Ah, Finally!

Heeeeelllooo Ladies and gents! It's been almost a week since my last post and it's been a massive auld slog! If you're in anyway creative, you'll probably at some point go through periods where you just can't get your ideas out in a manner that you're happy with. This leads to massive frustration and head banging on tables because you come to realise the only way to battle this thing is to work through it. The volume of output I've had this week is minimal. The volume of work is huge! I've drawn more than I ever had and all because I just could not get around my ideas with my current skill set.

So what was so challenging?

 For a while now I've been unhappy with Sebastian's design. It needed tweaking but I didn't know how... I knew that I liked some parts of the design and hated others. I felt he was a little bland, had not enough shape and size variation and lacked certainty and consistency. So I set about nailing down his design in a model sheet.

So what's changed?

Like I said, the guy was boring and lacked enough variation in the size relationships between his facial features to keep him interesting, however I didn't want to push things to so far that it become to broad and cartoony.

So I did two things : 

1. Enlarge his eye brows.

2. Shrunk his eyes a little

3. Made a feature of his chin.

These were the decisions that were made. The brain work before the physical drawing began.

The bad, terrible, drawing...

The overly drawn, and complicated... 

The overly simplistic and imprecise...

And the badly modelled and slap dashily inconsistent designs... 

And that's just the face!

When it came to drawing the rest of his character, I had previously been vague and unwanting to work him out. I tried him stooped, broad chested, ploddy, light footed - nothing seemed to work and my drawings suffered a great deal from my inability to draw as well as I would like.

So I turned to Milt Kahl. As I do.

Taking a look at how such a genius drafts man tackled larger, plumper characters and from here I took inspiration for shape variation and indeed, how to draw those shapes. If you're going to steal. Take from the best.

Eventually though, well today... I managed to breakthrough and figure out the design which I had been striving for. I hope you guys like it. Now all I have to do is build him :)

More soon,

Thanks for dropping in.

Josh.