Onward!!!

So Creative Computing Club is back, and this month we will be looking at illustration on both paper and computer. Today we looked at faces (cartoon) and how they are made up of different shapes and how to divide the face for placement of all the different features. We also looked at how images are lightly sketched, retraced, inked with sketch lines finally removed. For a lot of them it was a bit of an epiphany as they thought so many of these images were just drawn first try without sketching. Taking them through the stages of simply sketching circles and slowly adding features allowed a  lot of them to achieve better results.

I also had to explain, they need to slow down, analyse the thing they are trying to draw, break it up in to shapes and in to areas. A good book for this Christoper Hart's Humungous Book of Cartooning it is excellent, the other book I talked about is The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation both of which are prized possessions of mine. They all agreed they learned something and can see how this will help with both the graphics work and game design. It was strange today though as it was a computer club without any computers.

Today was also the first session I had to charge for, I sent out the email the other night and was quite upset to do so. I think it is more to do with the fact I really think a lot of these things we are doing should be covered more in school (which is free) so I was reluctant to charge. I am after all an idealist, that is why I am here. The parents were completely fine with it and were surprised that I had managed to keep them free for so long, so because of the parents paying the fees and from the donations that we get from this site we should be fine to carry on. It also means I can spend more of my time on planning out cool sessions instead of worrying about getting funding.