April– July 2018 Wk6 : layout, perspective and AKIRA

As we will be looking at layout and perspective, I thought it's high time we made a return to the work of Katsuhiro Otomo. In particular, AKIRA.

Otomo's art is next level stuff. 

PLEASE REMEMBER!
NO CLASS ON TUESDAY 29TH MAY
AS IT IS HALF TERM.

April– July 2018 Wk5: Figure Drawing, Creating Fantasy: Siren

Continuing with figure drawing and how this helps with creating fantasy art, here is another edited tutorial from week 5.

As we discussed in week 3  and 4, a lot of fantasy art related creatures/character designs are not really that complicated. It is quite often a hybrid of two or three things.

Hmmm, what would a woman look like with bird wings?

Maybe like this, and I'll throw in some latex, a tatty tutu, some goth/doom boots,....

 and some barbed wire  for extra weirdness.

What would a woman mashed with a honey bee look like?

What would a woman a man mashed with  a horse look like?

 or a man mashed with a video tape cassette?

How far out is the idea? Not very. It is just the combination of two elements.

How you merge them together is one thing. How you execute the image is another.

This drawing of Kate Pierson of The B52's was something of a no brainer.

Inspired by the track, Rock Lobster, I simply added lobster arms and lower body and antenna. Everything else, the bis hair, the sparkly dress , is Kate Pierson's stage presence.

Below are the images that formed  the tutorial for week 5

Reference material  below

Have fun!

PLEASE REMEMBER!
NO CLASS ON TUESDAY 29TH MAY

AS IT IS HALF TERM.

April– July 2018 Week 3 and 4: Figure Drawing - Medusa part2 reference material

You may find these links helpful

https://johnmuirlaws.com/drawing-scales/

https://johnmuirlaws.com/

April– July 2018 Week 3 and 4: Figure Drawing - Medusa part1

Over the next couple of weeks we will continue to look ate figure drawing, and looking at ways to capture movement and form.

I thought, Medusa, would be a good subject to explore both figure drawing and movement and also design.

As I mentioned in class, it is not important that you follow this drawing faithfully. Or that you do a completed drawing. What is important is that you use this exercise to develop in some way. Whether that be by  just focusing on the flow of the shape, and the form of the pose, or the character design, or some other detail, is totally up to you. Within this exercise, there is so much to consider. The twisting and turning of the upper body (that alone is enought to wrestle with), the lower, snake part of the body, and it's scales, the facial expression, the expression of the hands,...lots to consider and play around with.

Here are some of the images from the class session.

These are to be used  as a guide only, and not drawing style guide.

The drawing below is losely based on the Hammer Horror movie, TheGorgon.

 Below is a movie poster for the film and a couple of stills.

Here's some background to the the mythology of The Gorgon/Medusa

(edited from wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medusa

Classical mythology
The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were all children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or "Phorkys") and his sister Ceto (or "Keto"), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, which places both trinities of sisters far off "on Kisthene's dreadful plain":

Near them their sisters three, the Gorgons, winged
With snakes for hair— hatred of mortal man—

While ancient Greek vase-painters and relief carvers imagined Medusa and her sisters as beings born of monstrous form, sculptors and vase-painters of the fifth century began to envisage her as being beautiful as well as terrifying. In an ode written in 490 BC Pindar already speaks of "fair-cheeked Medusa".

In a late version of the Medusa myth, related by the Roman poet Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.770), Medusa was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, "the jealous aspiration of many suitors," but because Poseidon had raped her in Athena's temple, the enraged Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone. In Ovid's telling, Perseus describes Medusa's punishment by Minerva (Athena) as just and well earned.

In most versions of the story, she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphus because Polydectes wanted to marry his mother. The gods were well aware of this, and Perseus received help. He received a mirrored shield from Athena, gold, winged sandals from Hermes, a sword from Hephaestus and Hades's helm of invisibility. Since Medusa was the only one of the three Gorgons who was mortal, Perseus was able to slay her while looking at the reflection from the mirrored shield he received from Athena. During that time, Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon. When Perseus beheaded her, Pegasus, a winged horse, and Chrysaor, a giant wielding a golden sword, sprang from her body.

Feminism
In the 20th century, feminists reassessed Medusa's appearances in literature and in modern culture, including the use of Medusa as a logo by fashion company Versace. The name "Medusa" itself is often used in ways not directly connected to the mythological figure but to suggest the gorgon's abilities or to connotemalevolence; despite her origins as a beauty, the name in common usage "came to mean monster."  The book Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power by Mary Valentis and Anne Devane notes that "When we asked women what female rage looks like to them, it was always Medusa, the snaky-haired monster of myth, who came to mind ... In one interview after another we were told that Medusa is 'the most horrific woman in the world' ... [though] none of the women we interviewed could remember the details of the myth."

Medusa's visage has since been adopted by many women as a symbol of female rage; one of the first publications to express this idea was a feminist journal called Women: A Journal of Liberation in their issue one, volume six for 1978. The cover featured the image of the Gorgon Medusa by Froggi Lupton, which the editors on the inside cover explained "can be a map to guide us through our terrors, through the depths of our anger into the sources of our power as women."

In issue three, Fall 1986 for the magazine Woman of Power an article called Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women's Rage, appeared, written by Emily Erwin Culpepper, who wrote that "The Amazon Gorgon face is female fury personified. The Gorgon/Medusa image has been rapidly adopted by large numbers of feminists who recognize her as one face of our own rage."

April– July 2018 Wk3: Figure Drawing - Medusa

Here's a heads up for week 3.

We will be drawing Medusa