THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Got a big compliment for my work from a director a few days ago and that felt good. Looks like the way I’m approaching the work is getting approval.

Then there was this incident: Last week I finished a Couch Gag that I got very little direction on. It was assigned to me, I read the script and since it was an action sequence, I had to “write” the visual representation of the action. The director basically took a look at what I’d done and said, “Well, okay, send it to Gracie to see what they say about it.”  It was very odd because I had made it all up.

A few days later I got the notes back and the notes where really superficial and minimal. Change these character’s to be Lenny and Carl, shorten the shirts on Homer and Marge, remove that details on these eyes.   Nothing really about the action I had “written” with my drawings. That was very satisfying.

ART

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

I started working on the Giant Snake monster. I decided to go with a Horned Viper. It had an interesting  and very unique shape, plus it had horns:

As you can see in the drawing above, I was really trying to push the head shape in orders to have the viper’s face be all the way at the end of it’s head.

As cartoony as the drawings above are, they aren’t too cartoony.  Why? Well, because I’m not familiar enough with the viper to push it further yet. Thing is, like the gorilla from last week, I first need to see what the animal I’m drawing really looks like.  I also need to get familiar with their anatomy and how it’s put together.  I  can push only so far because I’m trying to figure out how to draw them to begin with.  What shapes to use, what features go where and how they fit together.   Only after drawing the animal, more or less, realistic, do I have a foundation to work on.  How can you exaggerate reality if you haven’t studied what reality looks like? It’s also not enough to just see what it looks like but you have to understand it. This is why figure drawing is so important. When you understand the structure, anatomy, construction, and rhythms of the human form, you are able to re-translate them to the anatomy of other animals (which generally share the same anatomy but in a different configuration).  Understanding how to draw something, does NOT require rendering. If you can draw something without having to render it and it still looks right, your doing something right. The point is to NOT use rendering as a crutch to cover up bad drawing. It doesn’t work. A bad drawing is a bad drawing no matter how much you render it. The best cartoonists are generally the guys that can also draw realistic (or semi-realistic) as well. That said, I’ve seen plenty of artists that can draw realistic and can’t draw cartoony (mostly because they don’t understand the principles of graphic design; or if they do, they don’t know how to apply it to creatures).

At this point, for me to TRULY be doing a deep study of both snakes and apes, I would need to start drawing them without skin to understand their muscle structure, as well as drawing their skeletons.  I may still do this, but for now I just want to get this over with. I want to move on and finish the development stuff sometime this year. It feels like it’s taking forever. I only get to work on this stuff for an hour or so a day.

I thought, in the end, that the Viper (and all other snakes I looked at) just were not scary enough. In fact, MY drawings of the Viper made it almost look like a cat.  It was too cute.  I thought I needed something a bit scarier and creepier.

Before I tackled that problem though, I came across a photo of a gorilla that I just wanted to draw, so I did. I quickly drew a color pencil under drawing, exaggerating the features I saw on the photo as I went. Once I was done, I decided to ink the drawing. I also thought I’d use my Copic markers to add some tone to the drawing just for fun. What I ended up with was not exactly what I wanted but I learned a few things.

Then I went back to drawing the Snake monster:

Both the Winged Ape and the Giant Snake are ideas I lifted from two different Robert E. Howard, CONAN short stories.  In the story with the snake, the snake had a human like face. I thought that perhaps, I should go with that image.  It definitely came out looking much creepier.  It also helped that I had drawn the previous drawings of the Viper because I was able to use snake anatomy in combination with what I know of human anatomy and construction.

You’ll also notice that there’s a gorilla sketch in the page as well. One with a pointy head. That’s because I got an idea for a gorilla head shape I wanted to try out. This lead me to the next couple of drawings:

The idea was to not have it be a ‘real’ gorilla but some kind of gorilla type creature so, instead of a big hump why not make it pointy. This made the ape look a bit alien, which I liked. The idea I was going for with the face, was to try to make it look like a death’s head.  More skull like.  I thought it was working and it was going in the right direction, but there was something not quite right, so I continued on:

In the drawings above, I wanted the face to be small compared to the size of the head, like I had thought in the other drawings last week. I think I got what I wanted with that but somehow the body all looked to “even”. Everything was the same size, so I decided to do a little sketch at the bottom to get the size variations I wanted. It was much better but there was something missing.

