Monday 11 August 2014

Joe Weatherly Drawing Workshop

A log over-due post indeed.

About a month or so ago I attended Joe Weatherly's drawing workshop. It was fantastic, I can't describe the awesomeness, and how much I learnt during the 4 days. If you ever get the chance to attend his classes around the world, I highly recommend it.

The first day was spent in a lecture room, talking about anatomy and artistic styles. It was great to be introduced to a whole heap of new artists and going over some of the classics. Joe drew out how we should focus on structure underneath the animal. As once you know what is going on in the inside, you know why stuff is protruding on the outside. Structurally, it also helps a ton with animating animals. He advised us for our future to studies to spend allotted times on studying certain aspects of anatomy, i.e studying hands or paws for a month.

The second day was spent at the Natural History Museum (NHM), where we could spend time studying the structure of the animal from the inside, and not worrying about it wandering off :P. I find your mind's eye likes to summaries and soften your impression of construction, you start to assume you know how it works, mainly because, well, we have bodies! But drawing skeletons and really studying them illustrates how many things you miss, or assume are there or not there. These studies are purely that, for studying, the pieces from the full four days are there for learning, not to put on the wall. I also found out a lot of structural information that I hadn't really seen before, it was truly eye-opening.

The third and fourth day was spent at the London Zoo. We mainly studied the giraffes, as they reflected a lot of what we had studied at the previous destinations, i.e. horses and stags. We also got to spend a little time with one of the Tiger's, the Lions, and a bunch of reptiles.

As we walked around the Zoo spending a lot of time at each animal, I took a few photos for reference studies later on (see below) and we also got a lot of attention from the public, at both the Zoo and the NHM. It's funny how different people react to us studying, and the difference between very intrigued children and very naughty ones!

One of the things we were asked to practice and think about was to start to learn and remember how the animals looked, because as they are always moving, we were going to have to start drawing from our imagination and memory to get the poses we wanted want. It was a really interesting way to train ones brain.

Anyway, so I've collected a few of my sketch book pages and a few of the reference photographs I've taken, all posted below. If you want more information on Joe Weatherly or want to start looking at animal anatomy more closely, I'll send you to two places, Joe's website here, and Joe's book. His book goes over a lot of what we studied in person, and it's a great place to start, I highly recommend, and I'll be adding this firmly onto the reading list page. Definitely keep an eye out for his next workshop, I'm going to try my hardest to attend!

Natural History Museum


Leg doodle and notes by Joe to help me construct my Mammoth better. 


London Zoo
                                                           From Memory, after some studying


 Sleepy Tiger and a very happy Lama



Reptile House




Camel's and Okapi's

The Camel on the top right looks a little like Ian Hislop


                                                                    Okapi Butt

At the end of the Last day, there was a guy with a Giraffe's skull, so I managed to get in some scrappy studies to help construct the head a little better in later observational studies.


Thanks to Joe for coming to England and braving our cold Summer (compared to California!) and thanks to Gillian for organising it all!

Over and Out



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