Nosferatu Sketches

Since Halloween is almost upon us I thought it'd be nice to share these sketches of Nosferatu I did earlier this week. He's a fun character to draw. I watched the orginal 1922 film earlier this week, it is in the public domain and full versions can be found on youtube and vimeo. 

I did the sketches above before watching the film and as you can see I gave him normal vampire teeth, instead of the silly evil-bunny teeth he has in the film. The sketches below I did while watching the final scene: death by rooster!

 

Gesture Drawing: Pushing the Pose

A little more work from my gesture class over on Schoolism. This week's lesson was silhouette. Part of our weekly assignment is that we have to use photos, film-stills or illustrations to find examples of whatever subject we are treating that week. 

I prefer to work from photos because with illustrations the poses are already stylized by the artist, which makes finding the line of action, shape or silhouette easier and, as a result of this, makes it harder to learn from. Searching for pictures with strong silhouettes I discovered Rita Hayworth (after reading that she would have turned 95 last Wednesday), she really had the greatest poses.  

The picture above is a publicity photo from the Orson Welles' film The Lady from Shanghai. The image beneath is my first attempt. I pushed her right arm (screen left) away from her body to make the pose read better. I also made her lower body bend away a little. 

If there is anything I have learned from my first two feedback sessions by Professor Louis Gonzales, it is that you should always try to push the pose further. ("push it till it breaks") It is better to push a pose a bit to far and tone it down a little, than to realize that you could have pushed it further.

A great help is Photoshop's transform option. Once you have established in which direction the pose is moving you can skew the picture in that direction. Here I felt that Rita Hayworth was moving to the left:

It's amazing how far you can actualy skew a picture without going too far. As you can see by the doors this picture is now leaning way to the left, still the pose doesn't feel that pushed. After this little trick I did two more versions of the silhouette from this pose. 

I quite like the way the final version turned out, although I'm not sure if it's the best translation of the original pose. In the picture I feel that Rita Hayworth is entering the room and is about to move towards the left side of the screen. My final sketch has her more standing still, and maybe slighty moving foward. But it is funny to see how extreme you can push the human body without it feeling weird: If you look at that final sketch and see how far her head is away from where her feet are standing you realize that this is an uncomfortable angle, but as a drawing it feels pretty good I think.    

James Bond - iPad Sketch

About ten years ago I was a huge fan of the Dutch comic artist Hanco Kolk. At the time I really wished I could make beautiful brush-inked line drawings like him. Since then I have moved on to other influences but I still love his work very much.

Yesterday I was playing around with this Paper app on the new Ipad3 of one of my friends, when I discovered that one of the pen tools in this app gives a line very much like Hanco Kolk's smooth brushstrokes. I did quite a few sketches, this one is my favourite.

Please don't look at it for too long, though. The paper app makes it pretty hard to erase mistakes, especially since it doens't have a layer option. there are quite afew things I wish I'd be able to erase (I'm especially displeased with the arms) but this would also erase the rest of the sketch.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice this is supposed to be Daniel Craig's James Bond, I'm really looking foward to Skyfall!

iPad sketch in Paper with a Wacom Bamboo Stylus.       

More Gesture Practice

Applying the theory from the Schoolism gesture course. By first sketching in the shape of the figure it is easier to keep the right volume. (In this case I used a green highlighter because it was there.) These two sketches were based on photos from a magazine.

Gesture Course

I'm currently enrolled in a 12 week gesture drawing course, over on Schoolism. The class is thaught by Alex Woo and Louis Gonzales, who are story artists at Pixar where they also teach in-house gesture classes.

These are some examples from my second asignment. I'm thrilled that after just two lessons I already see some improvement in my poses. These are all 30 seconds poses, ink on paper.