Visual Communication: Step 1 - Drawing Myself

After I had finished the mind map the next stage was to start the drawings. By using pictures that I took of myself I was able to use them as guidance to enable me to exaggerate my face further. This proved quite difficult and my drawings ended up looking more cartoony than exaggerated. They also ended up looking like Hermione crossed with Rapunzel. 


This is my first page of my drawing which i did while in class. I find it quite hard to do work when in front of people i find it easier to sit at home and not share my work with anyone, this is probably just because of my personality. 

For the first sketches i used a Prismacolor Col-erase pink pencil just so i could get the base lines down before i committed with a stronger colour when it would be harder to rub it out. I really like using these pencils because it lets you create a soft line for all the guideline marks on the face and you can either rub them out of just leave them.

So after i did these i got a good idea of what style i wanted to go for and in this case its just my normal drawing style. I also knew from this which parts i wanted to exaggerate. So personally i think my hair is probably my most noticeable feature which is why in my character the hair will be quite exaggerated.


Once i had done these drawings in class, like i said, i went home and did another page with a few changes in the angles i used which also better reflected my features because its my normal 'Selfie' angle so to me it felt more recognisable. 

Here is the page i was just talking about. As you can see the drawings look slightly more realistic than the ones in the previous image which is probably why i prefer this page. 

Once again i used my Col-erase but this time i used a blue. Sometimes i decide that i don't want to go over the lines so i just keep it as it is. This does prove more difficult when posting on here because the lines aren't as strong but in my sketch book i think this really works. 

I'm not sure if you can read them on here but i always write notes around my drawings (force of habit from college) but its actually really helpful for me and who ever looks through my work, just to see what i think of a drawing. Even though it might be hard its always good to pick up on things that you did wrong just so it helps you improve. For example in these ones i told myself to 'make sure the forehead is not too small and the face is longer' which heps the character look older.

So now that i had done these pages it would be easier for me to get an idea of my characters facial features and how i wanted her to look.                                                                                               

Side note: I'm sorry for the quality of photographs on this page. I tried to edit them in Photoshop to get rid of the tint but it i couldn't get the contrast right.

Visual Communication: Caricature Project

Starting back at uni after a long summer is always hard, when every lesson has more work for you to do It can take time getting back into the routine. For my visual communication (i.e drawing, sculpturing and everything to do with the art side of animation) lesson it was no different. 

To give a brief overview of what my first project would involve I'll just go through what I have to submit for my deadline. So as the title suggests the main focus would be 'Caricature' and more specifically caricatures of ourselves. For some of us this concept seems quite daunting when we have to analyse ourselves and our personalities but for me I didn't find it too bad. It was quite interesting to think about what makes us special and how we could interrupt this into our work. 

Now I have gone through what the theme is you might still be wondering what I actually had to do, well, for my submission I had to use all my caricature research and sketches to create a clay model that would be later used in Maya to rig and animate. That's all I'll say so far and hopefully as my posts progress you'll get a better idea of the process and how everything comes together. 

To start the project I needed to explore my personality and my lifestyle in order to create a character with strong emotion. 

Figure 1: A mind map I created to explore my hobbies, lifestyle, family and also physical features.

Figure 2: Notes

Once i had done the mind map it really helped me to separate the strong ideas from the aspects i didn't want to include in my final character sculpt. On the page after i noted some of the key points i discovered and some possible ideas where floating around in my head. Some of the themes i discarded right away but it was good to note them down to help show my progression to my final idea.