercise of drawing basic shapes and forms and using contour lines to help discover these forms. These forms become 3D and show the depth and dimension.
After this I then attempted the next exercise to create a flour sack using a sphere and a cube. Below is my attempt:
I liked this exercise as it gave me more of an insight into how dimensions work in different shapes and how they aid in showing the angle and depth. It also helped me discover how to build characters upon the three main shapes and how they can be transformed.
Following this I then looked into the homework of underlying forms. This homework was to take 3 of our favourite cartoon characters and find their underlying forms. I’ve never done a task like this and so through this I think I understand forms in characters better.
Below are my 3 favourite characters; Woody, Venom and Ahsoka. I am really happy with how they came out!!
Videos & articles:
- http://brendanbody.blogspot.com/2008/12/flour-sack-exersize.html
- https://www.karmatoons.com/category/drawing/
- http://www.thedrawingwebsite.com/2015/02/18/practicing-your-draw-fu-forms-forms-are-like-sentences/
- https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/think-with-forms-not-lines-take-your-drawing-to-the-next-level–cms-24486
- https://archive.org/details/PrestonBlairCartoonAnimation/page/n11/mode/2up
- https://www.justtodosomethingbad.com/blog/2018/9/14/what-even-is-animation
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsdkhQis34U&feature=youtu.be
- https://youtu.be/srK-vV-YzUc