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Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
DOWNLOADS
project-simple-animal-portraits.mp4
183 MB
project-simple-animal-portraits-transcript-english.txt
5 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-transcript-spanish.txt
5 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-captions-english.srt
8 kB
project-simple-animal-portraits-captions-spanish.srt
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![@davidem]()
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![Wormings Arts]()
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![Hodiyah Green]()
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![Corey Walker]()
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![@marciahasslocher]()
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![Soroush]()
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![Ben K]()
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![Manavi Prabha]()
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![Camille Varner Kolafa]()
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![Jerome Tan]()
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![Camille Varner Kolafa]()
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![@gdrexel94]()
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![Sven]()
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![Guilherme Ferreira]()
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![@kuscheldrache]()
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![@kuscheldrache]()
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![Cyrille Debard]()
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![a wa]()
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![@thesmokingrotoscope]()
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![Ben K]()
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![Gera Mve]()
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![Camille Varner Kolafa]()
Deadline: Submit your assignments by 06/15/2023 for a chance to be featured in the next critique video!
Level 1:
Create animal portraits using basic shapes. Try to simplify the animal using 10 shapes or less. Keep your shapes organic and simple. Simple shapes could be stretched, bloated, indented, or curved to capture personality. Don't worry about perfect proportions. Instead, focus on creating cool, simple designs. No details or shading! Use the three reference photos I provided and find 5 to 10 more.
Level 2:
Take Level 1 assignment and push them further. Play with your basic shapes and size relationships to give the animals different personalities. Don't hesitate to experiment and look for additional references to understand your subject better. Now, go have fun!
First attempts, made very flat versions. Wanted to make the buffalo more aggressive looking so used triangles as the base shape. The hippo I chose to make softer so used rounded squares as the base shapes. The chicken, was in between and uses triangles with rounded corners.
Need to revisit this exercise. And will do, going to move on to the next lessons now though.
realized a way too late that 'portrait' means only the head of the animal haha
my biggest struggle with this assignment was knowing at what point a shape becomes too complicated and has to be split into multiple parts, i kept wanting to default to basic shapes only
I broke down the studies into individual parts to understand them better, but it ended up looking a little creepy LOL
edit: after watching the demos i definitely misuderstood the assignment a little, oops
Here is my attempts, I tried thinking simple shapes and try to be organic with them but for some reason I cant stop drawing details.
Tried to keep the number of shapes in each drawing to ten or less .. or at least around ten. Focused a lot on the line quality of each drawing. Maybe I did not simplify enough?
I’m not sure I quite grasped the essence of the exercise, but here are my attempts!
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18d
These are looking good! All I'd recommend right now is letting your shapes overlap! Sketch lightly first and as you build the animal up, darken the parts of the lines that are part of the outline. For example, you could simplify the red neck of the bird into a more rounded bean shape, and then draw the wing, having it overlap slightly. This can help with proportions as well! Keep it up, you're doing great! :)
Level 1:I’m satisfied with my first two animal designs. Even after watching the demonstration, I found it difficult to simplify the hippo. I would appreciate some guidance on it.
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21d
You've got the right idea, breaking it down into the shape masses you see. It could help to try different ways of breaking it down. For example, you could try rounded shapes or larger and fewer masses!
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24d
I suggest playing around with the shapes some more on the buffalo, sometimes exaggerating the shapes can help us to see what the "correct" shapes should be when going back down that route!
These are my lineups for the assignment. I tried to push the shapes and proportions more as I went along.
Got inspired by the wacky hippo references to do a couple more :)
Took longer than expected, but it was fun. I learned a lot during this project, and I will give it another try after watching the demos. I struggled a lot with some of the animals (raccoon, capybara, and the bird were some of them), but it was worth it. I would appreciate it if some of you could provide some feedback.
I found this assignment tough, will do some more after watching the demo and getting some additional tips:
Then I tried level 2, but with the shapes from the demo to not make my life ultra hard:
Having just so much fun with this assignment - I need to stop doing this at some point….
This one was really tough, I felt lost throughout most of it, and I don't think I'm able to visualize the forms that make up the animals yet. The horse was the easiest, and the buffalo the hardest, to the point I had to trace over it to even begin to understand it. The rabbit as well was surprisingly difficult, considering it is a ball on top of a loaf of bread, but I had trouble making it look good. I would love criticism on my attempts, and advice on how to approach this exercise to make it less daunting.
Here are all the relevant images! Apologies for the photos rather than scans; haven’t managed to fix it yet.
I feel like I clung too tightly to the “it’s okay to use organic shapes” caveat, as it led me to attempting to fit as much of a given appendage’s contour as I could manage while still keeping the animal recognizable.
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1mo
These look good! I urge you to try simplifying the shapes if you decide to try another! Instead of following the entirety of the contour, see where you can divide it into simpler shapes and build it up like that. Nice stuff! :)
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1mo
Great work on these! You should try breaking them down into shapes a bit more, you did that well with the seal! Some of the others look like you focused mostly on the outer contours of the animal instead of simplifying them into shapes.
