See Like An Artist 

R. Paulus|April 17, 2019

See Like An Artist 

Article number 7

Creating A Character

When we play video games, watch movies, check out YouTube videos we seem to find interest in who the characters are in the story. We subconsciously ask ourselves “What are these characters like?”, “What do they want?”, “What will they do?”. The Intro to Art class began the process of creating original characters and presenting them on paper. All good characters start from reality and then expand there from. It is like building an engine then creating the form to fit that engine. What skills do you want your creation to have? What actions can they do and what does their body have to look like to make thaat action realistic? Sometimes the idea and the creature could be logical and sometimes the idea had to be thrown away. The final product was the results of putting these ideas together with the atists drawing skills.

Some questions that the students began with were:

  1. Age
  2. Allergies
  3. Appearances
  4. Awards won
  5. Best friend
  6. Catchphrases
  7. Emotion
  8. Enemies
  9. Family
  10. First words
  11. Friends
  12. Hero
  13. Hobbies
  14. Identity
  15. Idol
  16. Likes
  17. Living situation
  18. Mortal enemies
  19. Name or names
  20. Past loves
  21. Physical form
  22. Possible future jobs
  23. Previous jobs
  24. Skills
  25. Etc.

The classes looked at Commedia dell’arte  (a form of improvisational theatre that began in Italy in the 16th century. Commedia dell’arte continued to be popular during the 17th century and is experiencing a rebirth of popularity today.) The classes also looked at what makes a stock character.

Each of the drawings shown are the results of creating a head, then drawing it ten times in a full front position, ten times in a profile position and ten times in a ¾ position. The artist then placed one of each of the heads on a full body. They then drew the head and body that seemed to work out the best on a large sheet of paper. They then drew it on a nice piece of paper that you see before you.

Our next step is to draw their character in a position that represents a word from the nonsensical poem, the Jabberwocky.  Each drawing will compete against other drawings of the same word. The goal is to get ones character seen as many times as possible.

Stay tuned for the hieroglyphics of the Jabberwocky to be shown in the next article of  See Like An Artist.