Week 7 - Shape

Hi everyone! How you doing?

Another week, another update. This week I have been watching the 2nd week of the Schoolism gesture class again because I was very confused when I watched it last week. However, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, the great thing about the subscription is that you can do the course at your own pace so you can re-watch a certain lesson until you understand it. I still want to treat it as though I am on the live course just for the sake of my own discipline, but if I need to I will slow it down. The race is not given to the swift (biblical reference)

Anyway, in essence, I have been learning about how to use shape in gesture drawing. Alex Woo was talking about thinking big and thinking graphically/ not getting into the details too soon (my number one pitfall because I love details). He was encouraging us to look for the overall shape which describes the pose. 

Part of the assignment was to find 10 pictures and look for that overall shape. See my attempt below. I'm not sure I fully get it yet.

As with a lot of principles, it is transferable and because my interest is character design my immediate thought was how can I think bigger in my design. The colour blocking exercise below was a good starting place. I pretty much knew what I was going to draw from the start but I began with bigger shapes. 

I really enjoyed this exercise. Not only was it good for me thinking big with shape but also thinking big with colour and detail. I was also more conscious of the silhouette which Alex Woo will be talking about in next week's lesson.

Overall, things are slowly clicking and I am excited about the future, This gesture class, much like my Masters in Animation, arose from a need to build a stronger drawing foundation. Although I felt these courses were necessary, they are still a means to an end and the longer I wait to do a dedicated character design course, the more antsy I become. I am enjoying this course but hope deferred makes the heart sick (another biblical reference).

Looking forward to finishing this course so I can start a Character Design one. Just trying not to get ahead of myself which is really hard for me because it's no secret that I'm an eager beaver.

Until next time, God bless!