LCA Stage 3
Flame within
This was an interesting piece for me. It’s one of the first that I’ve completed where I was drawing abstract thumbnails with the intention of it being a weasel. I’m trying to figure out how to harness the compositional, intuitional interest of automatic drawing and doing so with intention.
I don’t absolutely love it, but I feel there’s something here I want to lean into. I am not really sure what was going on with all of the interesting shapes; I was attempting to make something interesting out of them and not have everything be totally random/ugly. I don’t really like that part, but I’m not sure how to improve upon it. I suspect I will get better ideas the more I do it. Overall, I think this piece was a win.
Blossom Creature
Another design based on a warm-up thumbnail. I didn’t really intend for it to become a creature, but I just started to refine the thumbnail and this is what emerged.
Abstract 260327a
I liked the shapes in a thumbnail I did warming up; so I decided to refine it a bit and add some colour.
I’ll probably be sharing a lot more abstract work moving forwarding as I explore how to incorporate this part of me into my art style.
Winter Weasel
In the wide white terrain suddenly there appeared through the cover a jolly little critter. “Weasel’s the name,” he began with a smile.
I had the idea to make this little weasel blend into the background a bit. I rather like the result. It could be fun to do an entire book of forest creatures in the winter.
Expressive Weasels: LCA Stage 3
I’m excited to share that I have completed Stage 2 of the Line and Color Academy. To recap what I completed in this stage, I did 26 letter illustrations for AlphaCon, 20 character portraits, and 20 full-body illustrations of anthropomorphized characters . . . and it only took me 6 months :). You can go back and see a lot of the work I shared in previous blog posts.
Stage 2 was about learning a simple, reliable process. Stage 3 is about making and tracking reliable progress; to do this effectively, it’s best to pick a very specific thing you want to improve at and then put in consistent effort and track your progress over time.
To begin Stage 3 I’ve chosen to try improving at characterization, the expressiveness of the characters, the interest of the character design, the caricaturing through anthropomorphism. I spent the last 3 weeks daily studying and drawing weasels, trying to really understand them so I can create convincing weasel characters. My previous 20 anthropomorphic characters were done with almost no prior study of the creatures I was drawing. I had drawn them a little bit over the last several years, but never in-depth study to really try to understand them. I relied mostly on memory of what they look like, my ability to construct bodies and form, and a bit of photo reference for some just-in-time learning.
In this post I share some of the sketches and studies from my time studying weasels to show you a bit of what goes into this sort of learning.
I began by observing photos and videos of weasels and stoats just trying to get an understanding of them – how they move and act, their behaviour.
The following sketches were done while I was at an event and didn’t have any photo reference with me; so I had to rely on what I could remember of what I had studied the week before. I partly incorporated some of what I was seeing in my surroundings. This gave me a good chance to start applying what I had learned about the weasels into drawing my own characters.
I requested feedback about anthropomorphism from people in the Mighty Artisan community and got some really useful advice about breaking the process down into simple steps. I tried applying the advice in the following pages.
There’s a glimpse into what it looks like to study weasels. I plan to continue my studies for another couple weeks before moving on to a different animal. I’m also going to be trying to complete more illustrations in that period.
Have a great day!
