Hi-yah! Last Monday during the Illustration Club (A.K.A. The Drawing Board) meeting, we watched a five minute scene from the hit animated television show Avatar the Last Airbender and made it a two hour drawing session.

Animation classes at other art school’s have actually showed episodes during studio periods for students to draw and learn from, so we figured why not try it ourselves?

Avatar in itself is well studied. The animators that actually worked on the show really did their homework on the different fighting styles and the all-important subtle movements that the body makes.

We tried not to pay much attention to the style the characters were drawn in, their clothing, or their facial expressions. Instead, we spent our time trying to capture the movement of each pose in our own static images. Some members got exceptionally active and wispy sketches while others focused on trying to develop a better understanding of anatomy. We’d even take the time to recreate some of the poses in real life to see how they stacked up or were exaggerated for the sake of aesthetic.

I got about 20-30 sketches out of it. I might not be able to kick all that well but I can sketch out kicks well enough…Of course, not all of the sketches are gold, but there wasn’t much pressure. It was just a fun little exercise we got to laugh about in the end.

The most important thing was that we got our creative energies flowing like chi.

my sketchbook: