Video Portrait

Today we participated in a group exercise to explore the idea of video portraits. From working with the group today I have found that I can bounce ideas off other people with a positive result. 
We watched an example of a video portrait:

A Family Portrait by Joseph Pierce.
I like the rotoscoping technique and have tried it before, but not in the same effect. I have learnt from this video that you don't always have to make something that looks very 'tidy' to achieve the desired effect and an emotion for a film, especially a short one due to the lack of time to get an emotion across to the audience. However I do like work that looks 'finished' and 'perfect'.


From this I have learnt that I need to explore other techniques in all areas of animation and art not just the ones I am used to. To create emotion it is stronger to portray that visually using lines, colour and effect than through story or actors.  

Caricature Extended

Today I drew another caricature of Jason, but this time I used a process from someone else's sketchbook. I believe that I have created a something that you would associate more with caricatures, however the features could still be enhanced even more. I believe now that I am doing this to eliminate offence that may be cause from the picture because I know people can be sensitive. I will do some more caricatures but perhaps not of people that I personally know, or I am going to do some of myself. 


However I still really like the way that the caricature has been drawn and I will experiment with this more throughout my daily drawings. I really like the technique of a vague outline being drawn first, then a stronger line over the 'right' line. It also allows a clean line with a quick drawing, which is something that I have struggled with for a long time. 

Jason caricature 

Drawing Characters

So here goes, we worked on our sketching and character creation briefly, we created new characters by using a game called 'Consequence', I thought this was a good way of creating new characters and will continue to do this process.

We then created character sheets, I enjoyed this also, having not explored drawing in this way before. When sketching I tend to take a long time to sketch detail in all of my pictures, this is good in some cases but I want to explore new ways of drawing. The work that I created was from attempting to draw simply and reduce the static feel by adding smoother, more random lines.  think that I have achieved this but could also improve this even more by 'letting go'.

I also found out from my work that I normalise my pictures, for example the head of my character was very large in comparison to it's body, in my character sheet my character ended up well proportioned. To improve on this in the future I am going to take more time to observe before I sketch to allow me to take on everything that is around and every small detail. I like this exercise and am going to use this again to create some unique characters of my own.

Because of amount of time I spent on perfecting the large character on the sheet I didn't get to outline the characters or facial expressions or 360 angles. I am going to work on this and improve my speed when drawing characters.

Caricatures

House by Nico Di Mattia

After the introduction to the drawing and visualisation module on Tuesday I decided to look at other examples of caricatures. 


I found this picture and thought it was interesting. It's a caricature of Hugh Laurie as Dr House, it's very realistic in comparison to many other caricatures. I like the way the artist has subtly changed the characteristics rather than making extreme changes.


During the lesson yesterday I also tried my hand at drawing a caricature for the first time. It was done during a small amount of time to evaluate our rapid drawing skills and to see how we would cope under pressure.

As you can see from the drawings below I have enhanced the features slightly, but not enough to call my drawings true caricatures. 

Ben Wheeler Caricature

Jason Godtschalk Caricature

The British Art Show

We were given that task to look at different pieces from the British Art Show and determine our favourite, least favourite and the one that reminded us of animation, whether in abstract or direct.

Maaike Schoorel

I liked Maaike Schoorels' work, it is a completely different design than I am used to. It made me look harder and longer at the painting rather than taking a quick glance. I think that it is all too easy to do this. 


I have found simply looking more into a subject matter or painting is very important in drawing and visualisation, these are skills I must develop. I also really like the collection of paintings because they are unusual, and they use simple colours such as black and white, backgrounds with a very small amount of colour to show the general form of the model. 

I have tried this process and have found it to be very difficult. I decided to create the picture using powdered make-up to create the effect rather than paint as I thought it would be harsher and I wanted to recreate the softness in the picture. I have picked out just the main important lines and blocks of colour. I think I have added my own spin on the concept. I used make up to allow me to create a soft texture and to experiment with different mediums. I like the way that in my picture you can interpret the subject matter into the way a viewer wants to.