Nadia

The hardest part for me in the skeleton foundation is to figure out length and arrangement of the body parts. Like, for example, on the second picture where the cat is throwing the ball. The leg is up in the air and hand should be behind it, but on the skeleton structure it’s not clear (same where he is crossing his hands). When drawing the structure I should always keep in mind WHAT I want to draw, the finished pose, and trying to produce it on a paper with simple lines. It’s like ripping it appart and leaving only base lines, the skeleton. Also, the head always looks wrong. Probably because head already have some shape to it… It is hard to connect shape and lines together.
I found that I don’t like the skeleton foundation much, thought it is helpful to know it, and probably in some situations it will help me to keep proportions correctly.

This is the third lesson by Preston Blair’s book. WEll, really it’s number four, because I skiped one where I needed to redraw and correct the first one…. I hate to perfect my work doing it over and over again. It’s so boring! Except, of course, if it’s not my job when people pay me for pictures (I wish I have this kind of job though!). I really think that perfection comes with practice, and practice should be different and interesting every day. I draw couple body examples from the book today, and after that I draw my own character. That way I’m not just copying Preston’s great pictures but trying to understand concepts on my own experience.

Drawing stretched and squashed circles first will help to understand how the head should look like. Also I catched myself on making faces while drawing. Probably, it helps me to feel the emotion better, I was trying to respond to the picture. If the dog is angry, I was making angry faces…
Another note on today’s lesson: do not afraid to stretch or squash more then you want to. My mistake was that I didn’t see difference on my pictures. Stretch and squash were almost the same. One of the cool design principles is to make different objects REALLY different. Smth extra small with extra big together. It brings attention and contrast.
And one more thing: I found helpful to draw the arrows to show the movement of the head. First, I was drawing construction, then arrows, after that I was checking and redrawing if needed my construction and then I draw the elements of the head.

Last page of the lesson 1. Searched for people who are doing same lessons. Seems like they all stoped working on it after the first one. Will see how it goes with me. Also I looked through other lessons on the site and don’t like the idea of copying Preston Blair’s picture with exactly every detail. I think the most important thing to learn here: principles and a lot of practice. Even if I’m drawing circles and lines – I must draw it every day. Just don’t let your pencil be dull (although I use mechanical pencil hehe ).

I feel very lazy today, but did the lesson anyway. It is probably not as accurate as I wanted it to be. Also, I ordered animation book by Preston Blair today.

Не знаю можно ли здесь переключать язык на английский. Видимо нельзя. Когда нибудь заведу платный блог. Пока буду на английском пытаться царапать. Простите за грамматику

Today I’ve got through Lesson One. There is a link there where you can see every page of the first book by Preston Blair.
Although, I’m not finished with the lessons, here are sketches that I’ve done today: