Andrew Loomis on Composition

Character ideation pose sketch and illustration examples

Jonathan Notes

Demo Crit

Stacking Forms - Head/Face

Hi everyone,

I've used the head to show how stacking forms work.   The 3 main forms can be pulled, stretched and combined to create types even before you drop in any features.  This is where the strength of any character lies - In it's shape and silhouette.  Features are mostly decoration.

Applying this idea can help design a characters qualities.

The different facial characteristics can be simplified into basic face shapes.  Square, Triangle, Circle and combinations of these. Any character you start with has a type.

The Reilly Abstraction is an advanced form of this idea and uses rhythms to relate the structure and muscle forms across the face.

Homework week 2

Hey guys!  Good stuff.  The homework for this week is to have 12 pages of exploration again.  But this time you should have direction for your designs.   

 Basically by week 4 we you should have a concrete idea of which way you're going with the characters.  Here are some samples.  They don't have to be rendered but all the pieces should be figured out and ready for posing and finishing.

Notes

I did this timed head sketch for my digital head painting/analytical class.  The main point was to show that I don't skip the lay in stage.  The lay in gives you a preview of your final piece.  From there, you'll just have to nudge shapes here and there to fix it but no big changes are made.

Since it's timed I have to figure out what I wanna do in the lay in stage and the rest of the time is spent on prettying it up and disguising my overall design choices so it won't look so obvious.

Keeping your head in this mind set will help you to design clearly.  If you ask the right questions and resolve the overall design question, the rest is just icing on the cake.  Much like George said.