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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Drawing Fuzzies!

Hey! I finished my online drawing animals class. It's actually called drawing furries. Furries are characters that are a blend of humans and animals. They could be talking animals. They could also be upright animals with more human proportions and wearing clothes. It's also called anthropomorphism. Here are the basic four stages.
Here's a link if you want to read a little bit about it: http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/2007/08/if-i-could-talk-to-animals.html




http://ponybot.net/pix/8246.png


http://ponybot.net/pix/8414.jpg
 Someone on DeviantArt created anthropomorphic characters of the My Little Ponies. You can see all the stages here.

Ok, so you have anthropomorphism and you also have furries. Some people consider them the same thing. However, furries can also have a negative connotation. Some people dislike furries like these.








http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/35000000/furs-live-love-furries-35083369-900-810.jpg
The characters are basically human with just animal heads and tails stuck on. They have completely human proportions. Here are some more.


http://wallpoper.com/images/00/33/92/11/wolf-furry_00339211.jpg
http://www.lastpolarbears.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/draw_more_furries_kacey_miyagami.jpg










http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/188cz7dbthev8jpg/ku-xlarge.jpgYou get the idea, right? I think some of these are really great drawings. They have really good solidness and perspective, but they are also kind of creepy. This dolpin...I don't know...
Omigod...I came across of some pictures of people as furries...


http://57vje3fqw032jqgx93yq531jak.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Arthur-arthur-11714679-2560-1394.jpeg

 Did you know Arthur is a kind of a furry?
But he's shorter and has cuter proportions so he's not scary.
Anyway, this was the online class I took for 5 weeks. The teacher would give us a lesson, I would upload my work and then she would critique it.
Here's my first week's work:


We had to draw a real animal and then turn it into an anthropomorphic character. My teacher said the real horse was a bit flat. I was working from a picture and the photographer used a telephoto lens that flattened out the image. THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS TRY TO WORK FROM REAL LIFE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE!
She also said I could increase the perspective by making the front legs significantly bigger than the back and making the head bigger. Then, the horse would look like it's solid and going back into space.
About my coffee horse, she said I could have changed the proportions more. I kept them the same as the real horse. The coffee horse was also sitting back on his hind legs and wasn't actually standing. I could have also worked with the perspective on him too.
Always always always think about perspective.
It's what makes things real. Among other things.
Yeah we've lived in this world for so long and lived with natural perspective that we can immediately tell when something is wrong.
We can't always say what, but we know it's wrong.
That's the challenge of being an animator! You have to suspend the audience's belief. It IS real. The characters ARE real. The world is just in the screen.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

First Post!

Hey! My name's Sandra and I'm doing this thing. I'm at this really tiny library right now. It's so small that there are only four bookshelves of non-fiction books. Very very small. Back on topic. I'm starting this blog so I can document(?) my journey to artistdom(hopefully). I think information is very powerful and now is especially a time of sharing and and learning with this newfangled internet. I don't know if I can teach anyone but I'll offer what I got! Hehe, if no one sees this, I can just read it and laugh at myself. I'm just making my mark on Google.com!

Ohmigosh, I can't indent on this! Okay, a little about me. I'm an eleventh grader at a public school in New Jersey. I love rabbits. I want to go to Rabbit Island in Japan. My parents are both Korean. I was born in Manhattan, New York. I love everything orange. I play Ultimate Frisbee. One of my best memories is going to Italy and eating Nutella gelato on a small empty beach at night with fellow art students. I also loved seeing Apollo and Daphne and The Rape of Persephone by Bernini at the Galleria Borghese. They are amazing sculptures. Almost impossible to believe they exist.

I always loved to draw. When my brother and I were little, my mom actually let us draw on the walls! So the walls of our townhouse was filled with crayon...things. My scribbles gradually became more recognizable as I grew. I have some of them taped to the ceiling of my room right now. They're kind of funny. I took kid art classes here and there, but I actually wanted to become a writer. I love to read. However, (dun dun dun) in eighth grader, I had this Language Arts teacher. Well, she was pregnant, so that probably accounts for her mood swings. But she expected all this high school work from us (because she used to be a high school teacher) and talked to us like we were two year olds. Not okay.

Oh man, I talk too much. Yup, so after that trauma, I decided to become an artist. Took Art Foundation freshmen year in high school. Amazing teacher. Learned about contour and negative space and all that. I took a Drawing Pre-College course and Glass Pre-Collge course at UArts in Philly. Yeah...glass cuts...so many. Somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to do animation. Yup, Disney and Pixar and Studio Ghibli. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I wanted to be like them. I guess I'm still a kid because my favorite song of all time is Can You Feel the Love Tonight by Timon and Pumba.

Soooo...onto my animation career! Or training for. Anyway, I went to Pre-College Animation at SAIC in Chicago for the summer before my sophomore year. Chicago is one of the best cities in US of A. Navy Pier, the Bean, the Field Museum. So much wind. It was amazing. They have the BEST DEEP DISH PIZZA. jifdoerpoijweiorjwklejklwejlfksdnsdhflkjwk. Yeah. The best.

The next summer, I went to RISD Pre-College for animation! I highly recommend it. I cannot fully explain how awesome it was. Six weeks in the small city of Providence, Rhode Island. Six crazy weeks surrounded by artists, sprinting to the mall, watching fireworks explode over a lake, eating Korean food off our dorm floor, splashing through the rain wearing garbage bags, finding jellyfish in the basement. Awesome awesome...incredible craziness. I'll never forget the friends I made. I learned things too, don't worry.

Okay, so one of the most important things of animation is LIFE DRAWING. Yeah, naked people. Well, if you want to get them to move realistically, you got to draw them right. So I took classes at the Art Students League in New York and some at my local community college. You can never have enough life drawing classes! You can learn something from everyone. Even the bad teachers. Like I learned how not to be a douchebag and not to say the same thing 894032 times. Yay.

So what I'm working on: life drawing! Soooo much life drawing. Every day. It's necessary. I'm also taking an online course on drawing animals at RISD. I'm pretending to be an adult. Shhhhhh. Art is never going to be easy. But you know what the amazing thing about artists is? We have so much freedom. We get to choose what we want to do! That freedom was lost way back when humans created society. Yeah, sure, money and social norms interfere with freedom, but in the end, does that really matter? Don't you want to die happy?

I want to die after making something like this.