- Lesson Details
- Transcript
- References
- Instructor
- Mark Westermoe
- Subjects
- Entertainment Arts
- Topics
- Anatomy, Composition, Design, Drawing Exercises, Head & Portrait, Human Figure
- Mediums
- Colored Pencil, Paper
- Duration
- 1h 59m 8s
- Series
- How to Design Movie Posters
In this unique course, Mark Westermoe, the creator of feature film posters for blockbusters like Braveheart, Total Recall, and Home Alone, teaches you how to design a movie poster. This course will teach you how to go from developing ideas for your poster with thumbnail sketches, through preliminary drawings, all the way through to a finished poster. Mark will cover the business side of designing movie posters, including how to get into this rewarding field of work. You will also learn the history of advertising illustration, and learn many insider tricks and finishing techniques.
In this lesson, Mark demonstrates how to attach designed heads to figures, using a photocopier, scissors, and tape. Then he puts heads and figures under tracing paper and draws the composition. You will learn how to make characters look natural.
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DiscussAnd in this lesson we're going to
demonstrate how to put heads on figures,
appropriately sized. So I used my photocopier
and applied percentages up or
down using the
finished head designs. Those will be fitted to six by nine format
and we can apply the tones
later but I wanna get those figures laid in
and that will give us two or three that are ready
to fill in later but I plan to do the photoshoot
with the male body double because we've done the Emily's body
double and once I've done that
then I will go ahead and size those and then the appropriate
heads for Robert Downey. There are other small factors
that are important such as
accessories or scenes, city streets,
etc. And you can expect that
to come in the next lesson too. So for tonight
pay careful attention. It's not that easy to size
heads to figures and even less easy to attach them
and make them look natural. So that's one of the lessons I really
want you to take away from tonight. Okay. Thanks for
watching and we'll start now.
design of our main characters
and that's Robert Downey Jr., John Malkovich, and Emily
Blunt. And our goal is to do
a front view, a three quarter, and a profile of each character.
as well as an occasional expression or
upshot or downshot. So let's just
review what we've gotten to. Before I do it
I wanna try to show you the seamless quality
between this and what I do from life drawing.
Not always the same but
so here a character modeled for us
last Monday on Halloween and
you see I try to rhythmically create
the forms of the head, the light and dark pattern
and everything is simplified. This one
also done on Halloween and here
I see a line version for the clothing which will be developed
and then just a combination of line, tone,
and edges for the head.
And so if you take that and then you look at some of the work
we've done here to design heads for our characters
I think you'll see what I'm talking about. Here's
Emily in a three quarter shot.
(organizing)
You can see both.
This was done freehand. Both done quickly, this was
done even faster because I just used the light
table as I have been demonstrating.
I will try to find the actually photo I did that from.
Ah, here we are. And this was
just pulled off the internet.
Okay. Tonight we're gonna be taking these
master heads, three quarter, front view, profile
and we're gonna be sizing the heads to the
bodies that we're gonna use in our comprehensive sketches.
We did a photo
shoot of just another student
and so she becomes the body
in all of the comps for Emily Blunt.
Remember when you do that, you're just shooting for the body
and the lighting may or may not be important on that pose
too. In our case, most of the stuff didn't
require a form light, but you may need a light stand or somebody
who's holding a single source of light in some cases.
So there's one finished head drawing.
Let's look at some of the others. We already did
this one,
If you can see that.
And we used it in our first comprehensive
sketch, which we didn't fill in with all this
dark values yet but that's not what we planned
to do. Here
this is another head of Emily
and she looks like she's got a bit of anxiety
going on, which is appropriate to some of the concepts.
This head,
heavily stylized,
and it's a front view angle. So now we've
quite a few heads now already. We may have another or two let's see.
Before I go there, let's take a look at
what was done here. Here's the head
reference on a three quarter view of John Malkovich.
Can see that.
And then it needed to be interpreted
into a drawing. If you tried sizing these
heads and you had to go real small
with it, then when you drew on top of it, you'd have a lot of work
to do. But if you took this, mind you I haven't
filled in the values yet, and this will reproduce
very easily on any copier and it can be sized
to any size, I will fill in the tones
but I didn't even bother, I just wanted to show you how we start.
(organizing)
What else have we got?
Here,
this one has been hyper
simplified of John. And really
it needed to be redesigned and improved.
