Model Wockets
When I have to draw a difficult face or gesture, the best way to do it is to take a picture of my own hand or expression and use it as reference. But when I can't use myself as a model, I use my friends and family a lot as stand-ins...my friend G-chan has put in a lot of shifts as Dinah and various guy friends have been Vincent. They come over and I tell them how to pose, based on my thumbnail sketches, then use my digicam to capture the pose and immediately upload it to my laptop to be manipulated into what I need.
But sometimes my friends aren't available or a pose needs to be referenced in conjunction with an object or background that I don't have, and I turn to modelmaking. My old professor Paul Hudson, at my alma mater SCAD, turned me onto modelmaking in his amazing classes. He's some kind of a model building genius...he once built a tiny working trebuchet out of wood as reference for a comic...and he taught me everything I know about modelmaking.
So here's a step-by-step guide to the inner machinations of my modelmaking wocketry, using a helpful little dude I like to call Mr. BendyGuy.
Here's the setup: Vincent is asleep at his desk, which is a high old-fashioned desk with a top shelf and a lower desk surface. The angle is from above left. Here's the thumbnail sketch of that page:
First off, I have to build a little bendy dude to pose in Vincent's place. I make lots of bendy guys to stand in for characters, using wire from the hardware store, craft yarn and some sculpey clay for a head.
First I model a wire body that's exceedingly simple...just a wire skeleton knotted together, using a wire cutter to help bend the pieces. Then I wrap a length of yarn around each part of the doll, starting at the foot and wrapping each limb tightly.
When I'm done I tie off the yarn and I have a solid body shape. The yarn is put on to flesh out the bendyguy a bit and make him more proportional to the character.
Then I get a little ball of sculpey clay and make a little face on it. It's very very basic and takes only about 30 seconds...just a chin and a nose and small hollows for the eyes.
I poke the head right onto the neck and the guy is done! Now he can be articulated and bent at any joint and at the neck. Here he is sitting at a small doll's vanity table in roughly the correct position for the page sketch:
In this position, I can go in and get extreme angles with the camera that otherwise might be tough to draw without a model:
So now I have my little Mr. Bendissimo. However this vanity table is not even close to the kind of table he should be sitting at, so I need to make one. With the help of an old toothpaste box and some artist's tape, I can throw together a desk roughly the same size and style as the one in the sketch, all in about 5 minutes.
And I can get the right camera angle for the sketch, and even try out some different angles that might be better:
All of this prep took less than 30 minutes and saved me a big headache on drawing this page (I'll have the finished page up for comparison later this week). Plus I have a new bendy guy and table to play with in future scenes! I have a whole box of little doll props, stand-ins and toys for use in reference setups...they're very helpful and an easy solution for setups if your friends are busy and you can't afford to buy new human-sized furniture every time you want to reference something. :3
Also can I just reiterate how much I LOVE to draw my little inventions? It bugs me that I don't get more opportunities in my books to draw my little machines and doodads...my next comic book series will definitely have to be more mechanically-oriented XD
today on marTV: Extreme Engineering, Mythbusters, How It's Made
But sometimes my friends aren't available or a pose needs to be referenced in conjunction with an object or background that I don't have, and I turn to modelmaking. My old professor Paul Hudson, at my alma mater SCAD, turned me onto modelmaking in his amazing classes. He's some kind of a model building genius...he once built a tiny working trebuchet out of wood as reference for a comic...and he taught me everything I know about modelmaking.
So here's a step-by-step guide to the inner machinations of my modelmaking wocketry, using a helpful little dude I like to call Mr. BendyGuy.
Here's the setup: Vincent is asleep at his desk, which is a high old-fashioned desk with a top shelf and a lower desk surface. The angle is from above left. Here's the thumbnail sketch of that page:
First off, I have to build a little bendy dude to pose in Vincent's place. I make lots of bendy guys to stand in for characters, using wire from the hardware store, craft yarn and some sculpey clay for a head.
First I model a wire body that's exceedingly simple...just a wire skeleton knotted together, using a wire cutter to help bend the pieces. Then I wrap a length of yarn around each part of the doll, starting at the foot and wrapping each limb tightly.
When I'm done I tie off the yarn and I have a solid body shape. The yarn is put on to flesh out the bendyguy a bit and make him more proportional to the character.
Then I get a little ball of sculpey clay and make a little face on it. It's very very basic and takes only about 30 seconds...just a chin and a nose and small hollows for the eyes.
I poke the head right onto the neck and the guy is done! Now he can be articulated and bent at any joint and at the neck. Here he is sitting at a small doll's vanity table in roughly the correct position for the page sketch:
In this position, I can go in and get extreme angles with the camera that otherwise might be tough to draw without a model:
So now I have my little Mr. Bendissimo. However this vanity table is not even close to the kind of table he should be sitting at, so I need to make one. With the help of an old toothpaste box and some artist's tape, I can throw together a desk roughly the same size and style as the one in the sketch, all in about 5 minutes.
And I can get the right camera angle for the sketch, and even try out some different angles that might be better:
All of this prep took less than 30 minutes and saved me a big headache on drawing this page (I'll have the finished page up for comparison later this week). Plus I have a new bendy guy and table to play with in future scenes! I have a whole box of little doll props, stand-ins and toys for use in reference setups...they're very helpful and an easy solution for setups if your friends are busy and you can't afford to buy new human-sized furniture every time you want to reference something. :3
Also can I just reiterate how much I LOVE to draw my little inventions? It bugs me that I don't get more opportunities in my books to draw my little machines and doodads...my next comic book series will definitely have to be more mechanically-oriented XD
today on marTV: Extreme Engineering, Mythbusters, How It's Made