Blog 1

For the first assignment, I chose the subject matter to be Arnold from the Nickelodeon show Hey Arnold. After going through all of my favorite cartoon characters from my childhood, I finally settled on Arnold due to the largeness of his head compared to the rest of the body. Even as a child I always wondered why he has the famous football shaped head and what his skull would look like. Since Arnold has a nontraditional silhouette, I knew this could potentially pose as a challenge. The heads high method we use in class with the models is not something that I was able to apply to this drawing. The research done to make this piece was simple and involved just looking at different images of the character. His skull shape is something that digital artists have already envisioned since the show aired. I drew inspiration from these images and decided to keep it simple by just having the skeleton next to the original. For the actual execution of the piece, I first made an entire pencil drawing where I then decided to add color and outline everything in a black pen. The outlining, in my opinion, is crucial since it adds to the graphic nature of a cartoon character. I also chose to keep the composition basic with each version of the character a little spread out. Having the paper horizontal made more sense since the character is shorter. 

I used the handout that we used in class for the man versus the skeleton drawing. The handout was helpful with the cartoon drawing because it gives an example of what it should look like. This cartoon drawing overall was a useful piece since it helps with working with different forms.