Let me find the photo from which we took it.
And that's here.
So now we have all - just about a
profile of Malkovich. And that
will reproduce very well.
Here, we've already seen this, this is a front view of
Malkovich.
(organizing)
Here
is the three quarter shot. If we zoom in on
this one probably.
This is a Robert Downey Jr.
So again, in most cases
it's not what's happening in the light or
what's happening in the shadow but what's happening where the two
come together. That's where the story
of the form of his head is told.
Good. So now we have a
three quarter view, we also have another
three quarter view, a simpler
rendition of the head.
Good. Then we have a front view.
Here.
And that was based on this photograph.
I light it because it's got light and dark pattern
that splits the head 50/50 and that can be used for a lot of things.
We could have a concept for instance where we had a large head
and overlapping the shadow, you could have some of your title,
tagline, or what have you. There are a lot of uses for this.
So now we have several views of Robert Downey
Jr.'s head.
And this was the photograph
that we used to do that design.
And we looked earlier at Malkovich, the
front view and there we are on that. I hope it doesn't come out
too dark but we have a dark and a light print of it so it was
easy to do the drawing. Here
we have a very small reproduction
of a head of Robert Downey Jr.
but we also have a large one.
Only problem is, the large one is too large
just as the small one is too small. And we'll go ahead and
do it but it's a lot more time consuming to go over a head
this size than some of the smaller ones I just showed you.
So I'll set that one aside. It's mostly done anyway.
It's really a matter of doing the ear, the beard, and the hair.
And it can be reduced also, which
is gonna be necessary to the comps.
Here's a better size, it should have been started on this size.
(organizing)
Here is another Emily
but it's printed out so very, very small.
Now you could do this using a fine pencil like a verithin
pencil or better yet it
should be photocopied up in size before you even start.
You see the difficulty the student had in trying
to draw that because of its small scale. So this
is to be avoided. Okay. I mean look at my thumbnail.
Or my fingernail. You see how small this image is.
(organizing)
During the course of this project you will be learning from your
mistakes, I guarantee you. And that's why it's good
that we do this, it's safe to make mistakes in class.
It's not so safe to do it
on the job. There was
some other research done on heads.
This is a nice three quarter back view.
This is another one that should have been printed out larger because
we're looking at the head not really the whole figure.
So I would blow that up again before
I attempted to do the design.
Here is another front view of Robert Downey Jr. In this
case though, it's not quite so interesting.
It's just a front lighting, there's none of this form lighting
with the shadow and the light dividing it.
And, you know, that's probably gonna be useful to us.
One thing to remember, once you
have the designs, they're on tracing
paper. So if your comp calls for her
to be facing this way, that's easy enough.
Just turn it upside down and probably set the
value control on your copier a step darker.
So here, facing one direction.
Here facing the opposite.
That makes that quite easy.
Again,
we have this, which gives us examples
of other heads that have been used for this purpose.
So
you can see how we wanna design our heads. And what we've been doing is
consistent with this.
So then I'll leave that out.
(organizing)
Yeah. I think that's just about the extent of it.
So when we finish these up, there might be one or two other
angles that you wanna cover
for very specific ideas. but
that's easy enough. Okay.
Notice I try to be very careful in the way
I arrange these drawings.
Because in the heat of battle, you're
trying to find one and if you haven't put it in
a folder that you recognize and that you know where you've placed
then you're gonna have a hard time. It's gonna be
slowed down considerably by looking around for stuff that you really could
keep organized. So he has
this accordion binder and
he's got 12
slots and he just puts his concepts in
numerical order within those.
So you'll have a blown up thumbnail sketch.
Here. And next
to it, you'll have his template.
This is the original thumbnail, this is the size
that it's going to be for the template. If he's
already sized heads, hands, or figures for it
then he'll put them in the same binder. In this case
this is the rearview mirror concept so Malkovich
would be here and we'd be seeing the side
angle on the head of
let's see if this works - Emily.
That's a bit of stretch but
this is how we think a little bit. Okay.
Now let's look at a couple folders that do contain all
or most of the elements that are gonna be used.
(organizing)
Sometimes you'll find a model,
just a magazine or a newspaper, and she may bear
something of a resemblance to your actress.
With a little bit of adjusting you can do that, you can use it.
So I may set these aside, just as
possible, you know, research.
