En Garde!

So about a week or so ago, sjsu had a guest speaker come in and give a pretty cool demo. His name was Chris Duval, and he was an actor, teacher and fight choreographer with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He was quite the character....pretty funny guy. So he brought with him some actual sword props along with some pool noodles and grabbed a handful of students and taught them a little thing or two about putting together a believable stage fight.

Not everyone was able to participate, and those that didn't (myself included), got to record all of the action in our sketchbooks. There was a lot of movement, so we had to draw fast and just get the gestures. It was kinda like a figure drawing session, only with less posing and more action, but it was fun overall.

As a result, Courtney decided to make an assignment from this experience and made us turn our sketches/gestures into an actual character. So these were a few of the gestures I was able to get.





This is the character I came up with. I really wanted to avoid the typical "hero" character with a sword, and attempt to make use of the prop in another way. I basically wanted to eliminate the use of a weapon all together and have the prop be something else. So, this is what I came up with.







haha, these were fun too. Enjoy!

-jeff