Homework

I recently finished up an online course in animation character design with the illustrious Stephen Silver. You may (or may not) know him from the work he's done on the Clerks animated series, or Kim Possible and Danny Phantom. I've been studying his work for some time - I love his clean lines and shapes - so when I saw he was offering courses I naturally hemmed and hawed for months before plunking down my cash. Nothing against Mr. Silver, I just work myself up into a ball of nerves when spending a lot of moolah on something others might view as frivolous. And my generation has a tendancy to view frivolous online art courses as the equivalent of "Draw Tippy".

But frivolous this was not. I'm making a concerted effort in improving my abilities. Time to put my dough where my pie hole is. I'm not looking into entering the animation field, but I want to be able to improve on drawing characters the same from different angles, and also constructing them in a logical and clear way. Mr. Silver's class helped with just that.

He uses videos to hand us the tools to improve our artwork with in-depth lessons and personal critiques that are hand drawn over our own assignments. We get to see where we've succeeded in applying his lessons, but more importantly where we've strayed so we can learn from our mistakes. I can't say that all of his lessons have sunk in yet, but I've already noticed an improvement in my artwork. And I have more confidence in my abilities too!

Here are a few of my assignments. The first is a character we had to draw based on a description. Merely an assignment so he could see where our drawing ability stood.

Aside from many, many, many drawing exercises, another assignment included creating a version of Dr. Jekkyl and Mr. Hyde. I invented my own version of a 19th century paleontologist who accidentally ingests some dino DNA.

It was a great course that was a lot of work and a lot of fun. Now to make it pay off!