Alright.
Here's what this one looks like.
Here's
the therapist, that's Downey. Here's Emily
and in the window we see
John Malkovich. So we want to
shoot a body for Emily. We also
want to have her head. Malkovich
is just a matter of sizing him, we haven't done that.
But let's take a look. Okay. If we're
gonna do the shot of Emily, we could either use
this, which we've sized
appropriately. Or
maybe we feel that's a little small. So in that
case we'll do a step up.
I don't think that's too good. Let's see what this one is.
That might be just about right.
So there's the head.
These two
just throw them away. Can I just get a waste basket.
But there's another
option. I kinda like this head for the pose
and what you do
is you just fold it like this
and see for yourself what you think.
It might be a little more
interesting. So I'm leaning toward that.
We did another version of that head, just take a
tap on the keyboard of your printer and we went down another couple
percentage points
and we may wanna use that
size. Then what we did
is we took a model
(organizing)
and
and posed her for it.
See now that I look at that, yeah.
That'll work. Okay so you see what we've done here.
We have this model and we have the head.
Sometimes when you have a dark photograph like this
you can do something along these lines.
(drawing)
Can bring the shoulder out a little bit
and can use the black Prisma for this
or white Prisma.
The hands we're gonna make
them look younger. Emily is about 31 years old
so that's not a big deal.
Remember, it's expected that you can
draw. It's expected that you've had
life drawing, the more the better.
(drawing)
So we'll do this one tonight.
The only thing we haven't
got for this folder
(drawing)
is a good sizing
of Robert Downey.
And we might not have that so we
might have to use some figure invention skills.
(drawing)
Those are very useful
and necessary over the course
of a series of drawings.
(organizing)
Okay. So that means that concept number
two here is
all set except sizing of Malkovich
and Robert Downey. So what we'll
do is at least get the main character, Emily, and then
size those others. You can use your computer
to size these things too. It's just that it sometimes
takes longer than if you use a photocopier.
(organizing)
So that's concept number two.
Here we drew this one up.
It's just your basic
montage and as
so many concepts are, it draws
inspiration from others that have been done before it. In this case
we have David Grove's
famous poster for The Outsiders. And so
it's a nice arrangement of heads, this montage. It has
a strip landscape here, we haven't really
even placed the location for these
ideas so but that's something that can come a little later.
And so here we could put a sunset here
what have you. And we've got a similar
concept.
(organizing)
So
that's now a concept.
What else do we have here?
Ah yeah. This concept I think is a
very good and interesting one.
We have Emily and we have Robert
and between them is the silhouette of the clown,
dark. We're gonna spread them out a little bit to fill out the
(organizing)
template. Let's find the template first.
Here we go.
So it's all gonna fit in like so
and we found a head of Emily
that looks to be pretty good for this idea.
But again, we test it literally
as low tech as this.
This'll be interesting because
you'll now start learning how to actually attach heads
to figures. It's not as
easy as you might think. In fact you probably don't think it's easy
and you're right. But I'll show you how
to do it. We've got a head of Robert also that will fill in
this figure here. Okay.
So the concept is not precisely what this
inspiration was but that's only what it is,
it's an inspiration, it's not a straightjacket for you.
Okay so that's one we'll do tonight.
This one is quite simple but I think quite nice.
So we have
the analyst or therapist in the corner and we have Emily
here. And what have we sized for this?
Perfect. We have a perfect
fit for Robert Downey Jr., larger
or smaller but light and shadow.
We have been using this a little bit
but that's alright.
We have Emily whose head would go on our main
character. We don't even need a photoshoot. We can just take this the way
it is.
Like that.
If you can all see.
(organizing)
Good. And we wanna have some sophistication to these.
As some of this stuff is more
romantic, some of it is more film noir but
it should all have a sophisticated look to it.
It's a
suspense film, it's not really a high action film,
it certainly isn't a horror film. The concepts have all been numbered.
He has nine that he knows he's gonna use.
And three or four others that he may or may not use.
This one
should probably
not do this one but this is just family pictures arranged
on a nice table. Somebody's apartment or
home. And Malkovich is one of them
and the others are
Emily, with her arm around a niece,
and then a grandparent, and then
perhaps a son, teenage son.
She's too young for that. Have to be a niece. So this could
maybe be an uncle, whatever. And you can find these figures
just as generics just by flipping through magazines.
