Florian Satzinger: Feed Your Artwork!

An Indian parrot hatchling is fed by hand on this hilarious photograph. (via)

Which in turn fed my inspiration:

Florian Satzinger: Guides

Drawing those green guides (you can use any colour you want, of course) on the characters effect automatically a better understanding of the volume or form. Which is important for the whole process related to placing shadows, accenting weight etc.

Wouter Tulp: Shapes and textures

Florian Satzinger: Rough Process

Update: There was a question about the zoom level I'm using:
33,3%-50% for the blue rough sketch

100% for the clean-up line work:

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This was entirely done in Photoshop with an Intuos4. I did this piece btw in parallel with the motor suit I posted here earlier.

Florian Satzinger: A Good Plan...

... is half the design.

Rad Sechrist: Emotional shapes

I didn't make this up, it's something that has been done in production design both in live action and animation for a long time. It's a lot of fun to play with. Here is how I used it in a recent comic.

Octavio Rodriguez: Making faces out of shapes....

Here is one of my methods to quickly knockout some shapes for faces. 

First I'll start to draw a bunch abnormal circles, as below:

Then use those shapes as the foundation:

To make these rough sketches:

Here's another example, just a little more dissected:)

Draw some shapes:

Draw the accents for the face (nose, hair, ears, etc...)

Ending up with this final result:

This process I find helps to keep you loose and also keeps it fun as you discover shapes you wouldn't normally create.  Because your focus is on the specific details from the beginning then looking at the overall design:)

Brian Wong: Drawing videos (shape)

Just another video but this one was using more of a shape based approach to the drawings... (though some of the drawings in the end went back to the regular approach)

Also just a note, I've created a new channel for all these videos... so all of the videos are in one easy to find place.. (was using my friend's account for the first 3 videos before)

Florian Satzinger: Fat Brush

"Got any suggested exercises for improving at design/drawing?"

... sure, ride the Shape Mon! This is something REALLY helpful to me to get new ideas... just take a fat brush and paint with the greatest of ease.

And it won't do any harm to inform your art :) Make your studio a laboratory. Get inspired!

Finally, I used one of them as a reference for a minor character in StarDucks.

The same goes for here:

Here's another example which deals with the same thing (I posted that on my blog earlier):

Work In Progress 2 from Florian Satzinger on Vimeo.

Florian Satzinger: Horse Power - Inspire Your Design

Working with reference material: The horse skull's shape and details were useful references for the design of this jet bike. Even you can't see the horse skull in the final rendering, it's there.

Image: Wikimedia

Update: Here is another piece about the same subject...

Photo: Skeleton Nothosauria (via Wikimedia Commons)