Design with Lawrence Marvit

 

This week we had a design class with concept artist Lawrence Marvit who has worked for studios such as Pixar, Thrave, Nickelodeon,Universal Studios, and a nomination to an Eisner Award, according to himself because it long.

 

The focus of the workshop is the 7 elements of drawing:

LINE

SHAPE

VALUE

COLOR

FORM

SPACE
TEXTURE

 

which we are going to go through one at a time. This week we have gone through line and shape.

 

 

Our first assignment was to make a dynamic composition with 3 boxes and a line. All the boxes should be at a  90 degree tilt and couldn't touch the edges or each other. The line on the other hand had to touch to sides.

And

Just to make it even trickier no distance from edge to another could be the same. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our second assignment was to describe 70% dark chocolate using only line. We had to taste the chocolate and describe the taste poetically to give us something more focused. Since having no restrictions tends to keep you in the ideation process and it helps to avoid too many clichés.

My line was Autumn Deserted Playground.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we had to listen to Jazz, Miles Davis: kind of blue. Same process as the chocolate assignment, just using shape instead of line. The focal point had to be clear.  Resulting in this amazing jazz-shapes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final assignment was to make a picture on the theme circus of the dead, using what we had learned. I learned a lot doing this assignment. I need to stop trying to draw myself out and think instead. For the next couple of months I'm going to focus on shapes and composition for awhile. Since I had to redo and simplify this picture a few times. I ended up do most of it with the lasso tool, so I couldn't detail the shit out of it.    

 

Franquin style workshop

Here is a little update. This week we are having a style course on the famous French/Belgian comicbook artist Franquin.
We have spend the last two days on our own doing research getting to know his style a little bit.
The assignment for the week is to do 1 or 2 comic pages in the style of Franquin. This all sound pretty straight forward, but to freak things up a bit the story is a scene from Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The scene is where the father and son meets an old man and decide to share some food with him.  
So far I have made a character sheet spicing the characters with some post-apocalyptic gear. In the next couple of days it is all going to be some depressing post-apocalyptic slap-stick making with Mården Smet, know for Stig and Martha.