There is no copyright issue, it's all consultation work.
So if you find someone who suits like a Norman Rockwell grandmother
and it's in a Good Housekeeping book or whatever,
then take it and size it and use it. if you wanted to have
the same treatment as the one that Emily is in
or the one that John Malkovich is in.
Let's look at some of the others.
Show you the photography we did.
(organizing)
Concept number four.
I'm not crazy about this concept but
it should be turned right side up.
And here we have a driver
and Emily behind the wheel and we just have Malkovich
in the rearview mirror. So all we did was this.
These should have been printed up lighter and darker, it's good
to have a light and a dark one. Anyway
you can see here the light and dark pattern, all this little bit of detail
helps a lot. You can make the mirror
somewhat bigger, you can slide her over a little bit. There's a
lot that we can do. And we can even put a street, you know, in front of her.
The thing about the camera is,
I just use my ipad camera and what happens is
it's a short lens. So in the foreground
larger than they would otherwise appear.
And in the second plane behind it
items become smaller than they would normally be.
Look how tiny that hand is compared to her neck.
So we have to make adjustments as we do this.
One way of doing it is
to size this separately from the
shoulders. But this is an
issue that you have to resolve. So I'll put the photograph
in with the folder like that.
(organizing)
I believe we have another.
We have several others. Concept number seven.
What do we have here.
Okay here
Emily is walking on a city street
with her handbag, a dress,
we don't know if she's shopping or going to an
appointment or anything but in perspective
like this, we get
Malkovich's head. It should not be
divided her by these frames and so but we fix that.
(organizing)
Here's the original thumbnail.
Here the thumbnail has been sized.
Like this.
And now let's find the photography that was done
to fit the idea. The photography
for all these concepts, on all of Emily, took about
45 minutes. Of course we didn't have to
worry about form lighting particularly.
(organizing)
Well
in the one case, here,
the images just shot in a backyard.
The sun itself is a form light, it's a single source of light,
but these images are way too small in the printing.
So that'll have to be corrected. But we see a woman's figure
stepping toward us, simple as that.
Here, same thing.
The only problem is the comp calls for her to be stepping
this way.
(organizing)
And yet the photos don't do that.
See?
This one has to be reshot.
I'll still put it inside the folder.
The more practice you have at this, the less likely you'll
have to reshoot anything. I very rarely
had to reshoot anything at all. That just
comes with experience of course.
The next
concept, I did go over these concepts with you
all last week but not like this. Concept
number eight. What have we got.
Now this is a very simple
concept and not one I'm sure that I care for. But I switched it
around, came up with a version that's better.
The notion here is that the cards
are laid out or in her hand and one of them
is besides an Ace
and a Jack and a seven and three. Once of them
is the King of Hearts. I think it is.
But that becomes Malkovich's head. Yeah.
So again, we'll make
these, the hands, of a 30 year old woman
and we'll probably make the cards
a little bit larger, relative to her hands, that's called cheating.
But it works. And so we'll see that
and then Malkovich is here. The head will
dominate instead of the full figure and so we'll see his head.
Very simple, very
limited concept so I'm not keen on it.
We have it just in case.
(organizing)
If we did decide to go with it, we're good to go right now. No
need any heads except Malkovich, which is simple to size.
Okay.
Here's a concept.
Now this one is we see our two main
characters probably here and here. That's Robert and
Emily and then we see a darker version here
of Malkovich. So we just need a front view head of Malkovich,
a three quarter of one of them, and a front view of the other.
And we just need to see the shoulders, that's all.
(organizing)
I thought we had shot that one but
that's easy enough to do.
Here's another concept.
And this one, not sure
we'll do it at all but we just see an angle on Emily
and she's holding a letter with a postage stamp that has the clown on it.
I think it's kinda corny and probably not likely to be done.
But
like Tony pointed out in his homework, if you do some of these
it always leads to the thought about others.
And you get new concepts. Here she's in
the confessional. Dressed well.
The priest is not a priest, it's our clown Malkovich.
So we now have the body for Emily.
All we have to do is size it and size her head.
So keep your
folders organized.
Here.
we have an idea that I think is really good.
It involves all three actors
either physically or conceptually.
Here's your idea.
So here's Emily lounging, knee up, hands on her
knee. Here's Robert in the foreground with his leg
extended and Malkovich or some artificial image
of that clown will be here. So far
all we've done is photographed Emily.
