Viewing Blog: The art of Christian Bocquee, Most Recent at Top
Results 1 - 25 of 192
The art blog of illustrator Christian Bocquee - features regular postings of illustration, character design, sketches, and animation.
Statistics for The art of Christian Bocquee
Number of Readers that added this blog to their MyJacketFlap: 2
I've been making a regular exercise of getting out and doing quick small pastel studies. Hopefully I can keep this going. The biggest challenge is often finding a spot to paint. There's a lot to think about - how's the light, the shadows, am I being too conspicuous, is there a shady spot to sit, etc. But it's also kind of fun driving around looking for inspiration. If you enjoyed looking at these, I'll be posting more regularly over at my facebook page,
here.
This was my re-design for the final week of my class back in March(-ish). I haven't yet had a chance to incorporate Stephen's feedback or add colour. Hope you like him.
My final Hyde design. The next step is colouring, then expressions & attitudes.
Trying to put my new understanding of character design to work on some more characters. This is one of my favourite characters from one of my favourite films (I haven't read the book). I love both the original and the more recent Burton version, but being an 80's kid, Gene Wilder will always be the real Willy Wonka to me. For this design I wanted to forget both of these films.
I based it loosely on Frank Lloyd Wright.
One of the things I loved most about Wonka in the original film and wanted to capture was his ambivalence. I remember as a kid not quite knowing whether he could be trusted or not. I hope that my design has some of that quality in it.
Here are more design process sketches for Jekyll & Hyde. Doing all this research is a worthwhile discipline which I'm not used to doing as thoroughly as this.
I still have quite a bit of work to do in clarifying the designs, but I thought it might help to flesh out their personalities if I did these quick story/gesture sketches first.
My idea for a fresh take on Jekyll & Hyde was to make Jekyll a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor who's obsessed with potency herbs. Hyde would be his wild party-animal state after taking the concoction of herbs.
4 weeks in, and the course has been a lot of fun, a lot of drawing, and a lot of eye-opening. My biggest challenge has been simplifying the design and making it read clearly. The biggest eye-opener has been thinking more of shape than anatomy.
Here are some of my other ideas for the Walter Chipwitther character back in week 1. You can see the initial sketches here for the designs I chose to
take further.
If you caught my last post you'd have heard I'm enrolled in fundamentals of character design at
Schoolism. I always knew there was something missing in my approach to character design. Over the years I've managed now and then to intuitively fluke some of the principals I'm now learning with Stephen. However just 3 weeks in I already feel I have a better grasp of these principals. Now when I revisit my favourite artists' character designs I understand much better why I like them and I know my own process will never be the same again.
It's week one of my character design course with Stephen Silver. I was really anxious about submitting my homework as there is so much talent in the class! I remind myself to not compare. My homework was to come up with a design for a character called 'Walter Chipwitther', a jolly, wealthy entrepreneur in his 60's. Here's two of my more finished versions. The idea with the rats in case you were wondering was to make him a kind of wealthy eccentric with his unusual pets.
Another imaginary landscape in gouache.
These are a few of the secondary characters I designed. Even though some of them only appeared very briefly I wanted to make each character as individual as possible.
These are the main characters I designed. My set in the series was written by Australian author Paul Collins. He created some really loveable and recognizable personalities. Lucy, who is on the end (right side) ended up being toned down a bit. Specifically her buck teeth. It was felt they tended too much towards negative stereotypes.
A while back I had the idea to do a series of these imaginary landscapes. I hope I can find the time to do more of these soon. I can't decide which I like doing more, characters or environments.
Day 29
Topic - Wolves
A fun topic but my time is short today, so here's a quick grab.
Day 28
Topic - kangaroos
Today was another one of those days I wanted to keep my sketchbook to myself. This challenge has been both good and bad. On the one hand it has got me practicing drawing a lot more consistently, but on the other it has obliged me to show drawings I'm not exactly proud of. I do enjoy looking at the unedited sketchbooks of other artists though, so here's to the spirit of openness.
(Ken Hultgren studies are noted, otherwise they were from photo reference.)
Day 27
Topic - crustaceans
The past few days I've tried to go beyond my original challenge and show more finished illustrations instead of just studies. With all the visual research I've done the last month I'm starting to get quite a few fun ideas. I thought it would be more interesting to see the results of my research rather than the research itself. I was hoping to show another finished piece today but I underestimated how hard it is to come up with something finished every day. Anyway I hope you find something of value in seeing my studies.
'Grow'vember day 25
Topic - 'Unidentified Floating Crustaceans'
Day 23
topic - Tyrannosaurus rex
To feather or not to feather? I heard in a radio show that more has been learned about dinosaurs -since- the film Jurassic Park than in all the time before the film! The bottom image shows my preliminary studies, mostly from the above mentioned film, and from Walking with Dinosaurs the puppet show. The uppermost image was a test to see what I'd learned from the reference material.