Character Construction-The Importance+My own from college

I can't fathom enough on how important character construction is. 

It burns me up when I see these modern western cartoons being churned out left and right but somewhere along the line, the design potential is lost just because some schmuck at higher brass decides that said cartoon should be all puppet-rigs no-ifs-ands-or-buts.

If showrunners or executives are going to have the mentality for modern 2D cartoons in North America, what's the point of teaching life drawing in art schools?

Ok. They still teach life drawing in art schools because it's used for other ventures such as illustration, 3DCG modeling, rigging, etc. 

To really understand construction, look back to your previous work on construction or look at books dedicated to construction and life drawing.

Though admittingly, most of my Life Drawing examples leave much to be desired.

You can blame it all on the Wacom Intuos Tablet I was using at the time. 

I now use a Wacom One Creative Pen Display.

Here's an attempt on drawing faces without resorting to my own art style.

However, my art style kept creeping up... except for the eyes. 

Thank god I drew half decent looking eyes that more or less looked like real life.

Ok. So not all my examples are bad. The ten feet drawings below are actually pretty good.

One of the reasons I'm ribbing on character construction lately is because I actually did teach an art class where it's dedicated to actual character construction but unfortunately, my participants just can't get the feel right. I had a few that were exceptional well taught artists but then they withdrew so now I have students who barely have the patience. I won't get into further details however.

Just imagine if I started an mainstream animation project and after fighting with showrunners and executives, I finally convinced them to use my art style with no puppet rigs and just plain hand-drawn purity? 

Well winning the fight is one thing but convincing animators to break convention is going to be hard since they were trained to use puppet rigs or CalArts style from the getgo.

Speaking of that, I've seen fanart of modern shows that use that CalArts puppet rigged style and I've got to say, even those that retain the art of the original cartoon, the fanart looks 10 times better than the actual product. Maybe it's because fanart is not constrained by deadlines or showrunner mandates.

Just look at how beautifully drawn this fanart of Luz and Amity is.

It's clear whoever drew this wasn't going to let his/her LIFE DRAWING knowledge go to waste.

(Probably because he/she was just a fan of the show but wasn't hired by Disney.)

I still haven't seen THE OWL HOUSE yet(even though I have access to it via Disney+) but I hear it's pretty good even for a modern 2D animated show. 

It's clear Dana Terrace got sick of the CalArts mandates, knew that people love anime, and decided to emulate that both in art and execution.

While the CalArts style sort of creeps up still with the acting and Luz's facial construction, a majority of characters such as Amity break the mold and really provide a shoutout to anime.

Funny thing is, on Disney+ the show was for some reason categorized as anime and as of this writing, still is.

I wonder how it's going for Avatar on Paramount+? Let me know.

And yes, I'm typing this in my custom built Maverick PC. 

The truth is I usually don't type on my blog because I think there's something funny going on with my Razer Mechanical Keyboard's polling rate. I ran into this issue where one of the keys accidentally registers as a key-bounce. 

So after I upgrade my GPU from a Zotac 12GB RTX 3060 to an RTX 4080, I'm going to invest on a new mechanical keyboard from either Steelseries, Corsair, or Asus. 

And one with linear switches. I feel that the more you use a clicky or tactile switch, the more worn out the key switch becomes.

So stay tuned.