Introduction to Proportion and the Mannikin

This blog entry is for my students since I'm home, sick today, but I think there should be some drive by merit  for the regulars.  

Today's class was going to cover two things in some depth: proportion and the Loomis Mannikin.

The Loomis Mannikin as well as a wealth of other drawing information can be found in the recently reprinted Figure Drawing for All it's Worth:

 Being Canadian I would prefer to just list the Chapters.Indigo link, but they're sold out.  Amazon.ca has it in stock here.  For the longest time you either had to pay a small fortune for one of the long out of print editions or download one of the pirate PDFs online.  I'm really happy Titan has brought this and other Loomis books back into print.
One of the class handouts will be a copy of the page below showing the male and female skeleton with a head-height ruler.

Another handout is from another favourite book of mine, Jack Hamm's Drawing the Head and Figure.  It's readily available at most bookstores and online at both Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca.  

This one really gets the whole relationship between the head as a unit of measurement for drawing the figure.  I should see about getting shares in the sales of this book as I go for the hard-sell every time I teach anything from this book as it has a wealth of well presented good information in a small and affordable package. 

 After a discussion and some examples of how the artist can use head measurements to improve their drawings we'd move on to the next part of the class where I'd introduce the student's to using Loomis' mannikin.  Below is another excerpt from the book, but not the first page of the handout I'm giving out for this.

And I'd demonstrate how this works as a good developmental too for constructing the figure as well as show a few other approaches to the mannikin tying in some material I've picked up from Buscema, Reilly and Bridgman.

The homework for the week would build on the previous week's line of action exercises, but involve the students constructing mannikins based on photos.

I'm crawling back to bed to hopefully recover quickly enough to teach tomorrow!

~Richard

Burning Itch: The Bat and the Cat

After wrapping the day drawing comics I felt I had to get this out of my head.

The new DC actually managed to hook me with a few books (which is a few books more than I was reading before this), but their mistakes have been many and the aggressive mishandling of most of their slate of female characters right from the start on the heels of the controversy over having so few female creators involved in the reboot merely reinforces the issue.

~R

Bettie Page Artist Proof 1

One of the perks of this new Bettie Page card set is the sketch card artists getting both regular sized sketch cards (2.5x3.5") as art returns to sell but some over-sized artist proof cards (4.5x6.25").

Above is the first of the four artist proofs I did.  I spent far more time on these than I anticipated and was a little exhausted after finishing the lot.

One of the four is already on hold, but the one above and the next two I'll be sharing (Friday and Monday) are still available for $200 each.

Bettie Page Trading Card

A follow-up to yesterday's posting of the black and white and coloured cards for the Bettie Page set from Versicolor.  I chose to do the second piece in grey tones prior to colouring in Photoshop.

Bettie Page 1

 I did two non-sketch cards in the Bettie Page set from Versicolor.   The first I drew in pen and ink and colored in Photoshop using the usual comics coloring approach.

The original is on 11x14" Bristol board. I'll be putting it up for sale over at comicartfans .

Versicolor was happy enough with my previous work to ask me to do more cards for them.  More Bettie makes me happy, hope it does the same for you!

Hulk Sketch

Found a scan of a Hulk sketch I did at the recent Fanexpo over at comicartfans.com!

The Crimson Clown

Another Remake/Remodel from over at the Whitechapel board.  I didn't get as inspired with this one as with Professor Zomax, mainly because I felt the need to stay away from making him a Robin Hood-like Joker.

~R