A day later, I was looking through the THE ART OF KUNG FU PANDA and came across the gorilla designs in the book.  They were sooo awesome I couldn’t help but steal a shape solution or two and incorporate it into my design:

With the arms of the ape, I was definitely trying a clearer “straight versus curve” line contrast.  I also made him generally thicker and shrunk his face a bit more, so it wouldn’t be so long.

Next I tried to give the snake another go. I was mostly trying to make sure to draw some of his body so that I could see how it grew bigger in the middle while it tapered more as it got to his head and tail.  I also wanted to try to simplify the face so that there wasn’t so many lines. It needs to look as if it’s from the same design universe as the rest of the characters. Not there yet, but getting there. I think I might need to experiment more with the nose and head shape.

(EDIT: For a much BETTER article on the subjects I touched on above, read this one DRAFTMANSHIP: INCREASING YOUR VISUAL VOCABULARY by Aaron Diaz.)

FAMILY

There was a lot going on this weekend.  It was both my wife and I’s 6th wedding anniversary on Saturday and my daughter’s 4th birthday was on going to be on Monday.  We decided to NOT celebrate our anniversary until Sunday and take Munchkin to the LA zoo for her birthday on Saturday instead.  Alesha invited our parents as well as a her sister, my brother and his wife and some friends.  We all met up at the zoo.

I had bought her a “sketchbook” at the dollar store and a few markers. I told her it was so she could draw the animals.  I didn’t realize how much she would LOVE the idea.  As we entered the zoo, we passed by a bird feeder with a bunch of birds on it and she stopped us all to take out the sketchbook to draw a bird.  She was that way with every animal there after.

I brought my own sketchbook but it was much more difficult for me to get any sketching done.  The little bit I DID get to do, didn’t turn out so well. I’d forgotten how difficult it was to draw moving animals at the zoo. Especially when I felt rushed by the fact that I wasn’t there to sketch.

Most of the time we were just trying to make sure to keep track of all the kids and keep everyone together as best we could. It was A LOT of work.  The bigger kids would run off and we’d have to make sure Munchkin and Dante wouldn’t follow them. They didn’t like that much, but it was the safest way to keep track of them. They both had a fantastic time in spite of us keeping them close.  We finished the day at the zoo leaving the kids to go play at the zoo’s playground until they kicked us out because the zoo was closing.

By the time we got home, we where pretty darn tired.  Still, Munchkin was really looking forward to her birthday cake, so Alesha took her to the store and got her one.  We sang Happy Birthday to her and she was sooo happy. I think she was looking forward to that part all day.  We then had cake and ice cream and everyone went to sleep.  Good times.

FAMILY

Sunday evening, we left the kids with my parents and went on a movie/dinner date for our anniversary.  Alesha looked beautiful.

We went to see INCEPTION. We both loved it.  First movie since the original MATRIX  that I’ve wanted to watch in the movie theater again.  If only I had the money to do so.  Really well written and really well told.  A very complex movie and yet they managed to make it  clear.  Fantastic.

Afterward Alesha and I went to dinner.  Alesha is still working on her novel manuscript. Well sorta.  She kinda finished writing it and the biggest reason she isn’t doing more with it right now, is because I hadn’t read it yet to give her my thoughts.   During dinner, I did just that.  I had been reading it all week.  There were some issues with it that I wasn’t able to quite put my finger on. Then we watched INCEPTION and it all became clear.  I knew exactly what it needed.  The way that INCEPTION‘s story was structured gave me the clue.  I gave Alesha my thoughts.  It was a very geeky anniversary dinner.

The first time I read the manuscript, it had needed a lot of work.  She fixed it really well. It still needs a bit of fixing though. I’m very proud of her. Her storytelling has gotten so much better.

We had a good anniversary date.

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