Wednesday 13 March 2013

Making my dream a reality

 Here in the studio it's grow-your-own-monster time again. Stephen is ready for his next drawing which means digging out all my original reference materials and sourcing any additional bits I might be needing. The first drawing I did of him was my usual side on shot with no background. These are like the studies of animals and plants in journals, giving a clear view of the whole thing.


 From there, it's about bringing him to life so everyone can see him the way I do- moving about, doing his own thing.... 

 Happily, this time I have a scale model of Stephen to help me figure out things like perspective and play with light sources. All of my monsters start out life in my red sketchbook.


 Once I've got an idea of who I'm drawing and what they're up to, I look up all of the bits of anatomy I'm going to need to make sure that what I'm doing is actually possible - one of my main rules is that each creature must function. They may have supernatural aspects such as Stephens' ability to misdirect but that's no excuse for my being sloppy and getting his shoulders in the wrong place :)


With my current drawing, I started by using my original layout for him which is a simple straight line drawing to scale of all the important bits- head, torso, limbs. Using the photo of my model in a similar position, I made adjustments for our imaginary camera angle. Then it's starting with his skeleton to position everything correctly.


That's important because that affects what muscles are working and so the surface appearance. The muscles are noted on an additional layer then the outline of that becomes my blueprint for the final drawing.


It's in the final version that the whole thing is skinned over and things like wrinkles, veins and hair are added to make it real. I'll be posting the progress of that final image as I go so you can watch him come out of my imagination and into our world :)




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