Schoolism LIVE 2019 - Skulls, Dog Designing and Story!

On the 21st April last year, I attended Schoolism LIVE in London, UK. I went to various workshops covering human anatomy, character design and story telling, conducted by Scott Eaton, Aaron Blaise, and Louie Del Carmen.

The first workshop was run by Scott Eaton, (an artist specialising in anatomy and sculpture) which covered the anatomy of the human skull. He went through step by step on how to construct a skull from the bones and cartilage, to the muscle, then the fat and skin. Scott's principle was that the head is the shape of an egg, with the face hanging off of the smaller end of the egg as pictured below.

From there you divided the face in half down the centre, at this point is where the ear is located and the jaw bone begins (pictured below).

Then the eye typical sits above the bottom line of the egg shape in the first half of the divide, and then the cheek bone is located under the eye, connected to the top of the ear (pictured below).

I found Scott's workshop incredibly informative and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but before ending the workshop he told us about his website 'Bodies in Motion' which harbours a vast library of movement reference and posing to practice human anatomy and posing.

Bodies in Motion: https://www.bodiesinmotion.photo/

The second workshop of the day was one hosted by Aaron Blaise, a character designer, director, teacher, and animator, who has worked for the likes of Disney. He took us through the process of designing a character based off of a description from a book, which happened to be 'Call of the Wild'. He showed us how he would tackle creating a design for the dog and got us to join in to work along with him; we broke down the description of the dog, picking out the key points that would influence his overall look and began to build his design from there, implementing the principles of core shapes, form and line.

The final workshop of the day was curated by Louie Del Carmen, who has worked for the likes of Disney and Dreamworks, and his workshop focused on the art of storytelling. Louie went over how to structure a story, generating ideas for it, the philosophies of storytelling, process of story-boarding, and going from script to visuals. I found his workshop to be extremely helpful as it allowed me to understand how to put my own stories into a good storytelling structure.

I loved attending Schoolism LIVE and cannot wait to go again!