Wednesday, August 19, 2009

3 Days Worth Of Study By Davi

Here's my latest discovery. He has just what I'm looking for in a cartoonist: his own style, yet the ability to learn basic principles and apply them. He is also doing it fast. This is only 3 days practice.You can see him building up step by step these great Scribner poses of Hook.
Are they exact copies? Not quite. But they show that he understands the methods of good cartoon drawings and that's the important thing.


My only critiques are very small:

1) He has squashed the craniums slightly - causing the eyes and facial features to be a bit cramped. The character needs a bit more space around his eyes. This is a common problem with cartoonists and I find myself explaining it over and over again to the same artists.

2) The finish is a bit "itchy". I think maybe because of the rough corrugated paper Davi is using or maybe the pencil is too grainy.

3) The money stacks are a bit too vague and have different shapes than on the frame grabs.

Here Davi applies the exact same principles of 40s animation drawing to a more complicated and detailed drawing from Asterix. He doesn't get lost in the details of clothing and cross-hatching; he wraps those details around the pose and construction.


Great life and flow! While not losing the solidity of the forms.
Here, Davi got something that some artists are missing. He not only copied this composition by looking at the 2 dimensional shapes. He made the individual elements look solid. The trees-even without detail hold together as solid objects. He also constructed the smoke trail in perspective and didn't flatten it out the with 2 dimensional details of the dust puffs.

Here's his stuff from just 2 days earlier and you can see how much he has improved.
These forms are a little vague and wobbly - unsure of themselves - probably because he is not used to drawing such simple forms.



The finish is also vague - too many lines, faces not clear.

But his latest stuff at the top is a big advancement, just by his dedicated practice.

He will be joining the private school if he wants.

His advantage is that he can already draw well, now he is learning to draw simpler designs - but that still are good drawings, not just flatness.
These show that he is a thoughtful artist: he combines observation with knowledge of how things work.

He combines what his eye tells him with what his brain explains to him about why things look the way they do.