IMC: Day 1 (Saturday)

It's very very exciting! The first day of IMC (Saturday), I couldn't wait to get into the studio to see what was going on. Breakfast started around 7:00 a.m. and then off to the studio at 8:00. There were three studios available (two for painting/drawing and one for digital work). So, after checking out the various studios, parked my butt upstairs with one of the larger wooden easels. Since I paint standing up, I like to have some room to move back and forth.

So, after that, we had our basic introduction meeting and then off to the critique session. The critique's were broken into groups of 12 students with 4 instructors (in each room). After looking at my drawing, the basic comment was that it needed to be a LOT more exciting. We changed the viewing angle so that you were looking up at the egg (which made the egg a lot larger). Also, the guy needed to be more exciting. Rather than being half-way through the stroke, we re-positioned the main character so that the sword was at a full-back swing and showed a lot of emotion in the face.

An interesting comment was that they asked why there was a man running in the back. What was the basic premise. I finally mentioned that I added him because I thought that we had to have, at least, two people. Didn't need to. So, the running man added nothing to the story, so he was removed.

Now, that I had the basic idea going, during the afternoon, it was time to start restructuring the drawing using the new ideas. First thing that I had to do was to change the perspective of the guy and the egg. Make it closer and look up from the middle of the egg.

Then, the next step was to change the position of the sword to make it more dynamic. This entailed taking more reference photos with the sword behind the head and the person starting the swing at the beginning of the arc, rather than the middle

Once the angle was changed and the person was positioned correctly, the next step was to add the dragon. So that the dragon was looming over the guy, I needed to redraw a totally different dragon and then fill up the negative space with some wings or something else.

After I had my basic drawing done, Ian came over and readjusted it to make it more dynamic. The dragon had to be bigger and more menacing. The sword had to come back farther. The coat had to swing more.

In comparison to my drawing, this is the equivalent of me coming into a room and saying "Hi... I'm Dougie" versus "Yo!!!! Dougie's in the HOUSE!!!"