Monday, November 29, 2010

Gee, she's really...um, fat. REALLY?

This was my first time of actually trying to figure out how fat is distributed across the body. Once upon a time, I thought if I just added a gut onto a character, they'd become believably fat. Sadly, this is not the case...for anyone.
Fat is distributed pretty much all across the body. In this chart, the male remains the same height and head size, but they grow wider all over. It would look odd if the person had a large belly, but well toned arms. What's most especially important is that the legs remain proportionate enough to hold up the body (when a morbidly obese person becomes tired due to walking and running though, they will feel it in the legs, but this is also due to the metabolism and energy level; the legs--though fat is weaker than muscle--are still proportionally sound). You might have heard of the term "big-boned." Everyone knows this is just a joke, but while drawing this diagram, I found it interesting that the skeletal structure is basically the same as the body grows.
One thing I want to also point out is something I noticed a few years ago in art school. While the idealized human body is a beautiful thing, there is also a sense of beauty I can't help but love in the way the human body adds fat. When fat grows on a body, the body has large gentle curves as opposed to the various bends and knobs that muscles accentuate. With more weight, rolls start to form, which form incredibly beautiful lines across the torso that would never be seen on a lean figure. Artists have focussed for millennia on the idealized human figure (which changes from time to time), but perhaps one of the most under-appreciated forms of beauty is the obese figure.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Copernican Revolutions

I've been putting of posting this week not (only) because I'm lazy, but mainly because I haven't been drawing much; I've been writing. Writing is a horrible experience, unless you enjoy pacing, sitting at a computer, talking to yourself, and thinking of what eventually becomes pointless ideas, for hours, and in the end have only a sentence to show for it.
One of the best helps I've ever gotten is Robert McKee's book "Story," which is one of the Bibles of screenwriting, and a very good tool for writing fiction in general. What helped me a lot this time around was his setup of character depth and how characters affect one another.
First of all, character depth is not a handful of character attributes that might be oddly put together. And it's not a character being committed to one idea far over all others. A character becomes interesting when he or she has inner conflict of ideals. If a man claims to be brave, but in a crisis is cowardly, then you're onto something. If a woman is known by all others as being useless and uninteresting, but her closest friends see that she has an amazing talent that can easily take her to the top of the world, then you've got the beginnings of a story.
Going off of this, a well-constructed story has characters that bring out specific qualities in the protagonist. Around certain characters, a person is happy and attractive, but around one very important secondary character, they become depressed and repulsive. In this approach, a writer designs characters around the protagonist like a miniature solar system. It can be said that a minor character's job is to force the protagonist to reveal a contradictory quality about themselves.
For the story I'm working on, I have a character who originally created a business because it's his passion. But a national company's competition makes money scarce, and he meets a publicist. This publicist is all about marketing and building hype, and the character gets so caught up with the newfound fame ("finally, recognition for what I do!"), that he doesn't have time to do the work that he originally loved. That's the basis, and there's a lot of development that I've done with it, but I'm not sharing it because then you won't read the comic!!!!

Friday, November 12, 2010

Idealized

Many people complain that comics, movies, tv, etc. all present unrealistic images of men and women. This is very often true, and I'd never disagree with this idea. This concept of using idealized people in stories and art is not new, though; it dates back well into the ancient times (warriors aren't typically as awesome as Achilles, women aren't as beautiful as Cleopatra, no one is as wise as Solomon, and so on). So, if people have been frustrated with unrealistic people in their stories, why do storytellers keep using them?
First off, when going to a movie, who would you rather look at for two hours: a fat, ugly, woman, or a super-model? Purely on a surface level, that answer is obvious. Think of that issue from a director's standpoint, though. The director knows that at any point in their movie, you can walk out and demand your money back. Therefore, it is the director's job to keep the film visually interesting. Nothing is more visually interesting than a beautiful woman. NOTHING.
This is why movies with bad plots will have beautiful women showcased in them (regardless of acting abilities). Either the director knows that the story is stupid, and must distract you from that with muscles and cleavage, or the director doesn't know that and is therefore not skilled at their craft enough to know that a story must have more to it than beautiful people. Either way, you get the same result of a bad movie with hot men and women.
Heroes and heroines most often need to visually stand out from the crowd. This is why in romantic comedies, the two leads are good looking, and the "best friend" roles are cliches in that they don't look as good.
Stories can most definitely have the average everyman, an overweight nerdy girl, or a frail old man as the lead. It's all dependent on the story itself. In character design, the ideal figure is often approached as if it's the basic template of a human. The ideal is the starting point, and afterward the artist adds or subtracts weight (in muscle or body fat), height, physical details (hair, clothing style, tattoos/piercings, etc.) and facial composition.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Numbers


1x1.618. Looking at a sea shell, the parthenon, light switches, and your face, you will see this. It's the perfect ratio, rectangle, and mean. Nature creates things in this formula, and man naturally finds it the most pleasing. Euclid said "A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less." Beginning with a square, you draw a line from the middle point of one edge to an opposing corner, and make that line the radius of a circle. The point directly above the center point is the top of the golden rectangle.
"What," you might ask, "the hell, am I talking about?" Back in ancient Greek times, numbers were kind of a big deal. Pythagoras was a philosopher that was all about numbers. Much of what we know about music comes from what the Greeks knew about the application of ratios and numbers to lengths of stretched chords that when plucked, made specific sounds. Phidias, when constructing the parthenon, knew of this ratio, and implemented it into the structure's ultimate design. Today, mathematicians, architects, musicians, and artists like me, still use it. I'm not entirely sure why a rectangle with these proportions is such a big deal, especially since there are tons of studies on this idea. What I do know is that this ratio works all throughout nature, and it's a tried and tested shape/line/design that is proven over the centuries to be aesthetically pleasing.
I was trying to think of a size for a new illustration I'm doing, and I thought I'd give the golden rectangle a shot. When I laid out where the image would be on the page, I have to admit, it's a good rectangle.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

You're so Vein

No, this isn't a self-portrait. I know you were thinking it was. This was actually a result of doing some research for a new project. I'd been looking up reference on bulging muscles, and noticed the little detail of the revealed veins.
I have no idea why the body does this. I'm sure there's a very interesting explanation that my friends in medical school could give me, but what's important is that when the human body works out way more than I do, veins start popping up. It's a little detail, and it'd be easy to just leave it at that.
But there are a few things to keep in mind when bulking up a character. I've heard many times from many girls that a guy that is the ultra-buff, body-builder type is not really that attractive. Especially once you start getting into the body-building competition musculature: it's almost gross. Physical, sexual attraction is more related to the lean, toned muscle definition, rather than the hulking lump of testosterone. I think this type of muscular proportion hits on the more primitive, barbaric, archetype than the heroic, attractive one. Conan the Barbarian, Joe Kubert's Tor, Samson, The Incredible Hulk, Hercules, Thor, etc. are all examples of that pure, unbridled, raw power within the human psyche that simply has the desire to hit things. This type of character is different from the archetype exhibited in Captain America, Achilles, King Arthur, Luke Skywalker, etc., who are if nothing else, a bit more well-rounded characters.
What does this have to do with veins? I think that a good way to help reinforce a character's physical strength is to have the muscles start to show some veins around them. But be aware that this might trigger an idea in the audience's mind that makes them think of that barbaric, violent, potentially physically un-attractive, character type. This could be fore good or ill, depending on the context.