Life Drawing Week 10 (Character Design)

Life Drawing Week 10

This week's Life Drawing class and Life Drawing homework both had a fair amount of struggles this week. While I think my understanding of form and shape have improved since the first class with Mike, my overall results this week weren't great. Below is my best one for the class.

I still struggle to place characters in chairs. In the Image below, It's visible that I'm not sure exactly where I'm placing him, so the drawing looks morphed and wrong. The problem is that I don't know where to place the rear end of the person because I don't know the shape of my chair. This is something I need to focus on for next week's class.

When it came to my homework, I had more problems. I think that I didn't grasp the task (to design a Character) completely. I think that the result was a stiff, weak character that doesn't adapt well when it's put into strange positions, positions like the ones I had to draw him as in class. 

For example, the legs and feet of my character don't move easily, and it doesn't really work when I put him in an uncomfortable spot, as seen below:

 Character Design is definitely not a strong point of mine, and I clearly have a lot to learn. I think that while the general shapes I was using were functional, the way they move when sitting or doing other strange positions doesn't really work. For example, the way his back looks in the above image doesn't seem quite right compared to my character rota.

I think I need to think about action and forces again, as per usual. I need to think about what on my character to emphasize and what to omit, so my character can work and be understood by my colleagues. I think that I was afraid to make my character too wild for fear of not being able to draw it consistently, so I went the other way too far, and made him too stiff.