#m y art

They share a single braincell and it says “eat the rich”

Trying to reacquaint myself with how to draw characters after a month of mostly drawing buildings and designing light

So here’s a nifty little

tutorial on pushing expression without caricaturing the characters too much 

The thing about these actors is that their expressions rely so much like micro expressions to carry very very heavy emotion across in fairly restrained people, so either we caricature/stylise their faces and make them more comic-y or we rely on rules of design to push a more realistic style.

In the case of Jyn and Cassian the expression is a lot in the eyes, so we’ll focus on that:

Eg: usually with sadness, the eyebrows will pull up at the centre, pulling the eyes with it with a triangle where its highest point is closest to the bridge of the nose. But Cassian’s eyebrows don’t always do that. Sometimes he furrows them instead, but we can still play with that triangle!

So what I do, is I usually have the line of the eyelid moving up like the eyebrow, emphasising that as the long shape, and have the lines inside the eyebrows move in a rhythm to emphasise that triangle. Similarly I’ll try to draw the shape of the eye socket in a shape that also emphasises that (here I’m using diamonds, because squares are better for masculine characters).

Further, I changed the edge of his cap so it moves up subtly, rather than down, to emphasise that sadness once more time.

Same with Jyn. Here, too, I’ve furrowed her brow a little more than it was in the original shot, because eyebrows that move up can also imply joy, and the realisation that they’re trapped on Scarif definitely is not joyful.

Compare to this one, where I had the lines inside his eyebrows push down on the eyes, and the eyeshade tilted a little to emphasise the downward turn at the centre of the face.

Perish the thought 

(aka when certain interpretations would make the canon character want to commit murder)

O, master of self-deceit

Free Palestine

So today, May 15th, marks the 74th anniversary of the Nakba. This is otherwise known as the beginning of the state of Israel or the Palestinian Catastrophe.

For those who don’t know Isreal is a settler colonial state who has ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people for decades. They have created the largest prisons in human history, and turned millions of people into refugees. This is a project that started Before the 20th century and continues to this day, and the entire western world is complicit through wilful ignorance.

Just this week Shireen Abu Akleh, an american-palestinian journalist, was shot and killed by IDF soldiers in what her colleagues say was a deliberate attempt at murder (source: AlJazeera). She’s the 55th journalist to be killed by Israeli forces since 2000. Not only was she an extremely skilled and influential journalist who documented the atrocities going on in Occupied Palestine, who was then silenced, but during the funerary procession mourners were attacked and her casket nearly dropped.

I can highly recommend the historical textbooks The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and The Biggest Prison on Earth by Ilan Pappe, who has documented the historical facts of the colonial settlement of Palestine. You can find the audiobooks on scribd (first month subscription is free), and the latter audiobook on YouTube. They’re extremely accessible and enlightening, and I cannot recommend them enough.

May our generation be the one to see this wrong come to right.

The Best Disguise