Let's have a look.
This one
should have been a lighter version printed also. So that's
gonna need to happen. Okay so we have one of the
figures. So let's just put it in here and we'll get the remaining elements
as we go. So for the family pictures
we have our model sit and have her arm
as though it were around her little niece's or granddaughter's - no it won't be a granddaughter
because it's Emily. Her little niece's head and shoulders.
So we'll have to pick up a generic little girl and that'll be fine.
And that will be the image contained in one of
these picture frames.
So so far that's the only research we have and I mentioned
the other characters can be found in just generic magazines. So
we'll need to size Emily and that and
we'll need to size Malkovich. Let's do one more design of the
head and then I'll switch over now to
actually building these comps.
(organizing)
So I have to register -
which means line up - what I designed
with the photograph and
we're having to do this twice which is always tricky because you might slip
a little bit. Alright. It's nice here because
we have a second head of Robert Downey
and so we can easily refer to it as we go. Since I'm
actually trying to make improvements over a
student design, I'll lightly
erase what was lightly drawn.
(drawing)
Okay.
(drawing)
Soften the ear lobe a little bit.
(drawing)
These movie poster
ideas are driven by the star, by the actors.
And so they're very closely aligned
to the subject of head drawing of course.
And you need to
really hone your head drawing skills and particularly
your ability to idealize.
(drawing)
It's not enough to have a likeness of Emily Blunt,
she's gotta look really glamorous.
Even though this is not a glamor role.
Doesn't matter. It's gotta have what they have the look.
(drawing)
So made short work of that ear.
(drawing)
His hair is gonna be simple and basically
black but it does matter a lot where the hair
overlaps, or grows, from the head.
So that's where I'm putting my attention and focus right now.
(drawing)
We have to make up the back of the head.
(drawing)
I can't just outline the hair.
You have to show its edges, whether it's
an overlap or whether it's being overlapped
or whether it's growing from the scalp and so on.
(drawing)
It's got a bit of a rim light here
or hair light they sometimes call it
in Hollywood.
(drawing)
Occasionally lift up the paper so you can see what you're doing.
(drawing)
Just remember, facial
hair has direction, it's not just
lumped on there.
(drawing)
I'm drawing the jaw
by drawing the hair.
(drawing)
Now if this head
had been sized to about half of this,
the time wouldn't taken about half of it. So
another lesson to be learned and that's why it's very
I think constructive to go through a whole set
of 8-12 concepts
and learn from each others mistakes.
Alright that's just
about done, let's see what it looks like.
(drawing)
I'll strip that.
(drawing)
As I showed in a couple other instances
it's not necessary
to fill in all your darks like the hair for instance.
It's probably gonna be a much smaller head anyway if you
find it very good to draw on
top of a padding of paper.
Much more
sympathetic surface than almost any other.
(drawing)
You can hone your edges
much much better.
(drawing)
One
of the things that happens routinely
is the client,
once you've given them the artwork,
if there is any exchange of original drawings
you can go and pick them up later
if you want, they're not gonna have much use for them. They're not buying the originals
so but
they're gonna be strewn miscellaneous around the
design studio. They're very busy and they're a little bit careless when it comes
to treating artist's work. So
if you want it back for yourself, you better
go get it in a week or so or ask them
to store it for you at least. They won't do it very long.
No matter how nice the work is.
(drawing)
So
again if you want your drawings back you've gotta do that.
(drawing)
You know,
outlines don't exist in nature but
we want this drawing to print as nicely
as possible on our photocopier so we can size
it and use it. Therefore have
no qualms about putting down an outline
around his head.
(drawing)
After a while you get a sense about
where you want to
lead the eye and that's what I'm
drawing on here when I pick the areas I want to
darken.
(drawing)
Okay so now this is
a finished head of Robert Downey Jr. in profile
that may be useful to us in one or more
more of the concept drawings.
(drawing)
So you
create a folder generally as a rule
and you call it finished drawings.
And that's where these go.
It's very good to save
the photographs from which you drew these
(drawing)
because then you can refer to them
when you do the finished drawing comps.
Now we have foreheads of Robert, probably
just as many as we're gonna need for 8-12 concepts.
I have two heads of
Malkovich.
I think I did a third too.
