Frank Debenham
Jan. 4th, 2017 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinFrank Debenham was junior geologist on the Terra Nova expedition, under fellow Aussie T. Griffith Taylor; as such, needing to be where the rocks were (so, not on the Barrier or the Polar Plateau), and suffering a couple of badly-timed knee injuries, he wasn’t included on the major journeys of the Expedition and therefore tends to get left out of Expedition narratives. This is understandable but unfair, as it’s in his diary that many of the amusing character anecdotes are recorded, he was official photographer the second year so the pictorial record owes a lot to him, and it’s thanks to Deb’s vision and curatorship that we have SPRI, which makes understanding and retelling the Scott story so much more possible. In a way I suppose he’s the Horatio of the Scott Expedition – not part of the action, and easily overlooked, but a good, stable, supportive guy to have around, and keeper of the flame.
After struggling so to get a decent take on Crean, I’ve budgeted myself a full week for each person’s preliminary design pass. While I acknowledge there were mitigating circumstances with Bill, I was still concerned that my pace with him was a negative indication of things to come, so it was a great surprise to find that Deb turned up almost immediately I sat down to draw him, and I filled five good pages in two days.
As you might be able to tell from those photos, one of my primary concerns with Deb's design is to differentiate him from Cherry, who he resembles superficially. (There are still some photos, especially when they're in civilian garb, where I still can't tell which of them I'm looking at.) Body language and costume can go some of the way, but I have to work with what I'm given facially to exaggerate the differences there.
Despite the insistence of every life drawing teacher I've had, I find that drawing people small helps me to see the overall proportions and shapes, which is what I should be considering, when designing someone. So of course I filled nearly the whole page with enormous figures.
I managed to wrestle myself down to the proper scale on the next page, and I think I found what I was looking for.
The first entrance test to Sheridan's animation program – when I applied for it, anyway – gives you a character and asks you to draw them happy, sad, angry, and afraid. I keep coming back to this as a basis for expression sheets. It seems so elementary, but it's amazing how often I've drawn pages and pages and feel like I'm missing something, only to realise it's one of those four. See below, sad and afraid.
The part of me that likes a good story suggested that my ease in drawing him was because he was so happy for someone to be paying attention to him that he was as cooperative as he could be ... but I rather suspect it’s because he looks enough like a Disney prince that he ‘fits well under the fingers,’ as string players like to say.
After struggling so to get a decent take on Crean, I’ve budgeted myself a full week for each person’s preliminary design pass. While I acknowledge there were mitigating circumstances with Bill, I was still concerned that my pace with him was a negative indication of things to come, so it was a great surprise to find that Deb turned up almost immediately I sat down to draw him, and I filled five good pages in two days.
As you might be able to tell from those photos, one of my primary concerns with Deb's design is to differentiate him from Cherry, who he resembles superficially. (There are still some photos, especially when they're in civilian garb, where I still can't tell which of them I'm looking at.) Body language and costume can go some of the way, but I have to work with what I'm given facially to exaggerate the differences there.
Despite the insistence of every life drawing teacher I've had, I find that drawing people small helps me to see the overall proportions and shapes, which is what I should be considering, when designing someone. So of course I filled nearly the whole page with enormous figures.
I managed to wrestle myself down to the proper scale on the next page, and I think I found what I was looking for.
The first entrance test to Sheridan's animation program – when I applied for it, anyway – gives you a character and asks you to draw them happy, sad, angry, and afraid. I keep coming back to this as a basis for expression sheets. It seems so elementary, but it's amazing how often I've drawn pages and pages and feel like I'm missing something, only to realise it's one of those four. See below, sad and afraid.
The part of me that likes a good story suggested that my ease in drawing him was because he was so happy for someone to be paying attention to him that he was as cooperative as he could be ... but I rather suspect it’s because he looks enough like a Disney prince that he ‘fits well under the fingers,’ as string players like to say.
