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My imagination has been turning more towards fantasy again lately…

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In life drawing sessions, I’m usually torn between drawing what I see and drawing what I know. When I draw what I see, I’m trying to learn about wrinkles and folds, and other details that I can’t make up. These drawings tend to be stiffer and less fluid than when I draw what I know, and use the model as inspiration.

The lunch sessions we have at Nickelodeon are made up of short poses between 1 and 5 minutes, which are harder for me to do when I’m not loosened up. As my line starts to come back to me, and flows better, the quick sketches become a little easier to do, and I get more personality into them.

The series above is a good example, where you can see the transition from drawing what I see to drawing inspiration from the model. John Tucker is a great body actor and he brings music along to help the mood. This week he did a ragtime character, and at some point the whole environment of sight and sound got to me, and I started to see the poses as if they were drawn by John Held, Jr., a great cartoonist of that era. It was like a lightbulb going on in my head, and the drawings suddenly came to life. I also noticed that my shoulders, back and neck weren’t as tight as they usually get during life drawing.

That was a good session for me, because it proved that I really do need to loosen up while doing life drawing. I mentioned that to the model, John, and he said, “It’s supposed to be fun for you, too.”

A couple of character sketches from my sketchbook…

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These are a couple of doodles I did in Photoshop tonight, when I unexpectedly found myself without any work to do. I guess idle hands do make mischief.

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Illustration Friday: Yet another great way to procrastinate from work…

Thanks to the miracle that is the internet, I just saw a trailer for Pixar’s upcoming film, Ratatouille, which is due to be released in 2007.

As I watched it I had an uneasy feeling of deja vu. Thematically the trailer is identical to a rough promo board I had done for my Roche character. Fortunately, I cut the sequence from the version of the cartoon that I’m now working on, but it’s really frightening to know that there are people out there thinking the same thoughts you are.

My buddy, Terence Taylor, has a couple of theories about that. One is, that when you formulate a creative idea and express it in some way, whether in words, or pictures, even if it’s not presented publicly, you’re releasing it into the ether to be picked up by someone else. Ergo, after you do that, it’s a race against time to realize your concept in its intended medium before someone else does it first. The other theory, and one that I believe, is that there is a collective unconscious from which ideas spring, by people of the same generation who are influenced by similar cultural, social, and political experiences. So it stands to reason their ideas will be similar.

I can’t post screen caps of the Ratatouille trailer, but I can post my initial rough sketches that were done somewhere close to two years ago when I had first conceived of Roche. As you’ll see, the concept is that of a vermin of refined taste in a high class French restaurant, that is discovered by the waiter and patrons, panic ensues, and then outside the restaurant he comes across another of his breed with less refined tastes.

Weird…