Fantasy Art Class Week 3

Week 3
Thumbnail sketching and speed drawing.
It was good to see that most of you responded well to this weeks exercise.
Fast and loose sketching is a really good way to loosen up before starting a new piece of work.
It is also very helpful in enabling you to decide on the action, pose and physical appearance of your character/creature as well as the composition of your drawing.
I recommend you all keep practising loose sketching as often as you can to develop this skill. I think you will find it will also help develop your figure drawing.

The images below show the stage from thumbnail scribble through to final drawing. The marker thumbnail was only 5 inches tall and drawn in a matter of seconds but enable me to capture the pose of the character and the direction of the action. I worked over the thumbnail to produce a loose construction drawing and then from that, produced the final pencil.

Here is a short clip showing loose sketching. Notice the pencil outline takes less than a minute, the ink sketch in total brings it to two minutes (using the ink pen was purely for clarity as I was using a low pixel camera, otherwise I would have just kept with the pencil), so each sketch should only take one to two minutes if not less.

For Jacqui, Jorge and anyone else who requested it, here is the Frazetta image.
Sorry its not very hi-res, it's the only version I have, which I got from the internet.

For those of you hungry for more Frazetta, I can recommend these books:-
Icon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icon-Frank-Frazetta/dp/1887424717/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Rough Work

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frank-Frazetta-Rough-Spectrum-Presents/dp/1599290138/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Here are a handful of stages from this weeks figure drawing exercise.
Mose of you got this down so I won't fill a blog with unnecessary words, although as you weren't attending Steph, here are some brief pointers.
The centre line is to gauge the position/balance of drawing a page. Often in fantasy are (or any style of art) females are given a stance which tilts the hips. This serves two purposes. It helps project an attitude or mood of the character and also visually helps define the female from the male. The difference should be obvious but will definitely help those of you who's figure work is not quite there yet with female form.