November 18, 2009

An evening (or two) with Mike Mattesi


So I had the opportunity last week of going to a two night workshop with Mike Mattesi, author of a book called Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators. He has worked for Disney, Dreamworks, Marvel (and many others) and is now teaching at Pixar. His philosophy revolves more around the movement of the figure rather than finding accurate shapes.


So these are the drawings I did at the very beginning of the first night, before he taught us anything. These ones were two minute drawings.

So these are 30 second poses, where he told us we could use only ONE line to find the "biggest event" of the pose. So each line here is a different pose. We did a TON of these, pretty much spent the entire first night on this. 


By the end of the night we were allowed to add a few more lines, while still focusing on the main action. (One minute drawings)

So the second night we focused on the rhythm of the figure, while still holding onto the principles we learned the night before. He showed us how the forms flow into each other... (all of the following are 2 minute poses)


Almost.....


Getting there....


Yes!! Got it!! Finally!!



Aaaaaaaand then he made us do blind poses.... (drawing without looking at your paper) yuck!

But after a ton of those it finally started to click! It actually looks like a person! I swear I didn't cheat and look...



Some final 3 minute poses (we could look for these)! So although it started off a bit rough... it was a great experience!! My quick poses improved a TON! Plus it was great to learn a different way of thinking about figure drawing. Yey!


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