Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: Have you ever considered doing a comic with modmad? -Just curious ya know-

0chromat:

Such as, our own original standalone, collaboration comic? It sounds like a great/fun idea, but there’s a few problems in regards to this proposition; Mod already has her hands full with her own comic and storyboarding occupation, both very huge projects, and I actually have my own comic (which I am currently on hiatus from, due to too much outside work), jobs, and school to fret about.

So :( That is something we may have to consider in the distant future.

same as the above, alas, but my god it would be beautiful if we ever could collaborate on something ;w;

one day my friends, one day…

my crappy sketch process press J to skip

pretty much always but I’m bad at tutorials and I’m tired so here have a bunch of WIP screencaps or something

so yeah first get that diggity darn basic sketch down, here I pushed Fred’s pose to look more like the cartoony double-bounce step walk I reckon he would have but his proportions are pretty humany so he’s not too different structure wise

needed reference for how the cuff would crease so I took a shot of my own sleeve (egads whodathunk you can use yourself as reference)

I tend to draw things a few frames after the reference if it’s moving; it’s a habit from animation, but basically to get away from that stilted rotoscope look that some heavily referenced pictures get I try to ‘animate’ the picture and draw it as if it’s the next key frame in a sequence, so here the coat has been pushed forwards by Fred’s hand and the folds are following that through

slapped on the rest of them clothes because ain’t nobody wants a naked android strutting about, also he’s not going to be on a catwalk in the picture so I threw in some blustery wind to help that hair and action line out. You’ll probably have noticed that I also leveled out the floor so his feet are both more duck-toed and at a different perspective

throw in a loose map for the lighting and there’s your goddamn scribbley-ass sketch. After this I red line it and fix all the mistakes I’ve made before going to inking and yes there are a metric shit tonne in this one but I’m hella tired so this is as far as I got :|

hope that helped somehow but yeah, reference; it’s great, use it, but don’t copy it, copying leads to dead awkward poses that your character wouldn’t do and really you don’t learn as much from copy pasting even if it’s by hand

Pull faces.
No, really. Look at this dude;

This is Ward Kimball, a super good animator who really influenced my own work, especially in the expression department, but almost all animators do this. You want a serious piece of advice? Grab a mirror, think about your character’s motivation and just get silly.

I’ve always had quite a rubbery face and people constantly tell me that I am a ‘cartoon’ of a person, but you don’t have to be extrovertal in real life to be able to pull faces back at your desk. Sometimes you don’t even need to be looking at yourself for it to help with drawing expressions; just feeling how the muscles of your face move helps, and it gets you in the mind set of the character. A lot of people do it naturally- ever found yourself drawing something and pulling the same face as the person you’re drawing? Good. Keep doing that.

Animation is acting, you just do it through drawings; illustration or even just scribbling a character with a certain emotion is just as involving and important for me. If you want to draw a character feeling sad, feel sad. Don’t just imagine them being sad, think about what would make them sad; understand why it would make them sad, and in what way. There’s a thousand ways to be sad and a thousand ways to look each type of sad. Don’t be simple, don’t be complicated; be deep. Know what you are drawing from the inside out.

The very word 'character’ tells you that the subject you are drawing, be it a human or a robot or a shoe with a face, has a personality. There are all sorts of tutorials out there about the anatomy of the face and typical expressions, which are really useful and I do recommend looking up, but for me the most critical part of the process is what is inside; realizing that you are drawing something with emotions, not just trying to draw 'an’ emotion on that character’s face. You have to understand what you are drawing. What is an emotion? A reaction. What are they reacting to? Why are they reacting that way? Make it mundane or make it dramatic, but give your character a reason to look the way they do.

Characters are people. Respect them for it, and they’ll help you find the expression that you’re looking for.