Wednesday, November 17, 2010

A Wild Narla Appears

Progress on Chapter 11 is a little slow due to scheduling and sick. I am about seven pages in, but would like to have more done (I'd like to be done with it and halfway through 12 by the time this chapter ends, but you can't always get what you want).

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Looking for More Material

I've got a bit of a mental disorder; I can't really talk at all to people I don't know unless I'm forced or prompted with a script (my mom used to write scripts for me while I was growing up). Typing is no problem, and I can be outgoing as long as I'm dealing with a written medium and have no one's face on the other end, but that's not what I'm discussing today.

It's faces and posture. Facial expressions and body language literally have no meaning to me at all. I don't know what someone's arm or face or body placement means at all, and in order to do this right, I've got to use reference charts (which, thankfully, I've mostly memorized now; you have no idea how much this has helped me. It's because of my attempts to do art (horribly) that have allowed me to actually go shopping by myself, even if I don't talk to the cashier) to even get a facial expression. Still, I'm entirely guessing on annoyance or surprise or anything like that (and as anyone who's looked at my attempts to draw backgrounds knows, my sense of spacial perception is crazy; my roommate finds it amusing to move things around when I'm not in the living room and watch me try to re-navigate when I come back in. Asshole.).

It's difficult, since I learn expressions and postures by rote and chart, I basically have to learn to redraw a face every time I want someone to have a different expression, which brings me to the real main point.

I have a large amount of physical reference material, but it's limited. I keep trying the exercises I can dig up with tutorials online. Anybody out there have any good ideas for helping me improve?