Approaches to Drawing Characters

Within this workshop, we used different skills to develop our process of creating drawings and in particular people and characters.

This one was drawing someone from memory. We had 2 minutes to study someone, looking at the lines that form the face and also things like hand position. I feel like I did well in this task, it definitely taught me to draw from memory better and to look more closely at the lines on someone and how that can be translated to my drawing without having the person in front of me.

This is called a blind drawing where I looked at the person's face the whole time without looking at what I was drawing. Using this technique made me not worry so much about details and every mark that I made and more about studying the face and getting the shapes and feeling of the piece. I think in time it will definitely also make me quicker at sketching as I'm putting less time into worrying about how the initial sketch would look.

For this piece, I drew from a character description. The text talked about a cold and withered character which made me think of a Victorian era elderly man who was at home by the fire with a cold blizzard outside. The description had the tone that the man was menacing and also cold in the sense of personality. This made me think of someone who would be powerful and evil.

This drawing was created for a response to the word 'revolting'. This made me think of some kind of create who was human-like but otherworldly like he'd been decaying or slimy like an evil creature. The hunched over position was to create a menacing aura with the webbed feet pointing to a character that was animalistic.