Week Twelve: SLV Sketchers Get Real

Highlands Highlight: (from week eleven, shown above) Tiana demostrates an excellent overhand pencil grip and smooth arm/wrist movement as she sketches guidelines for her Fernand Leger's drawing. Her bold lines emulate Leger's modern art style. Here's her finished drawing: Click

We had a new sketcher drop into last Friday's session and he got off to a great start. (Check out his dragon, shown below!) Welcome, Jamee! Hilda and I (and fellow students) will help you catch up on the basic skills.

Your sketches from last week are shown below. For the next several weeks we'll be exploring ways to draw realistically. I'll also help each of you develop your own interests and styles such as abstract drawing, cartoons, drawing from nature, anime/manga, etc. This is your opportunity to use your drawing skills in exciting, challenging ways!













This Week's Challenge: Pixar Studios (Monsters Inc., Cars, Wall-E) has just hired you as a concept artist to create a character for a new big-budget animated movie. Your job is to design a character from the realistic object you sketched last week. Make your object come to life by sketching facial features, arms, legs, costume (if you like). A hammer can become a hero. A wrench can become a monster. Get creative! Have fun! Your character will be in the movie with other students' characters. So, talk about how the characters would interact with each other in a scene. Make quick sketches of your character expressing three emotions: happy, sad, angry. If you'd like to add color, go for it! (But only AFTER you've done sketches of your character's emotions.) If you have time, select another object from the classroom and create another character. Note: Don't draw on last week's object sketches. Start new drawings of your object when creating your character.



To help you with ideas and sketching techniques, here are some examples of animated character sketches:

character model sheet

storyboard sketches

old Disney sketches

Wall-E sketches

Draw out your imaginations, SLV Sketchers!

And for those sketchers that have extra time and are feeling particularly brave, you can get a jump start on our next challenge. Drawing hands (Elvis's favorite challenge)! Here's the reference picture of Leonardo's drawing: Click

Can't wait to see your animated movie characters! --Rob