honoria in ciberspazio

http://www.stickpageportal.com/watchmovie/bubblemania.html

Did you know there is a whole community of animators and comix artists devoted to stick figures?
http://www.stickpageportal.com
My life drawing students have to do some stick figure drawings as one of the assignments in week one.  The stickpageportal community is an interesting field trip for students who want to get into animation or game art.

Movie splash page by Bubblemania

I'm gathering personal sets of visuals to throw into graphic recording moments when fine art just won't do!

In the process I am learning about stick figures.  In graphic recording stick figures are easy to use and are part of the visual vocabulary.  I found a whole online community devoted to stick figures and I joined stickpageportal.com

Stickpage.com has games, forums, galleries, humor, and animations all featuring stick figures. Here's a construction safety animation in the midst of Stickpage's many violent, ninja, and manga sticks http://www.stickpage.com/safetyatworkplay.shtml

I also went to Half Priced Books and found some fun old how to draw cartoons with stick figures.

In my life drawing class Week 1 has a stick figure assignment.  The challenge is to draw the stick figures in active poses while maintaining a correct human proportions of 7.5 - 8 head measures.  Many people draw stick figures with big round heads which is not wrong - it's just not proportional to the size and shape of the skull, spine, and long bones of the limbs.  I want my sticks to be proportional and active so I've been drawing both from life - stick figures drinking beer on a pub patio - and from my new array of comic drawing books.  It's fun to draw the sticks in the colored pencil chunks then smudge them with the colorless blender to give them a sense of volume and movement. 

My challenge is that I'm a gesture drawing freak and my natural path to capturing a gesture is quite different from the stick.  I wouldn't have noticed that before tackling the stick figure as a goal.  There really is a lot to learn about stick figures and I plan to learn it and use it in graphic recording.

I have 2 more graphic recordings that I can't put in my portfolio because the meetings contained proprietary information.  I have asked permission to post the one from yesterday.  We'll see.

I made these for my life drawing class. One of the first assignments is to make stick figures and I suggested they start with manipulating shapes from nature including sticks to experiment to achieve good proportions, then do the drawing versions. I shifted proportions around in these variations to show an experimental path searching for the right configuration of body parts.