I've been only working weekends this month and in my spare time I've been looking at other artists work, caricaturists specifically, and it's really been inspiring me to try new things. In the theme park I get easily caught up in just being a crowd pleaser, people want to be cute, fine, you're cute, next. It's easy, and well, when there is a crowd there is quite a bit of pressure. These people have been waiting a long time and I don't want to disappoint them. We've been so short handed some nights that I've had to work on my own on a weekend night. One day specifically I had about an hour and a half wait, which is flattering, don't get me wrong, but imagine waiting that long to only be disappointed? Everyone in that line up was awesome thankfully. Nights like that really get me into a rut and I'm not really happy with what I produce since they happen quite often.
Something that really stuck with me from taafi was when Marlo had said that she tries to never draw the same thing twice, and it really got me thinking about how I go about a drawing. It was a lecture on stylistic drawing, that was basically broken down to not relying on "style".
I recently bought Nate Kapnicky's book, Beasted, and he has a lot of progress sketches along with the final piece. I don't plan out my drawings at the park, and I find they're starting to really suffer because of it, so I want to start doing some on my own so I have a better library of shapes that I can use on the fly. Looking at a lot of those cool artists, they only have a basic shape, and then go nuts with the details.
I want to create simple cartoons, that are exaggerated but still have likeness (hey, a caricature!)
Only, I don't have the guts to do it usually.
But if I build up the kind of confidence I have with my park sketches, I think things will change and I will have a better time drawing for a live audience.
Anyway, I stole some faces of friends, hope ya'll don't mind.
JJ and Immalyn (Immalyn! Where is your blahg?!)
x2
I wanted to focus on couples for now since couples are majority of my customers. I really like how some artist fit two people on a page and almost make their shapes so they fit together. Of course, that takes planning and really looking at your couple. These aren't as successful in that respect as I would like them to be, but baby steps. I usually draw two people side by side, barely fitting them on the page. I like where I was going with the third one, or Gal and Rigg, but his cheek is making too much of a tangent with her hair for me to ignore. So I gave it another shot and it ended up being composed more like one of my park sketches. I like my first attempt at those two better. It's more appealing overall.
I've drawn Adam and Elena loads of times so I kind of knew where I wanted to go with their faces, only they didn't flow together as much as I had hoped.
I will probably take another crack at these guys.
Anyway, large amount of writing is large, I enjoy reading how other people go about their work, so I'm going to keep doing this to bring my thoughts together and actually keep this updated rather then having nothing to show for months. Maybe I'll entertain someone, I'm probably just speaking to air. Whatever :)
URL: http://daniwoods.blogspot.com/2012/09/moving-forward.html
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