People in Chairs

I’m trying to figure out how to do a better job of drawing people sitting on chairs.

Work asked me to resize a cartoon yesterday for use on social media (because bloody Faecesbook’s preferred size is the utterly awkward 1200 by 627 pixels). The social media team chose an old image (why always the old ones?!), and I couldn’t find the original.

I did this one a while ago, and while the message is clear, I feel like the background is garbage and the characters are drawn too quickly. (Like, WTF is happening with that woman’s hand?)

old comic

I figured I’d redraw it and do a fancier job this time — because newer is always better, right? So I foolishly decided to emulate a Van Gogh painting. How hard could that be to do in a hurry?

His:

Van Gogh scene

Mine:

Four Freedoms cartoon

It does the job, but the two figures don’t feel like they’re from the same world. And I hate the awkward way they’re sat in their chairs (which I’d pictured as proper Parisian chairs Craig always wanted, and now we have four unfinished ones of in our garage).

So today I have to draw a bunch of people around a boardroom table, and I’m trying to figure out a way to do it better. So far that’s involved trying to get 3D models in Clip Studio paint — which then promptly forgot all my saved custom materials along with the previously downloaded 3D content.

So while all that gets restored from cloud backup, I decided to find a SketchUp 3D model…

SketchUp model

That works, but the problem remains of posing figures in the scene, and SketchUp models aren’t editable (well, not by me).

So I got out my little ModiBot figures to create some real-world shapes I can follow:

modibot 1
modibot 2
modibot 3
modibot 4
modibot 5

Now I have to bring all this stuff together somehow… and actually draw something!

This is how I spend my days. I may sound frustrated, but who am I kidding? This is playing.