#04 • 3D Circles
Understanding that geometric shapes provide us the building blocks to create characters. Let’s be again to look at how to make these 2-D base forms dimensional.
1. Adding center lines
The 3D circle or sphere is a solid foundation for most cartoon heads. To begin to turn a simple 2D circle into 3D one, we can add center lines, both horizontally and vertically. This becomes a guide for where we can place our face facial features. The eyes and go on the center line or just above, the bridge of the nose at the crosshairs, the mouth about halfway between the horizontal center line and the bottom. These crosshairs can move anywhere in the circle, bring are feature with them. We can also move our features wherever we’d like, pacing them apart, or bring them close together. These crosshairs are only a guide. But what happens when we curve the center lines, drawn like we’ve put a rubber band around our all? Suddenly, our head becomes more dimensional.
2. Contours
We can imagine that these curves wrap around our ball by drawing through on the backside. These lines are contours, like the lines we see around the globe or a pumpkin, but we only focus on the contours in the center. When we move these 3d crosshairs and the features we’ve added, we can rotate from the front, to a 3/4 angle, to the side, to the back, and back to where we started. We have our character look up or down. or we can imagine we’re viewing the head from a bird’s eye view or from underneath.
3. Deformations and and adding more.
Of course we can change the shape of the 3D circle like we’ve done with our 2D circles by squashing stretching or it like a balloon, inflating and deflating certain parts.. Or deform the circle into any shape that suits us. As the shape changes, the center line contours change with it. By understanding that the ball and contours are simply guide, we can add features on top–like hair hats, a snout, facial hair, earrings–whatever we can dream up.
Now Let ‘s take these ideas and spend 10 minutes turning shapes into characters
Assignment: Fill a page with variation on three shape characters