Josh's Blog

Here are some cat shapes I threw together for a discussion in one of my classes this week. I agree there are a lot of ways to explore characters with poses that have foreshortening and a lot going on within the overall shape of the character, and silhouettes do not work for that. However, that kind of illustration is not what silhouettes are meant to be used for. Silhouettes are supposed to be the first step done when you have no idea or a limited idea of what the final character will look like. or a very limited direction (orc, mutant, alien) these are the times when silhouettes work the best. For example, one of my fellow students, appears to already have a clear direction of how he wants his characters to be. His Alice character is a slim female character with a floor-lenght fitted dress that flares at the bottom. the cat is a standard house cat shape, but no need to work out a lot of silhouette shapes for that. he knows what they are going to be already. This image above would be the kind of explorations he should be doing if he wanted to explore his cat character further. we might have ideas of what aspects we would like the character to have but the silhouette sketches will hopefully help us push concepts to the next level. then once we have a solid grasp of what the character will be based on the silhouette studies. then we can place the character in an interesting foreshortened pose that wouldn't make a good silhouette but will make a wonderful finished illustration. silhouettes are a tool and only work if they are used for the right purpose and in the right context…. like concept art.