Martin Etienne - his work and blog

**MARTIN ETIENNE BLOG LINK**

MARTIN ETIENNE WEBSITE

Martin Dessin a talented French artist and designer has very kindly allowed me to post some of his work onto my blog to share with you all! (I spent two hours writing a email in french to receive a lovely reply in English)! The link to his own personal blog where you will find more gorgeous drawings  and design work is above! Please check him out!

I was surfing the internet for interesting blogs that took my fancy and i stumbled across Martin Dessin, his blog is all in French, and my French is a little rusty now, however, my translation is Martin enjoys to spend his time drawing and listening to music. For me, music can have a large influence on the way you draw, it can put you into different moods, the different tempos can make you work quicker or slower etc.

I particularly love Martins charcoal life drawing's, i have only put a few on here do the rest of you feel inclined to take a sneak peak on Martins blog above! The way martin has created movement in the drawing below is very effective, the curves in the back and the positions of the legs create the illusion the model its moving forward. If i was to imagine this walk from a characters perspective, i can imagine it to be slow and smooth with minimal movement in the arms. The up right arches back to me creates a feel of confidence. The movement has a meaning. I also enjoy the way Martin has cleverly picked out certain aspects of the model to  shade which creates depth, and the strong contrast between the back of the charcoal and the white of the paper making it stand out more.

The use of charcoal carries on through out Martins other life drawings.

Here are some more images of Martins work that are different to his life drawing pieces. I particulary loved the two designs below. I love the use of negative space and the pastel colours. I tend to focus more on bright vivid colours, but you can create a classy look using pastel colours.

The image above is brilliant! Its clever, witty and a good bit of fun, i love the consistent colour pallet. I will be using Etienne's style as inspiration for my future animation.

Check him out!

Evaluation for Drama Workshops

Overall I found the drama workshops to be most rewarding. We looked at a range of areas regarding acting and animation. We learnt all about Diaphragms, how we breathe, the right way to breathe and miming characters. We learnt about using signs to get your message and ideas across to an audience. Miming took a lead role in the acting classes. Once we had got the hang of breathing deeply and using our full capacity we then went onto miming and acting out scene with no sound or mouth movements. For me, it was to demonstrate how simple movements, facial expressions, and posture etc can get across a lot of information to the audience. We should take this idea into our animations. Actions, expressions and movement are like the heart in your body when talking about acting. The heart pumps blood around to keep you alive, similarly you need expressions, mannerisms, body language to make a scene convincing. Expressions and mannerisms make it visually interesting and challenges the audience to make their own twists to our mimes. On the whole, the mimes were pretty self-explanatory.

We looked at various theorists like Rudolf Von Laban, a Hungarian central European dance artist and theorist. Laban’s work laid the foundations for Laban Movement Analysis and other developments in the art of dance. We looked at the stereotypes within movement that Laban created for example, a low heavy character would do punch, slice, and wringing movements, all disjointed, and uncomfortable movements and a light happy person would use gliding, flicking, dabbing movements. Laban did this so when he wrote a script the actor would act his words and then know the action he had to do, but due to their being no confinements, interpret it in the way the actor felt their character to take it.

We also looked at Cicely Berry an incredibly influential lady. Cicely Frances Berry CBE (born May 17, 1926) is the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company & is world-renowned in her work as a voice & text coach. We started off the lesson by doing some of Berry's warming up exercises for the vocal chords.

Once we had completely Berry’s warm up we had to show and tell our individual performances that we started the previous week. We had to sit in the 'hot seat', say our name, age, what we do for a living, and then answer questions from the class. This task was to challenge our ability, and how we could adapt under pressure. It was also to see how involved in our characters we could get, as we need to get inside our characters when creating character animations. Overall I found the acting classes to be an inside into a different world, a world that will holey benefit my animation work. I am more relaxed to lose my inhibitions to get immersed into my characters I create for future work. I also feel more confident about timing and breathing which I can incorporate into my animation work as well.

Eyewitness to Space: Over 1,500 drawings chronicling the American Space Program

AMAZING SPACE ILLUSTRATIONS

I found this page via doodlers anonymous which is one of my favourite databases to find inspiration, and fresh ideas. I love the techniques used in the sketches, they remind me of tasks we have done in the drawing classes.  If you go to the clip about you can see the whole collection, i have picked out some of my favourite illustrations.

I love the use of bright bold colours. We have not done a task in life drawing where we used colour, we have used chalk and charcoal. Even in my sketch book i haven't included any colour, this is something i should change and experiment with. Colour can really change the mood and feel of an image. For me, the image above looked like the character is in a crisis, everything looks frantic, the character would be in trouble or being attacked. I think it is the use of reds and oranges, as for me those colours represent danger and heat.

I LOVE the three illustrations above, the artist is extremely talented - i cannot find the name of the artist anywhere - as i got the images from somebody else's blog. (link at top of page) - I think its Smithsonian. The drawing style is great, it really caught my eye. Probably because it is so different to the way i draw, i have quite a confident neat line, i do not seem to put a lot of detail of depth or texture into my drawings; where as these illustrations do. Also what i think is fantastic is the use of negative space, some designers believe that a full page makes a brilliant eye catching design (and they could be right) but i also think that minimalism can be just as affective. A designer that can work with the paper he has been given, is someone that inspires me. Clever positioning can be key to make drawing look wrong or right. I remember one of my lecturers telling me, "When you are drawing a character running away from a threat, do not draw them in the middle of the box/paper, draw them to the edge, use the negative space to help piece the story together. The negative space will mean the character is traveling in a direction."  I also enjoy the use of brown and black ink in the lower of the three illustrations, for me it seperated three different aspects of a story on one page.

It is like looking at stills for a film, images for a story board. I love how the drawings just give the viewer so much information. I must look into how to do that myself... And therefore i have borrowed - 'Ideas for the Animated short - finging and building stories' by Karen Sulliban, Gary Schumer and Kate Alexander.