Here is a little more of a personal section for me. I am an artist, and here I would like to show how I made my most recent portrait of our favorite mad inventor. I did progress scans several times while drawing this, and so I will show these here to illustrate how I took a crude piece of lead (commonly called a pencil) and a sheet of flattened tree bark (which we call paper), and made this hand-drawn little image. Please keep in mind that I do not use a projector for my portraits; I only do free-hand drawing.
This is the result of my first few hours of work. Actually, I don't do rough sketching like they teach in art schools. This is just the way I taught myself how to draw. In case you were wondering, my starting point was on the corner of his left eyebrow. Then I worked from there onto the right, then (carefully) put in the eyes, then the nose and a rough mouth. I had fun doing his nose : ) It's so twisted and beaky. I was up till almost 2:30 in the morning doing this.
After getting the face done, I next did this outline of Rudy's round face. I particularly liked putting that little fat roll under his chin. I changed the right eye a little, moved the mouth slightly, and shaded him in to match that classic silent film look. A few tufts of hair to remind me where the gray streaks will go and on I went to plant his famous disheveled hair on his head.
Now, this is where I had the most fun. I do lions' manes constantly, so why should this have been any different? It was challenging getting some parts to look bushy enough, as if that can possibly be hard. It's when I was doing this part that I realized what a wild hairstyle they put on him. It practically stands on end in some places! But it's the hair that Rotwang is most recognized for, so I gave it my undivided attention and patience to get it right.
Added on the right side of his hair, and here you have it - a disembodied head! But it looks good. Then came the hard decision of whether I wanted to add more to him or just leave him severed at the neck, floating on the paper. I couldn't resist, especially since my very first Rotwang sketch had a small part of his coat collar and shoulders; I wanted this one to outdo that first sketch by leaps and bounds.
Whew! How nerve-racking. I was fairly scared of making this look weird by adding on his upper body. There was also a concern that his head would still look as if it were detached from the rest of him, but this turned out better than I had thought and I'm happy with it. The funny thing about drawing clothes is that while your eyes are zoomed in on the fine detail you're doing, the pencil marks you make all seem very confusing and make no sense whatsoever. But, when you lean back and look at it as a whole, it all looks just fine...and looks like clothing. I'm lucky his coat didn't have to be clean and neat; it has grime and old machine grease marks all over it, so it was okay to make it a little scruffy. Also it was fun making the buttons on his vest look stressed, as if they are about to pop off any second.
But my very favorite part about this work is his eyes. Eyes are always the hardest to do, but I was lucky to get both of his the same size and pointed in the same direction. It's odd that even in black and white, you can tell that his eyes were icy blue ; )
I had a good time doing this portrat of my favorite character from Metropolis, and I hope you enjoyed this short walk-through on how to make your own mad scientist!
