Fantasy Art Class Week 1&2

This blog is mostly aimed at new students; Mohamed, Mark and Gary. Your work this week shows promise, so don't lose focus and pay attention to anatomy proportions. For those of you would like another stab at the last exercise, here are four stages which should be enough for you to work from.

Figure 1

Note the guide here on the right, roughly marking out the proportions. Pay attention to the size of the legs in relation to the upper body.
When you have loosely sketched out the figure, ask yourself:
Are the legs too long?
Do they look like they are supporting the body in a strong stance?
Is the head the right size?
Do the arms look strong enough to be carrying a heavy weapon?
This is the stage where you should be checking this stuff.

Once you have got all the limbs etc in proportion, then you are ready to move onto the next stage.

Figure 2

Develop the figure drawing by defining the muscles and face.

Figure 3

This drawing gives you an example of one direction you could take to cloth the character. Of course, you can clad him in heavy duty armour etc, feel free to explore this as far as you can take it.

Figure 4

Here I have kept the shading as simple as possible to show how to apply a small amount of shading to give shape to the muscles.
Note also the simple approach to adding highlights to the hair . Before you can graduate onto doing more complex shading and hair detail, it is best to keep things simple until you become more familiar and confident with the basics.

Below are some drawings from Michael Oeming sketch book. I 've posted these as the theme is relevent and also one of them is pretty much the same stance. you can view more of his work here
http://michaeloeming.com/
and I STRONGLY recommend that you do.

Oeming has a very similar style to Mignola; very simple (but do not underestimate the skill and craft that goes into each drawing), very effective and powerful.
Note the use of black against white to offset the character from the background.
I could do a long indepth blog post about  Oeming's work ( and maybe I will sometime in the future), but I have  deadline's to meet and I'm out of time as it is, so instead go check out his site and sudy his work, you will learn a lot from it.

Here is Vanessa's response to this weeks exercise.
A very good start to the new term.
Way to go Vanessa - Keep it coming!