Teen Titans GO to the Movies - Beast Boy Draw-along (part 1 of 2)

After having recently seen the Teen Titans GO to the Movies (#TeenTitansGOMovie), I sat down and pencilled a Beast Boy that I thought would be a fun draw along. This was a bit of a quick one since I have many other duties to wrap up before my Lodi Library Con appearance on Sept 23rd.

I jumped in with a dynamic pose, I wanted to do something fun and use some sort of a dynamic angle that would bring out the quirkiness that is Teen Titans GO and Beast Boy. So the first pose didn't quite cut that. It was more of a cool pose, not so much quirky. The second one, however, was much more dynamic and a bit of an upshot that allows for tweeking of the limbs and a harsh slant to the perspective which lends itself to the dynamic pose. Being as how this is a character pencil, there's no background, but it would have been fun to incorporate one using this angle, it would've been interesting.

After I nailed the pose, I just started laying in all the guidelines I use that help me keep from making the drawing horribly out of proportion. It's supposed to be considerably out of proportion, because I don't like drawing real life proportions that much. I always want that something more, that dynamic thing that comics give that just looks so great on the page and screen.

I'm also using what Jim Lee (amongst many other artists #JimLee) would call incorporating the "XYZ." Which is where you take the "Cartesian XYZ Coordinates" and attempt to put different parts of the body planes (any area that can be angled and head in a direction of one of the XYZ coordinates) along the axis roughly, and it makes the overall image more dynamic. As seen below, the directions can be positive or negative of where the starting point or center of the axis is. These two diagrams are a rough idea of what those are:

Another for reference:

Don't think of these specifically how you're seeing them here. They're just a way to see depth (X), width (Y), and height (Z). If something's at a weird angle, like Beast Boy's upper leg/thigh in the video, that's going to be designated another angle, Like "A" or his shin coming out at us would be "B" or the bottom of his foot even further coming out at us would be "C" and so on ... But don't get too caught up in that, it'll really mess with you and slow you down. Just know of its existence and move forward.

You don't have to specifically choose a place to put the XYZ center point in your drawing, it's just a principal to keep in mind so that you know when you're "coming out toward the viewer" or "breaking planes" visually. It just helps make it more engaging. Just roughly think of it as below:

The object is to put those into a dynamic perspective that helps you warp reality a little bit and bring visual interest. This is one of the reasons that Jack Kirby is considered a King in comics. He had this down pat. His style was lost on me as a kid, I simply didn't understand the insanely huge contribution he made to comics until I got older and more skilled.

Towards the end of the video, I begin cleaning up the art a little bit. This video ends around that point a little abruptly, but continues where this left off in part two.

Hope you enjoyed this write up and found the video a helpful combination to the thought process. I'll catch you in the next one!