Associated lesson: 🧊 Lesson 4: The Multiple Dimensions (of Art)

Now that you’ve honed your powers of observation, we will start exercising your creativity! From this exercise forward, you’ll be practicing how to remix and rearrange the elements you have identified, to make something that is truly unique.

Step 1: Get a picture from niji

step 2: Trace out the body parts

step 3: Resize them all, so the sizes can be mixed and matched. Some lines will get thick and unpleasant, that is ok.

step 4: Recompose the body parts into different poses. You can repeat and resize them, as necessary.

Step 5: Turn the opacity to 30% and refine the lines, using the original as reference for the interiors

Step 6: Turn off the guide lines and refine the lines some more.

Step 7: Done!

Show it to blk cat with the /submit command at https://discord.com/channels/1017943945214435438/1129477874823479387

Tips

When choosing a reference: pick something dynamic

A character simply standing will make manipulating the sihouette difficult. Exaggerated poses are better.

Keep the shape simple when cutting out your doll parts. The same silhouette can be useful for very different poses. Don’t draw the interior lines on the doll parts.

You can be adventurous or as safe as you want, depending on how different your arrangement is from the original, but pay close attention to the joining places. You will have to figure out how to make them work.

When arranging poses, it’s better to keep one side simple, and one side complicated.

When refining: Don’t connect every line you see. The implied line is often more powerful than the connected one.

Keep interior lines are thinner than exterior lines. A simple solution to stiff lines is to make them thinner.

If this exercise is taking you a long time, you can reuse the doll parts for multiple sessions.

In Class Demo: dressing up the paper doll

In the example from class, Chroma takes the pose from one character sheet, and then the clothing referenced from another sheet.

Pose Sheet:

Reference sheet:

To do this, She first traces the poses only (not the silhouettes) Notice the meridian here, being used to design which way that the figure is facing.

Then, she designs new sihouettes with the completed clothing in mind

After this, she builds figures using these looser parts:

And then refines these into the final forms:

when doing this, keep in mind the joiners! Those are the important pieces to perfect: you can tell how precise chroma’s joiners are by the fact that you can infer which way the arms are pointing in her sketch, based on the shape of the armholes.

This is the natural process by which we learn to use reference. At the very beginning of your artistic journey, you’ll be copying the picture directly, adjusting only the joiners. As you get more comfortable in your practice, you will build the “vocabulary” to make up more and more parts of the picture.

Remember! keep it to 1 hour!

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