by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 2, 2008
Describing the work of Randall Sly, Alex Mandra, Jehan and Jens Holdener.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create people at random? You can’t. But you can create characters for animation. Randall Sly is an character designer and animator who does exactly that. He shows his work and the work of his colleague at his weblog Character Design.
At Character Design you’ll find the history from concept to final product of famous characters like this one
to lovely pictures like this Kung Fu Panda
Articles about work by colleague usually contain a link to an interview.
Alex Mandra has a little but nice blog with a few of, what I would call, indoor landscapes and cityscapes.
I have no idea of what this is supposed to be but it is a lovely painting
Here is a lovely painting of a city in decline. Going by the description I think it’s part of some game.
Jehan is a concept artist who works for EA games. His blog is kind of a mixture of personal photos and concept art.
Sometimes searching for beautiful artsites is a sad affair. I open a blog to find a beautiful painting like this one
Immediately I think “If the rest of the blog is like this I’ll do 4 site today”.
But sadly scrolling down I find that Jens Holdener gave up after only four articles.
Update: Looking a little closer I find I was wrong. Jens Holdener didn’t give up. Turns out that this is a very new blog of a very good, if not very productive, artist
(I’m sorry for posting this article twice. I had some problems getting the pictures to show.)
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 6, 2007
After reading some more and thinking a lot about it, I’m beginning to understand the right sided thinking and why it seems to be much more easy for me.
It turns out that I didn’t do my last two drawing in the way the book expected. With the Faces and vases drawing you were supposed to name the parts of the face you were drawing in the left face. Then draw two horizontal lines and then draw the right face.
It’s quite possible that this drawing is almost impossible if you do it that way.
But of course I didn’t. I don’t like thinking in words. I do it much to often and get very tired. Especially when I’m drawing I try to only think in pictures.
My way of drawing a face is think of a face in silhouette and trace it. The tracing part still doesn’t work that well. But it is getting easier.
With the right face I switched to the vases view and there was nothing to it.
It isn’t completely clear to me whether people were supposed to recognize the subject of the up side down drawing. For most people trying to draw an up side down picture is so taxing that they stop talking inside their mind.
The point being that talking is an ability of the left side of the brain and drawing is an ability of the right side. Drawing up side down is so taxing that the left side gives it up and leaves it up to the right side to do the job.
The book describes a special feeling people are supposed to have while they are doing this kind of drawings. You should feel more alert, more relaxed and not notice the passing of time.
I can’t say that I experienced a special feeling while doing the up side down drawing.
I do have those feelings when I concentrate on thinking in pictures. Especially noticing the passes of time seems to be something that is closely related to thinking in words.
I remember from my youth, when I primarily thought in picture, that I had very poor sense of time. But of course back then they called it day dreaming.
Could it be that one of the differences between autistic and other people is that autistics make more or better use of the right side of their brain?
I don’t know.
I do know that autistics are supposed to have a different thought process. I can think in words but it is a lot of work. Very taxing.
Any way. The book advices to do several up side down drawings before going on with the next assignment.
This was supposed to be a horse with a knight. But when I copy I always enlarge. So by the time I got to the head there was no room left for the knight.
I drew the horse up side down and then turned the page to draw in the shades.
Considering that this is the first time in my life that I’v drawn any kind of animal. I think it’s not to bad. (Except for the right fore leg.)
Horse without a knight
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday August 1, 2007
Something else
Only drawing fireworks gets a bit boring after a while. So when I was planning this series I decided to do some other drawings and put the fourth part off till next Friday. (And not to do fireworks for the fourth part…)
For this drawing I thought it would be nice to try my hands at a drawing of the sea.
But how to start.
I thought I had solved that problem by making the drawing a little bit abstract. Something like triangles in blue, grey and dark green.
Scorpio
But after drawing a few triangles I thought that the end result probably would be as boring to look at as it was to draw. So I added some more colors and before long I realized that I was actualy drawing Scorpio.
Scorpio
Featured on See me draw
Looking through my collection of art sites to link to I keep running into the art page of the site of Edwin Ushiro.
Every time I think “yes it’s a beautiful page, but not today”.
The page has some beautiful wild paintings but I feel that something is missing.
That said, Edwin Ushiro does have a few beautiful paintings.