I am taking this great character design course at Schoolism.com, with Stephen Silver as mentor. (He designed Kim Possible). We have just had our second class, which was about how to get ‘loose’ in our drawings. Silver mentioned several influences, including Gerald Scarfe in Hercules during the class. Since I own the book ‘The Art of Hercules’ the name sounded familiar and I looked it up. I never realized the influence that Scarfe had on the movie!

With his calligraphic drawings, Scarfe helped make the style of Hercules more flowing and stylistic rather than the classic ‘fluffy’ Disney look. In the style guide for the movie, they define what they called the ‘Scarfe Line’, a swoop of a line with a sudden reversal. Ears are made up of swoops or scallops, so are noses, eyes, brows and overal body shapes. They call it the ‘Scarfe Powerswoop’. Here are a few examples that I did in Illustrator:

So in order to get ‘loose’ I draw a full page of scarfed hands, and bodies, to warm up, and it really helps. You should try it! Send me a link to all your scarfed drawings!

We have just finished programming a series of French maps and vocabulary interactive Flash pieces for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. These pieces will be incorporated into the online bookpages.