exercise

Some Drawing Class Results

I haven’t posted anything on my drawing classes for a while. That’s because most of the time I’m doing sketches or trying new things out (technique and working material related).

Many of the assignments we get are comic/picture book orientated, since these are the professor’s main preferences (he’s a comic artist). The first two semesters he likes to go on an excursion around the globe with us…Well at least in our sketchbooks 😉

Perhaps you remember my version of Harald, which I tried drawing digitally (by now I learned a lot). He is one of four characters with some given attributes I had to design. The basic plot for the whole semester is that these characters (and some professors/other students) go on a loooong trip. Everyone is heading east by the way. After a long train ride the group arrives in Odessa, a town in Ukraine, where a monumental stairway awaits to be conquered. Poor Harald sits in a wheelchair (given attribute) and accidentally someone lets him fall while going up the stairs! Here is my version of what happens next (format and panel number was given, western reading direction):

theFall

"Hey guys! Who's holding the wheelchair?!" These are Harald's last words before the shocking experience... Oh, and his brakes mysteriously broke 😉

Here's a close-up of the first panel.

This drawing exercise is supposed to make us find the best shots (like in story boards/movies) to depict Harald’s falling down the stairs. The trickiest part was to get by with only four panels! Action scenes in movies require a lot of different shots in order to create a feeling of speed. With only four panels one has to give some sort of an establishing shot, the action and the outcome. These are a lot of aspects to show on only two pages! As you can see I cheated just a little bit in the second panel by adding a tiny extra panel 🙂

in Illustration  by Savina 0 comments

Typography – Back to the Basics

Over the past centuries thousands of new fonts have been designed. Some emerged out of new means of production others had the purpose to please certain aesthetical or cultural needs. All fonts are organized under the DIN standard 16518 although it has to be mentioned that this classification isn’t very accurate (example: Group Nr. 6 refers to the sans serif fonts which form about 80% of all fonts, hence this group is very imprecise and ought to have more subdivisions) . Unfortunately currently there is no official replacement.

Every font has its own distinctive features, sometimes very obvious ones and sometimes on a rather subtle scale. The best way to memorize some of the basic differences is to actually write some of the key-letters down (with a pen, not digitally). In typography class we were given four pages, each with a different font example, which we had to copy. The fonts were:

  • Garamond (key-letters a, P)
  • Times New Roman (key-letters a,b,g,A,G)
  • Bodoni BE (key-letters e,g,o,R,k)
  • Clarendon (key-letters a,g,t,R,G)

Additionally a short historical background was included to every font (which really helps you memorize the features better). If you want to try it out too you can open any program that can process words in different fonts like Word/OpenOffice/InDesign etc. and type the key-letters. Then you just get your pen and a piece of paper and start copying. Nevertheless it’s a good idea to print out the letters really big and organized in line-grids like this:

line-grid

example font Clarendon

in Typograhy  by Savina 0 comments