Thursday, July 1, 2010

Photo challenge

On his blog, John K mentioned that it's a good warm up to try and draw things you aren't comfortable with. So with that in mind, i grabbed a fitness mag off the shelf, and attempted to caricature the following image.





When it comes to drawing from a photo ref, i tend to get bogged down by the details, and i neglect a lot of the bigger things that are happening with the image. For example, after i inked my sketch i noticed i flattened the angles on both the guy/girl, standing them almost straight up and down, when in the pic they are kind of tilting towards each other. With "cartoonier" things, I always start with lines of action, but for some reason with photos, i tend to forget this step resulting in a stiff drawing.












Here's my redrawn sketch. Just trying to capture the rythm of each pose, and building all the muscles on top of it.








I blocked in the facial features trying to see what it is about them that i can exaggerate. The girl has an interesting forehead, and the guy's sucked in cheek bones makes him look like he's pouting. Also, his hands look really small compared to the rest of his features.
Here's my second attempt at caricaturing them. I feel i got the angle of their bodies better, but I totally blew it with the girl's forehead. All in all, i enjoyed the exercise a lot more than i thought i would.

3 comments:

JohnK said...

That 2nd one is pretty good. It's definitely hard to get the faces to look good on an up angle like that.

Thumpasaur said...

I found your blog while looking for Mickey reference material. Totally bad ass cartooning you got. I will be following your blog. Do you do this professionally?

Joey Lee said...

Thunmapasaur: thanks for the kind words! Glad you found my blog. To answer your question, nope, i don't do this for a living.