One of the things I struggle with the most with my drawing is the level of of abstraction, of “cartoonyness” (for lack of a better word) for my characters. The sorts of comics I enjoy reading most tend to be almost exclusively ones that one would describe as “cartoony,” but for whatever reason (most likely a youth heavily steeped in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way) when it comes time for me to design characters I find myself always fighting the urge to base my characters on the generic egg shaped head. To fight this tendency, I sometimes do sketchbook grids of heads and faces like this and try to push myself to distort and exaggerate things more. I don’t usually wind up with a very favorable usable to unusable ratio, but it’s good exercise I think.
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Ben, I have always wondered how you come to the design of your characters…or what motivates it. There is of course traditional aspects to it, but there certainly is a unique form your heads take…thanks for show us some of this process…nice window in.
Best, ben c.
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When it gets down to characters for my books, I seem to get more traditional and less caricatured for some reason. I wish I didn’t…
That’s a very good idea. Even if one is used to doing cartoony heads, this exercise would prevent them all from looking relatively similar.
Is it because of the historical context of your stories. Are you inhibited by the desire to be authentic. Perhaps if you did a more outlandish story you would end up with more outlandish forms.
Hmm… Andy, I’m imagining a 6×6 matrix with features along one axis (forehead, nose, mouth, eyes, ears, &c.) and descriptions along the other axis (small, big, long, pointy, fat, &c.)… Then you start with a single portrait (photo or doodle) and run the poor thing through the whole matrix. Could be a fun project for students to do, looking at different inking techniques for making, say, a pointy nose really WORK in a character’s face….
Marek, that’s a great idea for a workshop activity. You could do a lot with this. In a previous post, Ben has done a grid of “doodles” that he’s turned into characters. https://www.benzilla.com/?p=1511