Week 2 - Mark Making (Task 2)

So for this week we were to look into research to do with the human form after studying it visually in lesson. As good as it is to draw what you see, its also important that the student understands the fundamentals of the art they are creating when it comes to anything really, it would be the human form or landscapes.

In simpler terms, say you had a sports car, lets say a Ferrari, a very elegant car in terms of structure and its made even prettier with a wonderful red paint over, now lets compare that to a Ford Escort, no matter how well you paint it, it will never look as good as the Ferrari because the structure of it and the fundamentals are not as elegant. So the point is, you can spend hours making something look very good, but if you don't understand the fundamentals that lie beneath the visual aesthetics then it will never looks as good as you intend it to.

To relate the above paragraph to my human figure drawing, I could make a character look very good with different techniques using shading and light in my favour and so on, but to truly make a wonderful piece of art, I would need to be able to understand the human anatomy and how muscles entwine and wrap around each other to succeed in an anatomically correct piece of work. With drawing you can cheat this, but with 3D when I have to transpose my drawings, its more risky and it can make a character look out of proportion and not make sense.

TASK 2
Our task for this week was to have created 3 more studies of the human form that relate to a specific artists style. I decided to do some more zoomed in areas of the body particularly to do with the torso and lower part of the male body.

Artist styles

For my three different artists styles so I decided to choose my favourite, all are listed below:-

Leonardo Da Vinci - Da Vinci was a Italian renaissance Artist, most famously known for his painting the Mona Lisa, he was very talented with a brush and his work is world renown to this day. He was also a Sculptor, architect, a wonderful musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, geologist, cartographer and a writer; the list literally is endless, but the reason i chose Da Vinci as my number one inspirational artist, is because he was an incredible anatomist. With his anatomy skills combined with his artistic flair, he conjured some of the most incredible lifelike drawings portraying the human body perfectly and all of its forms. It was because of men like Da Vinci that people understadn the human body as well as they do today.  

Glen Keane - This man is a exceptionally talented animator, he is most famously know from the characters that he has created at Walt Disney Studios, these consist of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the beast, Tarzan and Tangled. He is also a very talented author and illustrator, He has won multiple awards including the 2007 Winsor McCay award for a lifetime contribution to the field of animation.                                                                                                                                                                                      

Feng Zhu - Feng Zhu is one of my most inspirational game and film artists, he is very talented at creating visually stunning fantasy art as well as game characters, he has done plenty of work on big names in film and games, he's worked on Starwars 3: Revenge of the Sith, specifically doing work on the mustafar lava environments, and he has also done plenty of character design work with games such as Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem Forever and The Sims 3. 

I will continue to talk in more detail about each artist later on In this page but first lets crack on with the visuals!

Below you will see three drawings that i created that relate to Da Vinci's particular drawing style.

The medium I used for these is traditional HB and sepia toned pencils, I'm looking to broaden my horizons with traditional drawing styles like the masters of old.. I'm aware that many people are using Photoshop and their digital skills but I think its better to do art traditionally, and transfer your traditional skills to the software instead. This way you get to learn the best of both. I think if you jump straight into digital art, you can hinder yourself a little because going back on yourself to traditional art is much more difficult to learn once you have stylised yourself.

I based these drawings off Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical art. I found Da Vinci's work to be most interesting and inspiring  his work is simply astounding and the height of detail that he puts into his drawing is unfettered. When I was researching into his life story I discovered what an inspirational man he was , I already knew quite a lot about him because I have previously looked into his chronological past. This time it was far more art focused and i discovered new things that I hadnt back then. For instance, his eye for observation and how he captures the most minute details and portrays them seamlessly.

So more about Da Vinci...

Like i said above, i chose Da Binci over the other artists due to his extraordinary knowledge of the human form and the work he has created in his life clearly depicts that of his intelligence. 

I could tell from his work that he is a very theoretical and mathematical man when it comes to proportions. He knows the human body and he doesn't simply draw what he sees, he studies the form and then applies it to his drawing, so his work is anatomically and proportionally correct. 

I noticed that in most of his art he uses a Sanguine or Sepia types of medium be it pencils or paints, this is excellent because it best brings out the different shades and highlights of the human body and its nice on the eyes, its good for layering and marking too. He is also very unique in his sense of shading and lighting, he usually used strokes or lines for shading that are widely spread apart, or he uses cross hatchet shading, a method still used to this day, in fact  I use it myself. 

Vitruvian Man

This picture depicts the exact proportions of the human anatomy, it consists of two men superimposed on a piece of paper in pen and ink. It portrays a man stood in a square and another man with his arms and legs spread which form the circle. Mathematically the man in a T pose forms a triangle form where his toes connect to each middle finger. This man is called Vitruvias, a greek architect whom Da Vinci was thoroughly interested in in his search for human proportions and the study of science. 

This famous study basically depicts the proportions of the human body, and the diagram shows this in small segments. I will elaborate.

