Purpose & Principles Involved

The purpose of this exercise is to have you continue to work with the basic principles of perspective as they relate to a characters head:

HORIZON LINE
POINT OF VIEW
ONE POINT PERSPECTIVE
TWO POINT PERSPECTIVE
ELLIPSES
3 DIMENSIONAL THINKING & DRAWING
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Drawing cartoon characters requires you to think of your characters as solid three dimensional objects. The easiest way to define this is to think as though you are sculpting your characters out of plasticine or clay. Many animators actually do this before they begin animating their character. It helps them to analyze the process of building the character up from the simple shapes and adding on the details later, just the same as you must do when you are drawing. I’ve given my students the same assignment at Sheridan College in their first year of character design class. All of the students immediately understand the principles involved after doing this.

Again, as in the last two assignments, I want you to get a handle on the importance of being consistent with the basic drawing before you get into the heavy stuff with all the features of the face added on. If you have a really rough time with this assignment, it will be almost impossible to do the heads right away. Get this process down first so that it almost becomes second nature to you and you’ll be able to draw any character with ease. Please don’t get frustrated with these assignments. I know it seems like we haven’t been doing much so far but, it is important that you get this part into your head. Stick with it. This is what you’ve taken this course for, not for some quick fix, one-two-three step process. This is the real meat and potatoes stuff, you’ve got to trust me on this.
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