iSculpt.org

This is a crazy time of year. Yeah, I know that's an excuse, but it's mine, and I'm sticking with it. Actually, it's not that late, I may go down and sculpt a little tonight before I go to sleep, but no progress pictures; my camera battery died and is recharging at the moment.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to draw more. Drawing is convenient - you can do it almost anywhere and it's great cross-training for sculpting. My problem is that my drawings embarrass the hell out of me. I hate open drawing sessions because I hate the fact that anyone can see what I draw, even though I know from first-hand experience, that few things help me get better faster than drawing nekkid people from life.

I don't have the problem with sculpting. I'll gladly work on mediocre sculpts with other people around; I always felt comfortable in open figure sculpting, even when I was first starting and noticeably the worst one in the room. It's a hangup - not rational - but it's hard for me to get past.

On a related note: I have many blogs and forums that I frequent, most of them are sculpting related, but I also follow a couple of animation ones. Which is a little strange, since I'm not much of an animation fan. Oh, I like animation, but I don't have any burning desire to be an animator, and I'm not more than a casual fan of animation in general.

But... the way animators and cartoonists draw is exactly the way sculptors sculpt in terms of what's going on in the right brain. Artists can use one of two broad approaches to drawing, one is to simply recreate what they see, the other—usually called "construction"—focuses on "building" your drawing from component primitive three dimensional shapes, and then refining it. Because of the nature of animation, animators HAVE to use construction to create their drawings and this approach is stunningly similar to sculpting in terms of the way it makes your brain work.

As a result, I've sort of half-ass been doing John Kricfalusi's cartoon course but I think I'm going to get more serious about it. John's the genius behind Ren & Stimpy and he seems to be a nice guy to boot, albeit one with some strongly held opinions about animation and entertainment. His blog is fascinating; the guy knows more about animation than should be humanly possible. Anyway, he periodically posts assignments on his blog for his virtual animation students to do and "hand in" (by posting). That's exactly the type of thing I need to keep me moving forward, especially when life is hectic and I can't find time to sculpt every day. I can manage five or ten minutes to knock out some sketches no matter how busy life is, I just need to keep a pencil nearby.

John's latest assignment was to draw a cartoon toy (yes, a toy), using construction principles, from several angles. I did it:

They suck, and I'm going to do it again, but you can see (from the numbers which specify the order I drew them in) that just in the course of doing these four drawing there were improvements. In fact, I almost kinda like #3, which was, in my opinion, a tough angle.

You can see the original images on this entry on John's blog (scroll down a bit).