Eisenberg Tom & Jerry Study

Here's my verbal analysis for this study:

-Opposing lines of action on each character
-Tom has a backwards "s" curve line of action at almost a 45 degree angle
-Jerry has a backwards "c" curve for LOA
-Tuffy has a regular "c" curve for LOA
-Tom has a surprised look (not just in the face, but in his body as well, like raised shoulder's, big surprised eyes, raised eyebrows, raised knee, raised foot)
-Jerry has his eyes closed and Tuffy's are wide open looking directly at Tom
-Jerry is immensely happy to eat some fried chicken and Tuffy is happy with his cupcake
-Tuffy is raised higher than Jerry inside lunch pail
-Tuffy's on top a higher stack of sandwiches making him higher than Jerry
-Jerry is slightly bigger than Tuffy
-Jerry and Tuffy's torsos are each 1 and half heads long
-Tom's torso is 2 heads long
-Lots of space between ears and eyes in each character
-Lots of space inside each characters ears (very big ears)

I wrote down the analysis on my paper, but I thought it would be best to type it up here rather than for you to struggle through my handwriting.

So I first put in the lines of action of each character...


Then I put in the primary forms on top of their LOAs and checked my proportions...


Here I've put in the secondary forms and details on top...


And cleaned it up a bit, but not too much to loose all the underlying structure.

Some Studies

These are just some good images I found that I thought were good to study from.

I feel like I'm stuck drawing characters floating in space and I figured I should try making drawings of characters within backgrounds that are all under a well-structured composition.

I wanna try incorporating some background elements within my drawings and studying these I thought would help me to do so.






The first two images I got are from Chris' awesome ComiCrazys blog! Lots of neat and inspirational stuff there! Go there NOW!

The last one I found was in John's blog of a Kurtzman post.

Pedro's Slab and Ernie Exercise

Hey, everyone! Happy New year! Hope your holidays were nice!

Here's my take on the Slab's First Fist layout exercise.


Hope these are okay. They aren't fully cleaned up though.

I wanted to see if I was going in the right direction before I kept going and wanted to hear everyone's thoughts.

I tried maintaining the guts on some of these from the storyboards. I think overall I did fine. There are some problems I noticed like some things are slightly toned down and I had some problems spacing the characters within the background like the ladder being to close to Ernie as well as too close to the edge of the paper.

I also tried maintaining a good flow between each pose so that they consecutively flip properly.


I remember reading a post that John did in his blog about how Irv Spence designed the eyes on some Tex Avery characters where their eyes don't follow the center line on the head without making them look flat. Here's the post I'm talking about.

I tried dong so with Slab and Ernie's eyes in most of these layouts so to attract the viewer to their expression in their eyes like the one Ernie has above, which I think was John's intention when he did the storyboard.

Doing this also helped the drawing retain the guts from the storyboard drawing.


With this last layout below I analyzed from the storyboard drawings that these last poses took up almost the whole spacing of the BG, so this is the layout I drew first while I visually planned out how the other poses from the other storyboard drawings would fit into that final spacing of the BG.


As I did the other layouts, little by little I started changing certain things in the BG like raising the top bed for Slab's big fist to fit in better or adjusting the steps on the ladder, so that all the poses read clearly alone as well as read clearly and make sense within the background.

I don't know if that was exactly the correct way to go about it, but it seemed to make sense to me.

Let me know what you think! If anything doesn't make sense let me know.

space behind face

One thing I notice lots of artists do, is they leave out negative spaces within objects


especially the space behind the face - between the eyes and the back of the cranium.

These Jones characters are really well constructed and have a great use of space VS filled areas.

Copy these and always keep in mind the use of space around filled areas in your own drawings.