Where's the feeling? Where's the emotion?

Don Bluth's critique this week really hit home with me. There's no feeling or emotion, not in the drawing itself, but behind the drawing. He's been talking about this for a little while now between the man vs art podcast and his last two seminars. He said he's gonna keep shouting it until someone hears. I for one am going to open my ears as wide as they can go to hopefully try and grasp what he wants. A couple of his questions he wants us all to ask ourselves is did you push it till it becomes obvious what you feel? Can you draw a character that represents emotion? Can you animate a character that makes people think it's alive and thinking? And in the words of the illusive Mark Rudolph ... Think about it.

Visualize

Visualize Visualize Visualize!

Last night I finally signed up for Don's Club, the Don Bluth Animation course, now I'm kicking myself that I didn't do it sooner. Tonight was my first class and it was chock full of information. I don't usually take notes, but I ended up with a page full of notes and a page full of drawings.
The main theme he had for us today was Visualize. What makes creative people valuable is that they can never really be replaced. As Rual from ManvsArt says, "be yourself cause no one else can be" or something to that effect. That being said our creativity and our skill come from our visualization, before you do anything visualize what you are going to do and try to get as close to that as you can. Whether it's animating, caricaturing, drawing, story-boarding, illustrating, whatever visualize, visualize, visualize!

Here's a quick glimpse at today's notes. (Note to self: use darker pencils!)


(second page of just notes and like always click to enlarge)


Today's concern week pose is Sorrowful Concern.


Here's a little concept design I'm working on that I might turn into a logo, or menu for the site later on.

(Gilligan, Claude's Turtle, Claude, and the Little Hero)

Simplify and Exaggerate

Finally got around to listening to an episode of the Ghettomation podcast. What a surprise! Not only did it feature the fabulous Kevin Cross of Art and Story and the always entertaining Raul Aguirre Jr of Man vs Art, but they had on the ever inspiring Sherm Cohen of Cartoon Snap. This latest episode is absolutely worth taking the time to listen to. The big take away that I grabbed out of it was something Sherm Cohen said to the effect of, Cartooning: it all comes down to "Simplify and Exaggerate!"

Here's a sneak peak at the theme song for "The Little Hero".
(Oh, and I know I've got to reencode it to have the audio and video perfectly match up, but I thought you might get a kick out of it anyways!)

The strength continues...


A little revision of one of the poses from double devastation week.


This weeks joker themed sketchgroup entry.


(small)

(large)


(wallpaper)