From the Sketchbook Pages of Sophia Wagganer

This page is actually a few re-drawings of old figure drawings that I had done a few months prior in my figure drawing class at Ohlone College. They weren’t very strong, so I thought it would be a good idea to revamp them using pastels ad to try to push the poses a bit more. I also added shading here, which probably wasn’t the best idea because I didn’t have any reference to go off of with it, but I just winged it and hoped that it would turn out OK.

This page was done from a live model, and I think it’s definitely one of my stronger figures. Both poses were drawn in under ten minutes, and were quite fun to do. Our model maintained a funny expression for a few seconds that I tried to capture on the left drawing.

This page was a lot of fun to do. I took a trip to the Oakland Zoo by myself to just walk around and draw all the animals I could. I decided to paint my giraffe page (because I have an abundance of brown paint at home) using acrylics. I adore working with acrylic paint because it has such a smooth quality to it and it’s very easy to blend (while it’s still wet of course).

This page was based on an old prompt that I got in one of my character design classes up at The Animation Collaborative, in which we took terrible family glamour shots from the 80s and made caricatures of them. It’s always a blast to take features on a person and push them to an extreme to really try and capture the character behind the picture.

These pages are an exploration of characters that I came up with for a little show concept I thought of. The gist of it is that the little girl is lonely so she summons a demon to be her nanny. I have yet to come up with any names for the two of them, but I still enjoy drawing them and trying to come up with little scenarios for them.

These pages were sort of a exercise I gave myself to try and capture some motion through an extended cycle. I drew these from a video I found on YouTube of someone doing a barrel turn in jazz class, nothing fancy. The goal was to show movement via pen strokes and bold lines to really feel the jump in the air, but I kinda fudged it and didn’t make the arc quite as strong as it should have been…

These pages are of my sweet dog boy! His name is Kipper, and I love him with all my heart. He is so fun to draw cause he has such wonderful shape language and has a lot of character to him. He needed lots of pats and treats to stay still enough for me to draw him though. He kept wanting to walk away right when I’d try to start drawing him, so that’s why some of these aren’t as strong.

This was a spread that I drew during a book launch/costume party one of my mom’s clients was having at their toy store in San Francisco. I got kind of tired, so I retreated to the corner and drew everything that I saw, which in turn made me even more tired. Complicated spreads like these always take forever, but the payoff is pretty rad. This one took me maybe an hour and a half to two hours to draw thereabouts, so this was probably the longest I ever spend on any of my pages.

This next drawing was from a costumed figure drawing session! What a treat! We don’t usually get costumed models, as it’s easiest to simplify the human form without anything “breaking” it so to speak, but sometimes we get fun ones! Our model dressed up as a Beefeater and did a few 10 minute poses, and this one was my strongest of that bunch.

These drawings are just some of my classmates from descriptive drawing class during the breaks that we get. Drawing candid people from life is really important (albeit a little bit stalkery) in animation as it’s an excellent exercise to draw figures really fast and capture a character at the same time. People tend to move a lot when you don’t tell them that you’re drawing them which adds a really helpful challenge to it as it forces you to stay loose, draw what you see, and keep it simple.