First illustration I’ve completed in over a week. I am starting to add more complexity and work over multiple sittings.
I pulled back a bit from the purely abstract pursuit to something that is more-reliable for me, construction-based character illustrations. But once I had the rough composition done, I thought, well, maybe I could do some abstract stuff in the background. I’m pretty happy with the result.
I’d like to create the abstraction with maybe a bit more unifying intention about the theme of what the abstraction should be or perhaps story elements that I can weave into it. This was very much just whatever I drew, but in the future I want to find a way to hone that ability to direct the abstraction and integrate it into the story of the illustration more.
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.
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.
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.
