Monday, August 02, 2010

Kirby Is Killing Me


I know you're dying for an exlanation of that crying tree.
It all started with an assignment I have to draw an illustration using some Marvel characters in my style.
My idea was to do a cartoony caricature of Kirby. As you can see, this is not an easy task.
I'm trying to come up with one good pose of Crystal from the Inhumans.

So far, not happy with any.
Drawing girls is hard enough.
Trying to draw them in Kirby's style adds a wrinkle.
Then to draw Kirby's style but with a big cartoony proportioned head only adds to the problem.
rrrrgggghhhh...

So I have been doing a lot of studies of real people with varying degrees of success in the hopes of discovering some secrets.
I even have been trying to figure out how legs and hips work in balance. Nightmare.
I tried measuring the pose above and then drawing it in proportion.

Something went wrong because I ended up with stubby legs.So then I tried again just to draw straight ahead by eye alone. A bit better but still wonky.

So next was to try drawing different ways of standing to see if I could start to figure out the mechanics of knees, hips in assorted balanced poses. It's a long haul.

Anyway, Eddie has been laying awake worrying about me studying how things really look. He's afraid I might have a revelation and decide to stop cartooning. He says he's known cartoonists who started trying to improve their drawing skills and then ending up abandoning cartooning for the delicate art of painting sad clowns or trees.

So I've decided to combine the 2 arts and become a black velvet crying tree clown artist. Am I the first?Now if I could only paint.