I know I did. So I have to find that one.
(drawing)
Here it is.
Let's just for clarity's sake.
I got more of Emily too.
Let's get one of
Emily right there.
And
I have a standard front view
and a one of a kind view.
(drawing)
Okay. So let's put these in our
folder called finished head designs.
My student who's working on this project needs to improve
his handwriting.
You know once you get into this you understand that everything
you do has to have an aesthetic and
so this is kinda not very good.
How about this, just as simple as this.
Doesn't have to be anything
smart.
(drawing)
Okay.
So you have to have some standards. Now
let's go ahead and finish up this head of John Malkovich
which will be our last of his. And then we're gonna
start sizing figures and heads and detaching
one to the other.
That's the big challenge for tonight.
(drawing)
You can put these at the back of that folder.
(drawing)
Keep your pencil very sharp.
Look at your reference
do we have both of those in place? Good.
Let's finish off this head of John Malkovich.
(drawing)
Crisp,
little designed shapes.
Nothing murky, nice and
clear.
(drawing)
Now remember I'm not just drawing on a sheet of Masonite
or an old wooden table.
Gotta be serious.
There are a number of sympathetic surfaces
but my favorite as I said is just to draw
on top of other paper. That means that there's a little
give see to the surface
you're drawing on. That allows you to really manipulate
your edges.
(drawing)
Being very careful not in any way
to disrupt the edges of this light and dark pattern that
I've carefully designed.
(drawing)
Just a simple, flat
tone. That makes everything else read
very, very clearly.
(drawing)
In pulling back
on the pencil to create a very light
and important half tone.
The side of his head that's
facing away from the light is always gonna be
even in the light pattern
and darker than the rest of your lights.
Probably not a big deal for this kind of a project
but
I'm gonna show you as much of what I know as I can.
(drawing)
And I like this little rim light
at the top of his head.
I think it adds a little bit of interest to the whole thing.
(drawing)
Now there will many times when you don't have time
to take your heads this far
but
I'll show you some hurry up heads and I'll show you some that are
intermediate and then in a couple weeks
some that are very, very tight.
As much as I can to give you the full
gamut of what you may be called upon
to use.
(drawing)
Another example of how form lighting
a single source of light, perhaps a rim light
at the back, how dramatic it can be.
Much more than simple ambient light like
outside on a foggy day or inside a room
with the fluorescents all turned on.
So it's perfect
lighting for a suspense or a mystery.
Okay, that's all we need from Malkovich.
Okay let's take a five minute break and then I'm gonna
show you guys how you can construct the actual
comps using the research that we've done, the heads
that we've designed, and the sizing
in order to stage the compositions.
all the elements in place
and see what we can manage.
(drawing)
Okay we know that this
concept
will fit nicely in our format.
In fact, that's why
it was sized to do so. Now the
question is, do we want to lower her?
And then just
go to white, that might work really well. Or do we wanna
keep her high and just go down
black all the way.
I think I'll keep her high.
So all I have to do
(drawing)
is fold this
and place this head.
(drawing)
That's pretty good.
(drawing)
I need one sheet of tracing paper, one
clean sheet of tracing paper.
(drawing)
Next I'm gonna need a
(drawing)
the head shot for this. Well this is of marginal use,
it's not angled the same way
but it might come in handle in some manner.
Now one thing about this comp.
You'll notice in the original concept
the model is looking back over the shoulder
so we could do that, all we have to do is change the gaze
in her eye. Let's
start by doing that.
(drawing)
I'm using
the verithin just for this
operation on here eyes.
Then I'll probably switch back to a prismacolor
because the verithin is so fine
it's a little bit light
and doesn't make a strong as statement
as the
prismacolor would.
(drawing)
You want
to maintain
the quality of the drawing
even though now we've photocopied it and flopped it.
(drawing)
Keep the pencil
very, very sharp.
(drawing)
Sometimes doing this
is just as well to turn off your light
box. And remember also
often times you'll just be using tracing with no light
box.
(drawing)
Alright, it's a very romantic
treatment.
And I mean that in the larger sense of the term, not just
amorous
romance. It's
gotta have that romantic quality about it.
Her expression, everything that comes across.
(drawing)
I'm gonna switch over to Prismacolor,
it'll go a little faster.
(drawing)
Try to keep the hair as rhythmical as you possibly can.
