The Weekend Sketch

In an attempt to improve my character design skills, I’ve been doing more people sketches. It’s something that has been begging for attention as I’ve been told during portfolio reviews that my human characters are rather generic looking and less interesting than my animals or quirky looking creatures. The sad thing is that I’ve been drawing human characters a lot longer than animals and creatures. I think it’s because I’ve been defaulting to what’s in my head as opposed to looking at photo reference of different types of people. So to build up that visual vocabulary, I’ve been making more of an effort to design characters from life. Anyways, here’s my sketches from this weekend.

Friday

These sketches were done in downtown Burbank as I met up with some folks from my sketchgroup.  Been trying to get away from sketching with a pencil, so these sketches were done in ballpoint pen and sharpie.  I find it odd that I have more line efficiency with a sharpie than I do with a ballpoint pen.  How that happens, I have no idea.

Saturday

The irony of these sketches were that they were done at the zoo.  Tried drawing the lions, tigers, and bears, oh my.  However, they just didn’t wanna cooperate and would just lay there the whole time.  So I thought I would use the opportunity to sketch the people there.

Sunday

Done in my environment design class at the Concept Design Academy.  I don’t really know the people in the class that well, so I had no qualms about drawing them.  Some of the sketches where drawn in the dark during the teacher demo, so I kinda fudged on the features.  Bad for my eyes, but a nice little challenge  as I’m forced to simplify since there are no features to really noodle over.

It’s all a bunch of hit and miss with these sketches.  My teachers say that it’s all about mileage when it comes to art so I’m pretty much filling up the tank for some long ass road trips.  Luckily there aren’t any police officers to hand out speeding tickets in that regard.  So let me know what you guys think.  Cheers.

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  By Dustin, June 22, 2009 @ 12:29 pm

  Great sketches and, more importantly, great productivity! Seems like you’re getting good at noticing and exaggerating the features that transform these people into characters.

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