Life drawing, Arrow-tongue and some spooky stairs

We've started life drawing again this term, so here are the fruits of today's efforts.


Basic stuff, just getting the outlines. For some reason, today I think my work was really sloppy.


Here I tried using a technique that Derek taught us about weighting out the figure with block of shadow before moving in with detail...I just couldn't get it right.


This was a negative space exercise, but it was really interesting. Instead of drawing the figure, basically we draw the space around it. It's a good practice because it helps you see character silhouettes AND it stops you drawing from your memory and drawing what's in front of you.


I also managed to find some old life-drawing studies:

This is a study of a skeleton I did a while back.


Procedural poses.


Woman pose with a stick.


The background project is finally going somewhere decent. I have a plan for the exterior and I've taken some photos for reference of the interior, which is a flight of stairs in a dark room.

Initial thumbs:


I used some game boxes and a mini reading torch (which has an amazing robotic arm... best cracker present EVER ).

I thank videogames for this.

And finally, the arrowtongue. I'm still having some difficulty in painting the deformation weights for the bones. It's the looking forward to getting this finished that keeps me striving on. The tongue now shoots out, and I'm going to try and make a slider (like cubey's antenna controls) to lock it's length and make it easier to control. Also, I need to put some sort of handle on the tail (I think it's a spline IK handle) to get that to waggle and bend nicely.
Again, I'm going to need to get the skin to deform properly first.

Menacing isn't it? Just remember that black thing is 8 meters tall and like all Darwin IV predators, hunts with SONAR.

Making this alien makes me wonder why I haven't yet made any of my own creations. I think it could be because of the Alien Planet documentary, which showed some of the creatures moving around, which may give them more of a sense of form. Also, Barlowe's sketches are more detailed and consistent than mine (although, annoyingly, the arrowtongue is the least consistent, with the 2 spikes moving further down the body as the drawings progress through the book). That and a lot of the designs I want to use aren't quite fully developed yet.

Now I shall stop using this blog as an excuse to procrastinate, and I shall continue working on these backgrounds. I would work on the essay, but I need the library and it's a bit late for that.
I'm writing about the representation of the aliens in 'District 9', and so I've got lots of racism and media spins to read about.



"Fookin' Prawns!"