A Little Warm-Up
My schedule for this month has completely gone out the door. There will be more of a schedule for the full Smart Dummies event. Starting Sunday I’ll be posting a schedule for everything we are working on this month. If you want to get your dummy done in a month you can follow the Smart Dummies Regular schedule on page 4 of your planner.
Let’s start warming-up our drawing skills by making some shape doodles. Just pick a shape (circles, triangles, square, oval ect.) Give the shape eyes, noses and mouths. You can just start with faces, but weird bodies are okay too.
If you can get a design for your main character designed before you start Smart Dummies you’ll be off to a great start. Fill up pages 7-9 with some doodling and try to figure out what you want your character(s) to look like. If you feel like moving on in your booklet or skipping around then do so! Creating a dummy is not a one size fits all situation.
You want to be able to draw your same character over and over again. Once you figure out what you want to draw, then draw that character over and over again. You may want to try different poses, but not until you are comfortable with your character.
Check out your library (and your personal picture book collection if you have one). look for books that have simple drawings. I’ll list some here so you can see how easy you can go.
Ed Emberly’s books have simple characters created with simple shapes or thumbprints. He has a whole set of drawing books that show how to draw anything using simple shapes. If you can find any of these books at your library do pick them up! His website is http://www.edemberley.com there you can see some of his work and get a few tutorials. You can also do an internet search to find out more!
Shel Silverstein has a lovely collection of picture books. Many of them just with line drawings. One of the most simple of these is The Missing Piece which features a Pac-Man like character as the main character.
Aree Chung’s “Mixed: A Colorful Story“ is another story that’s made with simple shapes and flat coloring.