“A really great talent finds its happiness in execution. “
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
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Character Designs Drawn & Quoted Sketchbook
Category: Sketchbook
I had gotten a bit spoiled being an employed artist for three and a half steady years until finishing my work on My Friends Tigger & Pooh for Disney last October. Suddenly I found myself with a lot of time on my hands – time to finally start developing some projects that have been festering in my brain for awhile.
Prior to coming to California in 1997 to work in animation, I worked full time as a freelancer. And as such, I worked on a lot of publishing projects. I LOVED working on books, and am very interested in getting back into it.
I recently started writing a story that hopefully will work its way into being a genuine bona fide children’s book. Writing silly ideas is so much fun, and being a visual guy, my silly words and silly pictures must go together to form the complete silly train of thought.
Of course you realize that I cannot just tell you my ideas here online as they are still just being birthed – where’s the fun in that? I like being surprised on Christmas morning, don’t you? But, I don’t think it’s giving anything away to show you some character studies I’ve been doing in my sketchbook of my main man.
So, without further ado, here are some development sketches of a young boy in a variety of poses and expressions. There’s a little inconsistency with some of the drawings because while looking for the emotions in him, I was also playing around with his look a bit. Enjoy!
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“The point of living and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.”
– Peter Ustinov (1921-2004)
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
– Honorè de Balzac (1700-1850)
If you really dig this sketch, and you have an account on Facebook, please come check out the Chad Frye • Illustration Guy fan Page where you can read about how you can win this ORIGINAL ART in a contest that ends on April 20th! On the left side of the fan Page you will see a link to the event “ANOTHER WIN A FREE FRYE SKETCH CONTEST!” with all the details. Come check it out!
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I like designing characters. After all, that’s basically what fills my sketchbooks. I’ll start to doodle a face, then soon enough a whole page will be full of variations of that first drawing. You’ve already seen the results of that with my previous posts of bear sketches and Frankenstein head sketches.
Last year I started to sketch an old dude in a deep sea suit. It was just some random guy, but he kinda looked like he needed some young charges. So the sketch grew to include the chunky kid and the little blonde girl, and on the page next to it were a few octopus designs. The sketchbook continued to be filled with mental musings on other topics, but my mind would often go back to that underwater trio.
Recently I decided to do something about it. Already well into another sketchbook, I created more sketches of octopi looking for that one that would go well with the kids. It was kind of like drawing a balloon with personality. A few more kids and fish were added to the mix. It started to look like a cohesive idea.
After deciding on a few poses for a group portrait, I transferred the characters to Bristol board and inked them individually (I’m a brush and bottle kinda guy, with the occasional Rapidograph and Micron pen stuck in there). Scan ’em, color ’em in Photoshop, composite them together – and there you have the Aqua Kids!
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“For the first time ever, overweight people outnumber average people in America. Doesn’t that make overweight the average then?”
– Jay Leno
I was thumbing through my sketchbook the other day, and came across this drawing. Thought it deserved to be let out for some air. It isn’t based on some real-life scene that I happened to observe in a local park or anything. In fact, I’m actually not real sure of what inspired the scenario. Perhaps I might have been feeling a little guilty for having just eaten a generously proportioned sandwich myself. Whatever the case, I offer this for your visual digestion.
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Now that it was clear what the concept for the Frankenstein painting was going to be, it was time to pay more attention to the details of that drawing. Sometimes a project calls for the use of visual reference materials. While I had a decent semblance of what I wanted to create, a few things needed backup assistance from some photos.
I used to keep a file of imagery for such uses. Most illustrators did. These days, Google Images is the place to go. Type in your key words, and let them find the images for you from all the websites out there! I’d wager some of you found this blog by the same means.
Unfortunately, a scan was not made of the absolutely original preliminary sketch that showed how the monster’s body originally looked. (I kept monkeying around with the one sketch.) While it was a hulking body, it needed to reflect some age and probably some muscle. Even the monster’s face could have been bonier, more sunken, etc. – the literary monster was created out of corpses after all. For some reason, Iggy Pop came to mind. While I’m not familiar with his music, and he is not a corpse exactly, I must have seen a picture of him at one point and it just resurfaced from the crevices of my mind as being the perfect reference material for my monster’s physique. So I found a photo of him and made some adjustments to my monster.
As you can see in the preliminary sketch in Part 1, the castle is just a vague outline thrown in there. Online I found an actual “Frankenstein’s Castle” that exists is Germany. So in a subsequent attempt, I doodled that one in, but it just didn’t look right. I needed a castle that would look good in silhouette to go along with the background stylings of the Mona Lisa.
About this time, it was clear that I just needed to sit down and watch the original 1930s Frankenstein movie starring Boris Karloff. I needed to immerse my mind into that story, and maybe pick up some inspiration along the way. Maybe the castle from that film would work? No, it was just a rather non-descript tower which I doodled anyway. It just wouldn’t read as a castle/tower in the painting where the background was full of rock formations that were similar in look to the tower.
Well, the tower will have to wait. Rounding out the reference material is a photo of an old man hand to help the monster have some more age.
Next in Part 3 – Prepping the Painting
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A few weeks ago I wrote about my recent fascination with Frankenstein’s monster that began with having just seen the play Arsenic and Old Lace. In that article, I shared with you a number of head studies of the monster as I explored the various ways one can draw him and still retain the recognizable fact that he is who he is. The fascination did not end that day. I continued to draw some more heads, all the while wondering where this was going to lead.
It has been awhile since I’ve done an actual bonafide painting, and just the simple drawings of the various heads inspired me to do a portrait of the monster. I rarely can do something straightforward, though. I love the funny, and the funny can’t just be in how the figure looks – it has to be about the situation. Immediately da Vinci’s Mona Lisa came to mind.
In looking at the da Vinci painting, it is the PERFECT setting for my monster. The background is dark and moody, desolate, and eerily earthy in color. Of course the monster will replace Lisa, but I must amuse myself with the background for the scene to be complete. I began to sketch the idea in my sketchbook. That little path on the left? An angry mob, of course! Off to the right? Well, it has to be Frankenstein’s castle! And the sky is going to have to be more stormy to justify the requisite bolt of lightning integral to the tale of Frankenstein.
The final painting is a current work-in-progress. Over the next week or so, I thought I’d take you step-by-step barefoot across the coals of my process that I’ve already overcome. Next, Part 2 of the Frankenstein’s Monster series will focus on my visual research for the painting.
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