(drawing)
Notice the back of her hand.
(drawing)
Shadow
over the thumb.
(drawing)
I can see a little bit better what's happening with her chin.
(drawing)
By doing that.
So she's wearing a fuzzy sweater.
No need for any detail, we're not gonna
put any drapery or any folds or creases in there.
(drawing)
Okay.
So now we have
Emily nailed down
it's just a matter of doing Robert.
(drawing)
So where is Robert? Let's see.
Here we are.
(drawing)
You don't have scissors do you?
Alright. Be nice to
keep the scissors on hand.
(drawing)
Just cutting around this head that's been
reduced from one of our finished head designs.
(drawing)
You definitely want to use a
finer pencil for this small head.
(drawing)
Have you got this original
tissue for this from your completed heads folder?
Not the photograph
but the actual tissue drawing?
(drawing)
Just keep the
shapes nice and graphic, don't depend on any soft
detail. If you got this
it could help you on executing the smaller version.
So it's good to keep it on hand.
(drawing)
What's the point of doing these nice head
designs if you screw them up
when you apply them?
(drawing)
Hyper sharp, keep
everything really sharp.
(drawing)
There are
times when you'll be working on an advertising campaign
before they've even finished the script.
And so
you can't even really be sure
in every case, whether Robert will have a beard
such as some of the ideas or the finished heads
we've designed.
(drawing)
So very careful with the graphic design
of this head. It's really gonna depend just pretty much on black and white
or maybe dark gray and white and
we don't really know necessarily whether he
has facial hair or not in this film.
These are early stage drawings
so especially then you might now know.
(drawing)
Just for this little head I probably
sharpen my pencil twelve times.
In fact
I really have to because it's so small.
(drawing)
And for a little incidental head like this
it's not even absolutely critical that
you have a spot on likeness,
everybody knows who's cast in the movies so when they're
reviewing the work, if it could be his cousin
or his brother that would usually be fine too, however
it doesn't take
any longer to do it like this and get a likeness so
I take that trouble to do it.
(drawing)
Let's save this and keep it in the file.
(drawing)
Let's bring his hand
up right under his chin.
Like here.
(drawing)
Well from the very heel of he
hand to the tip of the middle finger.
Hand should be
the same distance as the chin to the
hairline.
(drawing)
And so
that should help you when you have to introduce
hands for which you don't have proper reference
and so on.
(drawing)
Okay, now we'll pull it apart. Let's see
how it looks.
(organizing)
Okay.
(organizing)
And let's have a look at how it lays out.
(organizing)
I can even crop her head it might make it more interesting
so let's do that.
(organizing)
This template's a little skewed so
I'll adjust it and then I'll give it a label.
This is number,
it's gotta correspond to what we have here.
This is number three.
(organizing)
That's most important.
(organizing)
Alright there's
the template.
I think it's gonna work out real well. Alright so
we're gonna put this away now.
(organizing)
Got all this miscellenous reference here see.
So tape it onto one big sheet so you don't lose
any of it and then file the folder in the accordion
file.
Okay.
Trim this down a little bit in advance, it's way to
big. And you can start cleaning up the rest of the stuff
because there's a lot of organizing to do in all of this
process and you don't wanna rush
and in the process get something out of place.
One head out of place and looking for it
can cost you 20 minutes.
And although
I'm doing this on a generous pace
you should practice for reality
because you just don't have that much time to lose.
(organizing)
And you know, if you're doing these in house
while you're doing them, right about now
one of the art directors is gonna drop by your desk.
You'll expect them to look at the drawings and maybe comment.
They won't say anything, they'll just drop off three more folders for you.
More concepts. So, you know, you really have to think
about your time frame.
Okay we have the head of Emily
and we have a body which
is pretty nice the way it is. I'm just gonna
swipe it.
(organizing)
I'll just
do one more and this one I'll just confine to the figure.
Again this should look stylish. Not really fashiony but
almost and
we'll just do the figure.
That's about enough time for tonight.
Next time I will go ahead and do the photography
for the Robert Downey figure
and size figures and heads
to fill out the entire collection of these comps.
And
I want to do two of them out
of the total number.
I want to do two of them that are
done in a different medium. Monochrome but
a different medium so that you can learn how to do that and you can learn
how to do the comps very, very tight. I thought I might
get a chance to put in the tonalities on the
three shot we designed, the one
that was inspired by David's work but
we'll do that next week.
