Aardman Life Drawing

Some drawings from the Life Drawing sessions we do at Aardman on wednesdays over a period of 9 weeks: The first week's drawings compared to the last week's drawings. All poses are from 10 seconds to around 2 minute ones.

First week:

Last week:

Also check out my talented colleagues! Richard Phelan , Ashley Boddy & Kartika Mediani

Cheers!

Animatic The Twits - The Frog

This is an animatic I created for the homework assignment The Story Book from my Films on Paper class at the Oatley Academy.

Assignment was too choose a dialog scene from an existing novel that has not been made into a movie. I choose a book by Roald Dahl, The Twits and this is from the chapter The Frog. Enjoy!

Visiting Annecy 2014

I'll be visiting the Annecy Animation Film Festival again next week!

You can find more info about the festival at annecy.org

If you're there and like to say hi, drop me a message! 

See you at Annecy!

Film Studies - Jurassic Park

One of the exercises Ian asked me to practice, and continue practicing, is to do film studies.
These are some film studies I've been doing the past week from Jurassic Park. I'm drawing these a little bigger as the thumbnail size drawings I did when I did film studies of 'the Incredibles'. The slightly bigger size makes it a great warm-up exercise in the morning, and it will feed my visual memory stick inside my brain with composition, value and shorthand practice... a lot of fun to do these...

Schets Sessie 2.0 - Sword & Shield

Last weekend I attended the first edition of Schets Sessie 2.0 in Breda. The theme was armour and swords. This together with some very interesting in depth info about the armour and the swords was demonstrated by sword fight instructor Merlyn from De Zwaardkring... here's some sketches I did of him posing and explaining about how a sword weighs about the same as a carton of milk...

 And there was a model present who posed with a sword, here's 2 10 min poses I did...

Next month there will be a 2nd session with a new theme. I'm there! 

Motivarti Spring 2014 has started!

I'm happy to share that the Motivarti Spring 2014 Program has started as of today! and that for the next 10 weeks I will be mentored by the amazingly talented Ian Abando.

I will be posting some of the work I will be producing during this mentorship on my blog. Too warm up, I'm getting my teeth into doing some film studies from... Jurassic Park...

Drawing from Life - February sketchbook

These are some sketches from my Drawing from Life February sketchbooks... trying too stay loose and fluent in my lines inspired by David Pimentel's gesture drawing workshop I witnessed last November when I was at CTNX in Burbank, CA.

Cheese! Dirk. 

Week 3 & 4 assignment - Rad's Figure Invention Class

Here's some of the drawings I did for the class I'm taking; Figure Invention for Animation. Class is great! Drawings in the style of an existing animated film and some invented characters for my assignment about the torso. Cheese! Dirk.

Week 2 assignment Figure Invention Class

For the 2nd week assignment for Radhowtoschool Figure Invention class we had to pick one of your favourite animated characters. Study it via modelsheet and film stills, draw some invented poses with that character and clean up your favourite invented pose trying to stay on model as best as possible. I had only a few hours tonight to work on this assignment. Here's what I produced...

Sketches invented poses

Clean up 

Great exercise, definitely going to try to do this one more often. Very interesting to spend some time looking and studying a character so up close. Cheese! Dirk.

Radford Sechrist Figure Invention Class Week 1

Next week the first class of Radford Sechrist's Figure Invention Class starts, and I'm looking forward to the class! This is a sketch of a female Lepidopterist I posted to be critiqued the first class. I've been practicing drawing female characters lately. Digital cleanup based on a sketch I did in my sketchbook. 

Happy New Year! and DFL January sketchbook

Here are some random pages from my Drawing from Life - January Sketchbook. In order of appearance: some random tough guys and girls, still learning to draw appealing female characters, Happy New Year, went to see Frozen and did this drawing to remember it,  me drawing me, myself and I and I'm going to try and do more short comic strip kinda drawing from life kinda things, here's one... 2014 has begun! Cheese, D.

( ...and I've started drawing with Faber Castell PITT artist pens, had a bunch of them lying around and thought I should finish them before I went out and bought some new pens...)