Directed Studies Week 2

As I mentioned last week, I am conducting a Directed Studies class with a local art student. For my demonstration for the second week I took a piece of photo reference supplied to the student for an assignment last semester. That assignment was to create a character from the reference. I wanted to take that same reference and show how I go about using photo reference to help influence and improve my drawing. This is the end result of the drawing demo, a monkey man with a lot on his mind...

Simian Orator
© 2011 Christopher Burdett

Giving my student the option, he asked that I create a character along the lines of the one that he did, a orator type figure, rather then one using a weapon. I opened one of my animal books and came upon a howler monkey and I let that be the reference for the monster side of the drawing. While letting the reference influence my choices I pushed and pulled the anatomy and altered the attire. Always looking to the reference to tell me how I should go about defining my forms. LOOK FIRST and then DRAW SECOND.... repeat. Here is the final drawing next to the supplied reference...

Figure reference and drawing.
LOOK FIRST and then DRAW SECOND

You should be able to quickly pick out where I stuck closely to the reference and where I did not once placed next to the reference... hopefully you could not when just looking at the drawing. Once completed I got out the drawing from week 1 in which the drawing was mostly influenced by the silhouette that I drew. While I was looking at animal reference the waste majority of the drawing was influenced by my experience and the symbols in my head. I put the two drawings side by side to show the difference in feel even in my own drawings when more reference is used...

Week 1 and 2 drawing comparison.
Image on the left is mostly out of my head while the image on the right is much more informed from reference.

If I was creating the image on the left for a project I would have gotten a photo of myself in the pose suggested by the silhouette before beginning the final drawing to help fill in the gaps and add a level of realism.

As a reminder, if you are in the Tallahassee area Friday night, I will be appearing at GEEK NIGHT 2011 on the Florida State University campus! Hope to see you there!

That is all for today, see you back here on Friday! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com