Heath Ledger as the Joker

Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor!

This is 1 of 4 pieces I did for Daniel Krall's Illustration 2 class. Our assignment was to pick from this year's top 6 Oscar winners and illustrate them in a strange 8x3 format, with an extra inch above and below left free for text (which I opted to overlap into). I knew a lot of my classmates would end up creating a scene that looked like a movie still due to the format, and I wanted to avoid that. I also wanted to avoid any kind of cartooning because it isn't exactly my forte at the moment and getting a good likeness was essential. At the time the only 2009 Oscar winner I'd seen was The Dark Knight, which I loved. When I thought on Heath Ledger's performance, specific scenes came to mind, certain expressions and body language and interactions he had with other characters. I decided that the best way for me to capture the feel of his and the other actor's performances would be to screencap all of these scenes and draw directly from them. It's something I would normally avoid, but in this case it just seemed to make sense.

This meant that I had to actually see the other top movies, (including Vicky Cristina Barcelona, though I didn't end up drawing for it), taking notes of the scenes I felt were most important, then either finding caps online or making my own. After I collected all the caps I printed them out and made line drawings from them with the aid of my mini light table. This made getting proportions down a lot easier and faster than otherwise but it didn't help much in the areas of likeness and line width which is why some places are kind of wonky. Overall I think I did a pretty good job, though. I did a lot of drawings.

After I did as many drawings for each character as I could, I scanned them all in and aligned them all in Photoshop. This was the fastest part. It took about 16 hours straight through - unfortunately the night before it was due. The pieces I'm showing you now have been edited somewhat since I had them printed and presented them in class.

All of the drawings were done with marker, a mixture of crayola, rose-art, random off-brands and some skinny felt tips from the school store. Nothing fancy.

The Joker is so badass!