studying

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!