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Speaking of improvement - I was thinking about that teacher I had who said you had to draw seven heads high before you could break the rules while watching those old RGB clips.

I noticed that the show is pretty good at being consistent with the heights of the characters, unlike Transformers where heights could change constantly to accomodate various situation. Egon is the tallest, Peter is a little shorter, then other two are shorter than Peter but maybe about the same height as each other. I actually counted. Egon is about 7 heads high. Peter is about 6-1/2. Winston and Ray are about 6. Loro up there is about 6 heads high (not counting his hair as part of his head). He probably should be about 1 to 1-1/2 heads higher, as I imagine that if he were standing next to the RGB, he'd be taller than even Egon.

I can MAYBE understand what that teacher was getting at - if what he had actually said was that you have to be able to draw realistic proportions before you can draw cartoonish proportions. But it seems to me like choosing 7 heads in particular is an arbitrary number to start with. If there is a reason you have to be able to draw people really tall first before you can draw shorter heights well, he didn't make it clear. And it seems to me like it would make more sense to draw people at average heights first, and then bend rules to make them taller or shorter.

One thing I can say is that I've never ever had a cartooning class or art class that even touched the basics on human anatomy. I wish now that I had because I think that would help immensely for drawing characters like Sesa and Chance who are supposed to have more realistic proportions and anatomy than characters like Honen, Deuce, Nucleo, and Image.

All of my elementary art classes were like the ones Crawl described where the teacher says "Draw an L for a nose". I think all elementary art classes are probably like that.

My first high school art class taught perspective and little else. We drew buildings and furniture using perspective and I certainly don't remember drawing any humans in that class.

My second high school art class was one of those deals like Kiera had where the teacher would have you draw a grid on a picture, then draw a larger grid on a paper or posterboard, and then you'd copy each square. I agree with her that it's one of the absolute worst ways of teaching an art class possible. Never mind that it teaches copying instead of creation - even for copying, using that method will teach you absolutely nothing about form, composition, structure, anatomy, perspective, or anything for that matter.

Out of highschool, I had four art/cartoon courses:

1. An art history class I needed for college credit towards my degree. We didn't draw much at all, so I wouldn't count it, though it was the class I made those sculpture models of Harken and Seth for (as well as a few others that fell apart, like Calico King).

2. A non-credit Cartoon course. This was taught basically in the same manner as any elementary school class. Sadly, as sucktastic as my skills were/are, they were still beyond what the course was able to teach. I now own the "How to draw cartoons" book that was basically that class's bible (remember the costumes from around the world picture? It's from that book), and taking that class was really no better than reading the book.

3. The non-credit advanced cartoon class. This was the seven-heads high guy. This was the teacher who told me this was a vast improvement over my previous work. Yeah.

4. A non-credit animation class that wasn't even at the same school. It wasn't at a school at all. And it was a total rip-off. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that until later and I let this woman get to me. I used to have sketchpads full of video game characters I had drawn for whatever reasons, but she kept going on so much about how drawing/using characters that weren't your own creation was "PLAGIARISM!", that I got paranoid and threw them all away. She once made a student change the helmet on a football player he was drawing because it had the Dallas Cowboys logo on it and that, to her, was PLAGIARISM!! What's even worse is that I never got a chance to animate anything because they only had one animation machine and there were too many students in the class for everyone to get a chance to use it. Those who did get the chance didn't really turn out anything spectacular with it. Imagine something like South Park, only even more amateur-ish. Oh, and the great thing was, one of the kids who did get to use it had Shyguys in his animation. I can imagine the only reason he got away with it was because she didn't know what they were.

I really can't believe I let that person get to me. She was even worse than 7-heads Man. He at least was going in the right direction, even if he was incompetent at teaching it. But even professionals like John Kricfalusi will tell you that copying professionals' work (for your own practice, of course, not to claim as your own or make money on it) is one of the best ways to learn.

Rough sketches from Part 4:


Cirrus and an Anti-Virus Drone.


This is the same image as on the site, but without the ArcSoft effects added in.


Rougher version.


Although the Drones look okay, I honestly could have done a better job with Deuce in this one. It was one of the last scenes I drew and I rushed it a bit. Her legs and feet weren't quite right and I never bothered to fix them.


These two were placed farther apart in the final draft.


Honen can be angsty and uncooperative, but he has his moments as a nice guy.


Though far from perfect, this is a huge improvement over the way he looked in "In Case of WTF, Break Glass" when he was hit with the towel.


This might be my single favorite scene from Chapter 4. Honen is rather nervous being around a version of Deuce Koma that doesn't like him, especially since he's aware of how bullheaded and triggerhappy she is.


That unfinished "Honen" to the right is a practice drawing of the "oldschool" Honen. You can see the differences to the design when compared to the "newschool" Honen on the left.


Rough sprites from the Megallon explosion scene.


Honen's back-kick. Had a hard time positioning his foot correctly.


Rough kneeling Honen.


Oldschool and newschool Honens. The one on the right was slightly obscured by Deuce in the final version, so here's the full drawing.


Rough Honen sprites and Anti-Virus Drone from the "falling pillar of dolls" scene. Incidentally, this marks the first time in years I've drawn something that was not created by me (the falling mushroom heads and dolls in this case.)


Color versions of the Honen sprites.


Various things.


Exploding Megallon without added Deuce, Honen, and Cirrus sprites. The self-destruct mechanism of the Megallon was almost foolproof - if only Honen had counted on running into a future version of himself...


Rough walking Megallon.

From the last sketch....The first few I've posted before in Post a Picture:

Honen loves his machines.


Puzzled Loro.


Nucleo is thoroughly freaking out.


I used a picture of Jake Gyllenhall as a model for this.


I rarely drew back views of my characters in the past.


Honen confronts a hate-filled, angst-ridden 1995 version of himself. Oh me and my not-so-subtle allegories.


This came out better than I thought it would. I used a model of a woman sleeping on the ground from Google Image Search, but she was facing the opposite way and actually lying on her back. I had to twist Deuce's upper body around so she'd be lying in the position that I wanted.


Drones.


Important scene for Honen's character. He's still very paranoid, basically phobic, of magic.




She gets put to sleep and woken up by the same guy...sort of...


I originally was going to draw the '95 Nucleo wearing his old mage cloak, but I really don't like that thing, so I went with a Sherlock Holmes-style...uh, don't really know what that thing is called...


Rope Demons


If only he hadn't started freaking out, Nucleo probably could've gotten rid of himself sooner, but...

Crawl and 1OOO wrote:

---

I think this was the picture that turned into Honen running:

Yes, it is.

I don't remember what I GIS'ed, (probably something like "person running"), and the funny thing is, I didn't even realize until I was about halfway through the drawing that it was Jake Gyllenhall. But I happened to glance at the picture's URL and was like, "What? Oh... I guess that is him."