Through research I have discovered that the top paragraph of the diagram shows the following measurements of the human anatomy:-

• A palm is around the size of four fingers.
• A foot consists of four palms in size.
• A cubit (otherwise known as the forearm) is about six palms long. 
• Four cubits makes the height of a man.
• A man is twenty-four palms long

The second paragraph at the bottom of the image translates that:-

• The length of a man's arms spread, from each middle finger, is the height of a man.
• The length of a man's body is approximately the size of a man's head from hairline to chin stacked 8 times on top of each other. 
• The length of the hand is a tenth of the height of a man
• From below the chin to the top of the head is and eighth of the height of a man

There is such a long list of measurements  I don't want to bore anyone reading this blog page, but this is just a taste of how much detail Da Vinci went into with the human form. 

To the right is another image of a man, yet again and excellent piece of work that clearly portrays the construction of the human body but specifically with the face. Da Vinci has constructed a grid around the face of this man to differentiate the space between each facial land mark to create an accurate perspective of the proportion of the head. 

This method is excellent for drawing, and the grid itself can be drawn on paper which then allows you to have some basic guidelines which will help you to draw the human head accurately.

On the right you can see multiple images that I have used as reference material to create my drawings above. As you can see in Da Vinci's work he is very meticulous and precise with his style of shading and line work. I have tried to replicate this in my drawings of the human anatomy.
What i love about his drawings, is the definition between muscle groups, for example, on the side view image of the human standing up, i love the detail that is incorporated into the drawing where the latissimus dorsi and external obliques wrap round. Its details like this in drawings which really help me to appreciate the human anatomy and the way we are built.

On the right you can see a study I created, I found two of my best side and front perspective anatomy drawings and labelled all of the muscles that I went through in the lecture with Sam. I also delved into more detail and labelled some muscle groups that I found In Da Vincis drawings detailing the anatomy of the human body.
Labelling the muscles has helped me a lot with trying to understand the construction of the muscles in the body and how they connect, i think this will help me in the future a lot whe nit comes to doing more life drawing and being able to remember muscles that i have memorised from studying them more. 

Feng Zhu
This is my second favourite artist, Feng Zhu is more of a contemporary  modern artist who does work for the game and film industry creating environments and character concepts. The main reason why i love his work is because all of his work is so brilliantly made, and his concept of colour is outstanding. I love his sense of light and shadow detail in his work. His general art style is that of a digital oil painter using Photoshop or Corel painter. Some of his work will be shown below in GIF format that i made, and you will be able to see for yourself just what kind of art he actually creates himself. He is now world renown in the games industry and has worked on huge projects.

As you can see in his artwork, he uses a variety of brush strokes and uses lighting and colour to his advantage to try and manipulate or depict an enchanting and visually enticing environments.
This is why I love his art work, because whenever I see a piece of work by him, I am instantly pulled in and captivated by his artistic license.

Glen Keane
Last but not least, my third favourite artist, I really enjoy looking through Glen Keane's work I find it quite enchanting and engrossing to look at, but it doesn't quite grab me as much as the other artists, I think his style is a bit different and his drawing style unique but his work looks quite simplified at times. Things that captivate me are vibrant coours, striking scenarios, poses or scenes and i done really feel that in his work. None the less though, his work is brilliant and his character designs flawless he has a wonderful eye for creating elegant characters with exaggerated poses, the characters look proportionately incorrect, but believable. Below I will show some images of his work and the things that he has created that i enjoy most.

As you can see below, his drawing style is very unique and that of a talented artist, but I don't feel captivated by his work when I look at it, but I do very much appreciate his art style and the way he creates his character designs. 

I particularly like the style of shading and his use of colour, its quite vague but it gets the point across and I think sometimes something that looks sketchy is far more genuine and it adds a degree of authenticity to the work.

So that concludes my three chosen artists, and I hope this justify's as to why I decided to choose Leonardo Da Vinci as my leading artist who I found most inspiring.
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On a side note, when we were in our lecture, we did some charcoal drawings that were related to this particular task, and we used different styles of translating whatever medium we were using onto the page, the method I choose was to coat a page in charcoal and then use my eraser to bring out the highlights. Here are my first attempts of trying to achieve that.

 Each picture is pretty basic but in time my charcoal skills will improve and i will be posting some more pictures later in my blog showing my progression using different art mediums.

Some extra Input...

Below are 5 or 6 drawings that i made in my spare time just to try and understand the human figure a little more.

Above are a series of images I made which weren't part of our main tasks, but I wanted to develop my art skills a bit more  as well as understand the human form a lot better. One drawing that I did quickly and roughly was the Davinci method of drawing the human body. This is the last picture, it starts as a series of dots and you halve each one which gives you a rough direction of where things are landmarked, so for example, if you find the half way point between head and toes you will find the naval.
  This is a slightly different method to using the head to measure out the human body its a little more mathematical and practical. I also took the liberty of investing in various books, those of which i found incredibly useful below is a photograph of the books I invested in.


Force: Character Design from Life Drawing - Michael. D. Mattesi
The Fundamentals of Drawing Anatomy - Tom Flint
Artistic Anatomy - Dr. Paul Richer
Zbrush Character Design - Scott Spencer

All of these books are brilliant and i look forward to reading and studying them with great enthusiasm.