–
Jan 172017
FEATURED
Jan 042017
click for larger
Anatomy study from Bodies in Motion.
The Summer session of my Anatomy for Artists online course is coming up on June 23rd. In this course I cover ALL the anatomy that goes into making an ecorche drawing like the one above. In fact, ecorche drawings are the primary exercises for the eight week course and by the end you will almost certainly have levelled-up enough to create a detailed ecorche study like this one. If you have an interest in improving as a figurative artist, join me for an intense but fun 8 weeks of sutdy this summer!
Dec 132016
click for larger
Form study from Bodies in Motion, about a 1 1/2 coffee drawing. And morning two below, a few other poses from the same Motion.
reference from BodiesInMotion.photo, launching 16 January, 2017!
Dec 092016
The growing collection of demo sculpts
I’m recently back to London after a long trip to the West Coast (LA, San Francisco). The first stop was Blizzard Entertainment for a four-day facial anatomy workshop. For the uninitiated Blizzard is the juggernaut game developer behind the hit franchises World of Warcraft (WoW), Overwatch, and Starcraft. From their fortress-like campus 100 miles south of LA in Irvine, CA, they run a digital empire built on monsters, magic, and well… fun.
dark magic at work here, me thinks a levitation spell or something
My job was to level up the artists’ facial anatomy and portrait sculpting skills. The workshop broke down into two days of facial anatomy lecture and two days of portrait sculpting in ZBrush. The content will sound familiar to anyone who actually reads the posts on this website (and doesn’t just looking at the pictures, like most), because I ran a similar workshop for Ubisoft very recently. In fact, you’ll recognize one of the heads rendered above. I added a second head (my Blizzard demo sculpt) to the menagerie this time.
sculpting expressions
Even though we were studying facial anatomy the artists also got a chance to draw and study from the Bodies in Motion site. We drew from quite a few Motions, less for full-body poses but more for examples of skull structure and head/neck articulation and anatomy in dynamic poses. There were some great drawings from the room full of talented artists.
head studies from Bodies in Motion
Nov 072016
demo sculpt from the Ubisoft workshop
I am recently back from a week-long workshop at Ubisoft’s Quebec studio focused on portraiture and facial anatomy. The week broke down into three days of facial anatomy lecture for twenty of their artists (animators, riggers, concept artist, character artists) and then finished with an intensive two-day portrait sculpting session in ZBrush with just the character artists.
artists sculpting away, and me, the shadowy figure in the corner
Continue reading »
Nov 062016
click for larger
The Venus of Cupertino, my iPad docking station, is just back from a busy week at the London Design Festival. She received countless oogles, smiles, and appreciation over the four days. She was even chosen as the top design at the festival by a prominent online design & lifestyle magazine.
Now that the Venus of Cupertino is almost all grown up, most future posts and updates on the Venus project will be found at: EATON.london There you can follow all the gossip, blogs, & tweets. And of course you can order her there as well!
Nov 042016
click for larger
Friday morning drawing. Up early and browsing BodiesInMotion.photo and found this pretty epic sequence – Aerial Rope. Good inspiration for a bit of figure study. Each image sequence (aka Motion) is a collection of crisp, high-resolution frames (15-20 megapixel) with tons of detail for close up study – hands, faces, muscles, deformation, etc (you can find a composite from the high-resolution images here). I’ve attached the preview GIF so you get a better idea how motions are previewed at Bodies in Motion. This was a two-coffee drawing, done on the iPad Pro so I could record the drawing session, timelapse below.
Oct 122016
click for larger
Timed studies from Bodies in Motion. One minute poses using the site’s timer, great for forcing me to capture the gesture of the poses quickly (toned afterwards). Site is launching in a couple weeks so join the mailing list if you haven’t already…
Oct 012016
click for larger
Anatomy study from Bodies in Motion. There are a few interesting things going on here:
Continue reading »
Sep 262016
click for larger
I am really enjoying drawing/studying from the material in the Bodies in Motion library (and looking forward to seeing what other artists do with it). This drawing is of an aerial performer, Stephen. He has quite a few sets in the Bodies in Motion library, and honestly, he possesses the perfect body for studying heroic human anatomy. There are countless lessons that can be learned from studying even a few of his images.
Sep 262016
click for larger
Portrait sketches of a freerunner backflipping at Bodies in Motion. Many challenging angles to draw from.
Sep 222016
30 second sequences from BiM
Not long ago, I had twelve artists from Natural Motion (of Morpheme and Clumsy Ninja fame) into Somerset House, my home away from home, for a four day anatomy workshop. At the end of each day we would take about 20 minutes to draw from the Bodies in Motion library.
sketching from BiM
We made extensive use of the timer for gesture drawing. It can be set to 10fps, 1fps, 30sec, 1min, 2min, or 5mins, and ticks down to zero before flipping to the next frame of the motion sequence. We had it set at 30 seconds per image and we were all drawing frantically trying to keep up. Anyone who goes to life drawing regularly knows this is challenging, but it’s great practice to help capture the essence of a pose – balance, gesture, rough volumes – quickly, without being drawn into the details. Here’s a timelapse of my scribbles (Procreate on Ipad Pro):
timelapse of a sequence of 30 second poses