#stylization

Broken wings and broken hearts.

Aaah thank you, Anon! <333

I do have some tips, in no particular order :>

Gesture drawing and Character design are deeply intertwined disciplines, to me!

I treat studies of characters the same way I treat gesture drawings: I try to find the essence of the pose/face and then I exaggerate key features and shapes. While doing this, I keep concepts like "Simple vs Complex", "Curves vs Straights", "Rhythm" and what types of curves are available to me (S curves, C Curves) in mind :>

A really good resource for all things gesture drawing is the GRIZandNorm tumblr blog https://grizandnorm.tumblr.com/

One very useful exercise, in my opinion, is to look at your reference, be it a face or a pose, analyze it, and to then draw one somewhat realistic version of it in 5 minutes.

Do not pay any attention to stylization here, just try to get a feel for proportions, construction and what makes your character readable or recognizable.

Then, right next to this drawing, you try to push everything you just drew a bit further. The character has a receding chin? Push it! Button nose? push it! Their eyebrows are bushy? Draw them bushier! This can be repeated until you feel like you reached your desired level of stylization and kind of eases you into the process.

Some more notes on this, for Armand :>

Identify your key shapes and push them! In the case of my Armand drawing, the key shapes would be two rounded triangles. One for the hair, one for the face

Identify key features and exaggerate them! If we understand a character's feature and how they relate to each other, we can make them recognizable in any style :> In the case of Armand, these features would be (imo):

chin/jawline/lower lip -> The actor has a slight underbite, causing his lower lip to stick out more and for his lower face to extend down- and forwards slightly.

eyelids: The anatomy of his orbital socket! A lot of the eyelid is visible -> great opportunity to show the roundness of the eyeball underneath and where it sits in the socket

Nose: His nose slopes downwards in a very elegant manner and the tip is also slightly downturned. Note where his brow is in relation to the nose and place the eye at the correct height.

Philtrum/Mouth: The philtrum is long, so make sure to accomodate for it. The upper lip is quite thin, the lower one protrudes slightly and creates a triangular shape

Another thing I like to do is to kind of "sculpt" my drawing once I have a rough base down. This just means I squint at it, see what works and what could be pushed further, and then I just erase parts of the shape or add to it to make it more interesting :> This is what I did here with this Armand study!

The initial sketch is not very stylized or interesting but once I put down some colors and defined my shapes a bit, it became much easier for me to see what could be pushed.

For me, creating interesting shapes is MUCH easier if I have some actual colored shapes to work with rather than just lineart, which is why I do not spend a lot of time on sketches or lineart.

Then, we can look at a very basic design principle that we can apply to this study: "Simple vs Complex" You usually pick one side that is simple and one with more shape variation -> this guides the viewer's eyes to what's important. If you do a study of a profile, this one is usually a no-brainer. Simple side: back of the head, Complex side: face If we keep this in mind, we can exaggerate it and just make sure we do not add any distracting shapes to the back of the head.

I could have kept this even simpler here by getting rid of the individual curls in the back.

Some general tips for construction: Something like the Loomis method is, imo, not very suitable for cartoony styles or for people who do not look like superman. I MUCH prefer something like the Hampton method of construction because it's easier to use it on a variety of faces. If you want something even simpler, I recommend the Prince of Egypt model sheets.

I really like this design of Mickey, very different from what came before and after. It has less round shapes and more sharp shapes and thin lines. Very interesting and fitting for the era it was made in, especially when UPA was all the range back then.

The villainous Captain Pete's in my more shaped style. I went all in my stylization with him and I like how these turned out! If you guys want, I could go over my design choices.