Character Design Class #2

I am in my 6th week of the Character Design Workshop with artist Stephen Silver (watch the trailer for the class here)and still enjoying it. What I appreciate most about the class so far is that it really motivates me to draw stuff I am terrible at drawing. I have always avoided those things, the classic stuff: Hands, feet, heads, faces, animals.... and I have always gotten around it by drawing very cartoony (don't get me wrong, it took a lot of work and passion to get there...but I have always had a hard time constructing bodies, etc.).

So I have started to draw almost every day, and I draw stuff that looks terrible because I am bad at it. But that's ok, because nobody will ever see those drawings. They land in the trash right away because their only purpose is to build new connections in my brain that will make it easier to draw.

Character Design Class Feedback

As for Silver's class, we are about to create a full turn around of our character. We have been working on an adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde characters so far. I have taken the characters to a sort of Lovecraftian NYC 30ies setting, where a character based on Lovecraft is my Jekyll, and a weird, dark demon-ish entity summed by the Necronomicon is my Hyde.Below you can see my approach to "Liebkraft", my Jekyll character, a young author living in 1930ies NYC. Stephen Silver chose his favorite out of my sketch and gave some suggestions with red marker, as always. Essentially, the most important thing for me to consider is breaking up the shapes, creating diversity within the shapes and maintaining the volumes of the arms/feet/etc - clarity is very important, and I know I get lazy with that sometimes.

As some may imagine, I have more fun creating monsters as opposed to human characters, below you will find Silver's draw over of my Hyde characters, which were heavily inspired by tribal mask culture. 

Here are Silver's draw over of my approach to a character called "Bowler Hat Man", which was an exercise to create caricature off an image.

And below you can see my shaky approaches to exercise hands, eyes, ears, etc. This is the first time I actually dealt with the way an ear is build up. Seriously, how did I never look at ears more closely before? I still need a LOT of practice for all of those body parts.