I started my project by devoting time to doing a little research everyday over the course of a week on different types of cartoon drawings. I wanted to get an understanding for the different types of body shapes and characteristics of various cartoons so I could start to get an idea of what I wanted to do for this project. Each cartoon character was very different from the next, but I found that they are all very distorted in their own ways in the sense that they were accentuated in certain areas. For instance, Felix the Cat has long legs and a very small torso while Pepe Le Pew has an extended torso with short stubby legs. Although having unproportionate bone structures and accentuated body parts, most of the characters bodies parallel the human body structure. I was also really inspired by Michael Paulus who took universally known cartoon characters and drew their skeletons and how Hyungkoo Lee who sculpted characters out of wire and resign because I was able to grasp a better understanding of how to approach this.
This project was a long process for me because of all the stages I went through for one outcome. I first began drawing Donald Duck, but found the majority of the drawing was of his head and beak and stopped. I really wanted to focus on practicing drawing the rib cage, so I moved onto drawing Patrick Star from Spongebob. Although fun to draw, about half way through that, I decided I wasn't being challenged enough, and wanted to choose something harder so I could work on my drawing skills. I finally found peace in drawing Ariel, the little mermaid. I stuck with this because her body is very similar if not the same to a human (except for the tail), so I could work on getting the correct humanlike proportions. Ariel is a combination of human and fish so I was able to practice drawing the human body as well as learning how to draw parts of a fish. I also chose a more complex pose so I could see where I’m doing ok and where I’m struggling. It was also really fun to draw a very different pose from what I’ve seen so far. I must have erased and gone over the rib cage a thousand times, but it really got me to focus exactly on if I was drawing the shapes correctly. It also forced me to not only be looking at the shapes, but the negative space around them in order to get an accurate representation. The tail part was very challenging because I had to study fish anatomy and somehow morph it into humanlike tail. In my research of mermaid 'skeletons’, I discovered that people always interpreted the tail differently and the form always seemed to change. I found some where the bottom portion was just two thinly curved bones while others had a handful of curved sharply pointed bones sticking out.
For the drawing of Ariel, I used colored pastels and for the skeleton part, I mainly used the charcoal pencils because it allowed me to be more precise while still having that flexibility to smudge it. It also helped me with value and shading in order to turn it into a fully rendered piece.
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