COCO GUITAR ART REFERENCE MASTERPOST:
Coco fandom! I have seen so, so many different creative interpretations of the guitar from the film. And every single one of them is lovely! But guitars are new to a lot of us artists and it’s so easy to tell which pictures have been referenced and which haven’t. So let’s make this easy! (And these are just tools you can use or disregard, it’s up to you!)
First of all, here’s an invaluable guide by @im-fairly-whitty on basic proportions of a guitar, based on the Cordoba version of the guitar from Coco. (I have this same guitar on my wall right now! A word of caution though: it’s a 7/8 size guitar so it’s smaller than a standard guitar and proportions might be slightly nonstandard.)
The size of the guitar is also notable because, for the most part, it’s Miguel drawn with it and Miguel is TINY. The animators of the film built a real-life guitar prop to help them pose with a full-grown adult, and, well, just look:
Miguel is a cartoon and a child, so his head and hands are bigger than an adult’s would be–but this fake guitar model is pretty similar to how the guitar’s size compares to Miguel’s body.
This only applies to Miguel and other kids–the guitar is a standard size compared to the adults in the film.
If you’re drawing Miguel’s homemade guitar, remember that Miguel seems to have built it from memory, and got some of these details wrong. Example–his homemade guitar had 10 teeth, not 12.
The sides of the guitar are made up of alternating dark and light stripes in columns of 7 polished rectangles that are pearlescent in the light. The neck is white.
The front and back sides of the guitar both have a rim of those same decorative rectangles (thinner and in a parallelogram sort of shape, as seen in the pictures below) outlined by a thin gold border. Otherwise, the back of the guitar is plain white and lacking in detail.
The sound hole on the guitar is bordered by 12 gold triangles with an outer dark border around the whole thing. The neck covers some of them. Think of the sound hole like a clock, and the tip of each triangle is where the hourmark would be. Unlike most guitars you’ll see, there’s no sticker on the inside of the sound hole (which would usually have the brand and model of guitar written on it).
The E, A, and D strings (the thick ones on the top of the guitar) are wound silver strings, while the G, B, and high E strings (the thin ones on the bottom) are wound nylon–not a very common type from what I can tell.
(Here’s a zoom on those nylons:)
One of my fav and MOST-missed decorative details, btw: the tuning keys (aka pegheads, tuning machines, or machine heads) are adorable metals skulls!
The headstock (where the tuning keys are, the part shaped like a skull with a gold tooth) is slightly angled or “tilted back” when seen from the side. It’s a “slotted” headstock, meaning that you can see the tuners through the slots that are decorated to look like skull’s eyes. The headstock on the Coco guitar is larger than most guitars’ so keep that in mind if using a standard guitar as a reference image!
Here’s some zooms on that headstock. Note the teeth–there are 12 of them, and the gold tooth is the second from the right on the top row:
The black designs aren’t solid black; they also appear to be a stone inlay with dark swirls in the stone:
The frets (the horizontal lines along the guitar neck) are gold-coloured, along with the fretboard markers, which follow this pattern:
3rd fret has a little skull
The guitar has 19 frets (standard for a classical guitar).
And here are some full-body views of the guitar for good measure:
If you can, try to use reference images directly from the film. Recreations like the Cordoba guitars often get details wrong, intentionally or not. Take this Cordoba collection for example, which is possibly the closest real-life recreation of the guitar that’s out there. It still is lacking the diamonds on the fretboards, and the border on the outer edge is thin without any of the gold detailing. The bridge (the white bar at the bottom which the strings connect to) is too long, and the colours aren’t quite accurate. (Which is fine! But don’t use it as a reference image if you’re trying to draw the canon guitar.)
With those details out of the way, I wanna touch on one more thing: drawing the guitar from various angles. This is SUPER HARD, especially if you don’t have a reference image that’s exactly the angle you want. HAVE I GOT SOME LINKS FOR YOU. Sketchfab has all kinds of in-browser 3d models, made by users, that are free to play around with. Here’s a basic acoustic guitar model. Here’s another. Here’s a very basic model with no details on it.
Here’s a 3d model of the actual guitar from Coco, made by user oday on Sketchfab! Again, the details/colors may differ from the source material so make sure to line up your references, but in my opinion this is FANTASTIC.
Now go! Go draw some guitars!
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