2009/03/15

Four Days with Dan Haskett

I attended a character design workshop with Dan Haskett at SVA this past week.

First we were asked to design a character that we connected to emotionally, or at least appealed to us in some way. I didn't manage to come up with anything that I really loved, but over time I developed a "loser knight" character that sort of encapsulates what I draw.


We were asked to draw Mickey Mouse, and everyone failed miserably. I think my redesign is way cooler than the Disney version.


Other than that, I just doodled a lot while Dan regaled us with stories of the animation industry, past and present.



I really liked drawing this skull spaceman/deep sea diver.


It's too soon to tell how much or how little I learned from this workshop. It occurred to me that when I'm designing characters, I don't consider how well they work for animation. Basically Dan said round, simple characters work best for fluid animation, but I think ideas like that can be limiting. It would be terrible if everything looked like a Disney film just because that's what moved best. Animation is an art like anything else - the more diverse the better. Even if I didn't agree with everything Dan said, he had a lot of great insight from years of experience, and though the change is subtle, I'm definitely thinking about my drawings differently.


The End.

7 comments:

Mie Illustrates! said...

Your Mickey Mouse totally wins

jake armstrong said...

I totally agree that drawings don't need to be round and simple to work. I think the idea is to have form and shape, and your drawings definitely work in 3 dimensional space. The skull-faced kid in 007 and 009 would move especially well.


And that mickey would totally kick the wimpy disney mickey's ass.

jake armstrong said...

oh, and i hate you. you draw my monster way cuter.

Kevin H.Y. Shen said...

good read

Elliot Cowan said...

Mickey Mouse is very fucking hard to draw.

And nice to see so much new stuff since the last time I was here.

Anonymous said...

Obviously Dan Haskett's class was wasted on you.Pearls before swine.

Kat Morris said...

Criticism is fine, but don't be a coward, "Anonymous".