Keep this nice and simple.
The simpler the better.
Now once we put
her head in place, we may have to adjust the size of
the hands slightly or the width of the shoulders.
So what? There are harder things in art to do
than that.
Notice I break up the line here.
It's not one even line, that's deadly.
So it even gets kind of
sketchy in places.
(drawing)
Very lightly sketch the neck in.
That may change considerably.
(drawing)
I'll show you a
couple drawings that are instructive here.
I think these are great drawings.
Can see how he relies on the light and dark pattern, he does not
use one single weight of line, he varies it.
He even -
let's see here.
(turning pages)
There are lots of ways of doing these
projects. I'm only showing one.
Here's a very effective treatment, yeah.
Much looser.
This one's
a little bit tighter here on the lower right.
(turning pages)
I
think doing some drawing from life in a continuous line
form can be helpful.
Can be really good for any illustration projects
you run across. Here's a
kinda scribbly one
here. This is a nice scene.
of a group of people. And we're gonna be doing at least
one like this among the series.
(turning pages)
Here we are.
(turning pages)
It's a simple sketch.
And here's the art director's comment. This one
exclamation point with no underlined
people. White background okay
and then signed.
Typical.
(drawing)
It's almost like the sketchier the better in this case.
(drawing)
I wanna skip the print
pattern on her dress for the time being.
I may put that in at
some point, probably will, or a different one. Just
make it up.
(drawing)
Very lightly
I'm putting in the contours of her head.
Now I'll just slide this over.
(drawing)
I wanted a little more room
(drawing)
for our clown.
(drawing)
The clown is not really a clown anyway.
He kinda -
what's the word for it. It kinda channels
a clown but
not that he really does anything himself because he's kind of a phantom
so what we're gonna do
is just put this in so that later we can invent
the back silhouette of our clown.
(drawing)
See how loosely the hand is treated here.
You don't need to prove to the
art director that you can draw hands. Your job is
to get across the idea.
That's your job.
(drawing)
Good. And finally this is the
position we're gonna put Robert Downey Jr. in.
(drawing)
Right in here. So I'll just loosely sketch that
in and this is number one.
So again make sure you label
your creations and then
this goes back in folder number one.
Okay, so on the note
we come to an end for this lesson and we covered now how to
thoroughly design the heads, how to organize them,
how to size them.
In the cases where I
did size the heads for the figures, I often did two,
three, or four percentages and I thought
oh that's 80 percent and then it's a little too big so I'll say 77.
I'll size another one and that's still too big and then I'm down to
75 and this could happen for each of the heads. For
each of the folders. But if you've got a printer,
a photocopier that moves quickly like mine,
it doesn't take any time at all to do. Unfortunately
you can go through a fair amount of paper, that's
the one bad thing about being a visual artist. It's
not necessarily very good for the forests.
But that's what you must do and you must also use up a lot of wood by sharpening your
pencil repeatedly. So in the next lesson I'm
gonna show us how to do a photoshoot
with a model who's gonna be the body double for
one of our two main characters, Robert Downey Jr. We're gonna do
three shots for three of our comps. And then
I'm going to size them so that they
fit into the format of the six
by nine template. Once I've done that,
then in most cases I'll need to
size the actor's head. And by the way I'll be showing you how to do that
on a simple photocopier,
80 dollars. After I've done that I'll take one drawing, one
concept, and go ahead and draw in the figures
with the sized heads according to the concept
and how it fits into the template.
Okay so keep with it.
Some of you have been following along really well. If you haven't
been, then just you can start any time.
Just go back to the earlier lessons and you can
begin the projects at any point. I think it's really gratifying
and you're gonna wind up with some really good samples. Alright.
Thanks for attending tonight's lesson and I'll see you in the next one.
Transcription not available.
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1. Mastery of Natural Attaching Heads to Figures
1m 40sNow playing...
Watch the whole lesson with a subscription
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2. Reviewing Front View, 3/4 View, and Profile Head Designs and Matching them to Figures
36m 23s -
3. Finishing up the Head Designs
30m 49s -
4. Attaching Sized Heads to Figures and Drawing the Composition
35m 42s -
5. Starting the Next Composition
14m 2s -
6. Attaching Sized Heads to Figures Assignment Instructions
32s
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