Hanzz - the caricaturist

Dogwaffler of the Moment:

caricatures by hanzz

a member of the June Toon Platoon

more: DOTM

Hello

To Probe Further:

hanzz.be

Hans'
Tutorials

our
tutorials

Hi, my name is Hans, I live in Belgium, the land known amongst other things for the comic strip and cartoon industry. I'm also known as hanzz. I do a lot of caricatures. You can see some of my work at my website, www.hanzz.be

I've tried and used a number of drawing programs, including ArtRage and ArtWeaver. Whether you're an artist on a tight budget, or a professional who already invested into the more expensive 'big guns', I can highly recommend some of these freeware or shareware programs. In the end, they're all tools, and the real magic comes from somewhere between your left and right ear.

I do like and have used Artweaver a lot. Now I'm also using PD Pro, the latest version of Project Dogwaffle. And I'm finding a whole universe of new tools I didn't even know existed. All I can say is WOW! And it's great that they still also make a free version available.

Tickle my nose

Particle Brushes!

Project Dogwaffle lets me easily add a whole new style of backgrounds such as lush foliage effects, trees, grass and shrubbery. I can also use it for fancy hair, moustaches etc...

Background trees and grass
made just in a few seconds!

I like those to manage colors from images such as this one to create a custom color well or palette based on the colors found in the current image.

Waffling

I recently re-discovered Project Dogwaffle. I had dabbled with an earlier free version long ago, but never quite took to it. Now with the great support from the developers and the tutorials, I've become rather proficient at it in just a few days, and I'm finding a lot of fascinating things to do with it such as adding fancy hair with the particle brushes or automatically converting the colors from an existing image to a new custom color well. And now that I saw that there is a plugin for Artweaver to work with Dogwaffle, I think it's the perfect companion to use together.

First Steps

One thing I tried first is simply to dabble and try some basic shapes used in figure painting, I immediately liked what I saw.

Here's a work in progress, my first caricature in Dogwaffle, shortly after loading a hand-drawn sketch, which I scanned from a pencil/paper drawing. My initial sketches usually start with pencil on paper. I've seen very impressive work done in similar ways by others such as that shown by Martin of Cybersign. Dogwaffle has great scanner and oether TWAIN import support, and can recognize and load dozens of image formats.

click me for larger screenshot

I really like to have a photo visible on my desktop when I work on coloring the sketch. Once the reference photo is loaded I use the Store Buffer (or Store Image) command from the Buffer (Image) menu. I can then keep it in a resizeable thumbnail and place it wherever it's convenient. I like the way I can totally customize my workspace.

Once thing I usually need soon thereafter is to create a color table with the main colors from the photo. Dogwaffle has tools to quickly and automatically create color wells from the image that's currently loaded. That really saves a lot of time.

Animations

I've always wanted to do animations, step-frame, hand-drawn, the good old-fashioned old-school way, and I found that Project Dogwaffle and particularly PD Pro has great features for creating and managing animations.

This animation was not done in Dogwaffle, but it shows what I am interested in doing.

Tutorials

I'm going to be creating examples made in Project Dogwaffle, and showing and sharing the techniques I use in a few tutorials. Hopefully this will inspire you to create your own caricatures, cartoons and animations. Here are a few tutorials. Come back for more in the future.

(Flash Tutorials created with Debugmode's Wink)

Tutorial #1	-	preparing.htm (size: 2.9 MB)
Tutorial #2	-	masking.htm (size: 2.6 MB)
Tutorial #3	-	painting.htm (size: 6.3 MB)
Tutorial #4	-	background.htm (size: 5 MB)
Tutorial #5	-	dogweavering.htm (size: 6.3 MB)

All images are copyright hanzz.be - no unauthorized use or duplication