NOT Drawing-Related

I know I set up this whole blog for the purpose of drawing shit, but I just had to write this down somewhere that people might see it.

ABC tonight reaffirmed my utter lack of faith in television. My television viewing is generally limited to ESPN, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network (I know the animation sucks, but I'm not gonna just throw out the writing with the bath water [let that sink in a minute] -- it's still funny), but tonight I decided to watch the season finale of Lost. I've never watched an episode before tonight, but I got a synopsis from some online news (since this shit is apparently news) today, so I wasn't too "lost."

All I keep hearing about this show is how great it is; how it's so intelligent, and how such a compelling, thought-provoking format wasn't supposed to work on TV, but "oh, my gosh, it's such a success...." Here's the thought that it provoked in me: automate the fucking button. Maybe I missed something, but it seems to me that if scientists can harness some massive kind of energy like this, they can write a simple computer program to enter the goddamn lottery numbers every two hours. Leave it to the IT department to fuck up a few lives cuz they didn't feel like writing a few more lines of code. Yeah, brilliant writing. Flawless.

"No, that's why it's good, cuz it makes you ask questions, man...like, why didn't they automate the button?"

Now I'm gonna get comments from angry fans of this dumbass show who defend this oversight as a simple device to create drama, on some sort of ends justify the means pretense. These, of course, will probably be the same people who chastise me for being so careless as to not equate animation to the baby in my above analogy.

"What baby is he talking about?"

Hey TV writers: if you're trying to be smart, think shit through. The fact that this is some of the "best" shit on TV speaks volumes for the rest of the trash out there. And for our effectively lobotomized populace. I'll stick to cartoons; at least they make no pretense at being anything more than goofy, funny, entertainment.

P.S. I'm sure I've contradicted myself in some fundamental way, as my goal is to one day make cartoons, which would pretty much have to be on TV at some point. I don't care, and you shouldn't either; it's just a rant.

P.P.S. I absolve myself from any ignorance of the "facts" of the show's plot.

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 2

Lesson 1, cont'd


Somehow I seem to be regressing:


So, on both of these, I had the front of the face turned too far away, even though my egg shape looked pretty good. So the actual construction looks pretty close, despite the fact that as far as copies go, both of these are trash. Except for the fact that I got the horizontal construction line dead on with the second. Too bad I blew the rest of it.

I decided to work with the bulldog, figure out that construction, and then spin him around all over the place like the book says. These are my attempts at working out the construction:

The second attempt is much closer, however, there are some significant flaws; namely, that the top of the head is stretched too high, along with the top of the ears and the eyebrow ridges. The top of the snout, however, is too low. I'll probably do another one, but I think I have a good feel for the construction, which is kind of the point. My next post will then be the rotations, which I'm sure will frustrate me to no end:

(old drawing)

This shit is like picking up a musical instrument for the first time; frustrating as hell cuz you know how it can work, and how it's supposed to work, but you just can't do it yourself for a while, until you've practiced your ass off.

Anyway...

More later.


ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

Adam Stiff - Head Construction 1

Head Construction
Lesson 1

I was gonna wait until I got my book to start, but I think John might have single-handedly kicked Walter Foster's ass last week, and I went ahead and printed stuff off of animation archive, despite the crappiness of my printer. These are my first cracks at the egg; and I'm about sick of the shit-eating grin on that egg's face. I wanted to see how close I could get before doing the overlay, so all of the notes are just based on my eyeballs. Now that I've done the overlay, though, I can see that some of them were a lot closer than I thought. Anyway, here's my stuff, followed by my stuff with Preston's overlaid in blue (I think it's blue, I'm kinda colorblind).




Overlays:


So it seems that my eyes are right, most of the time, although some of my drawings weren't as bad as I thought. A major problem seems to be that I try to fit the head to the features, rather than vice-versa, as it should be. I can also see from the overlay that I tend to drop features on the lower side of a tilted head, which I didn't notice on my own. So now I have something to work on for my next post.

*Bonus Material*

I also tried to apply these basic construction principles to drawings of a couple of my friends, although I probably shouldn't be worrying about that yet. Either way, here's Bowden and Nikki; the drawing of Nikki is based on a picture of her, but I built the two of Bowden from scratch. I think I cheated on the second one of Bowden, cuz I didn't construct his jaw/cheeks separately from his cranium like it ended up. Once again, I'm working backwards, but I'll work on that. And I'm done drawing him for a while anyway, cuz his glasses keep effing me up.

Nikki!

Bowden is loud.

Bowden is not cool enough to ever do this.

Here are photos of Nikki and Bowden, just in case you were wondering if these suck or not:

Hope to hell you can tell that Nikki's on the right.


"Mildly Inquisitive" Bowden.

So yeah, any and all feedback is welcome. By all means, rip this stuff apart, I wanna get better!

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 1

I have a blog now. Cool. This isn't something I'd normally do, but I'm using this as a medium for a class, as soon as I get the book. So, subsequent posts will be a buncha drawings.