Tim Burton exhibition

27th August 2010


Tim Burton's exhibition at ACMI was a experience that helped me learn alot about a totally different style of illustration.
  The most recent Tim Burton film i'd seen was the 3D Alice in Wonderland movie that came out last year. The Tim Burton version of this disney classic was quite interesting especially with Johnny Depp's lead as the Mad Hatter. 
Later in the exhibition i discovered that Johnny Depp is in many Tim Burton films including voiced characters in the cartoon films such as Corpse Bride. 


The exhibition showed Tim Burton's roughs which was good to look at for inspiration for an assignment at tafe. 
His roughs still looked rather good, compared to our roughs at school howveer showed the imporatnce of doing roughs before our final work. 
  The most interesting drawings Tim has done was the Nightmare before Christmas. It was said that Tim uses alot of shapes such as triangles, circles and spirals in his work to show emotions in his characters.


Tim Burton seemed to have a weird like childhood to produce such unique and distinctive artwork for his films. 
His ideas and concepts all explore the same gothic fantasy themes such as graveyards, skeletons, corpses, but also people like clowns. 
  Towards the end of the tour, we got to produce our own drawings on Tim Burton characters, this exercise was good because we got to see our capabilities in illustrating his style, it was easy enough to do spirals and his character's hands (which are like stick figures) but i found it hard to draw those odd shaped heads and characters, some of which can be 3 or 4 different animals joined together. 


I found this excursion interesting and when i got home, ended up watching a few of his cartoon movies, the Corpse Bride and Nightmare before Christmas. Its good to see this distinctive style that carries through in the actors of the characters that plays these roles for example Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands and Willy Wonka (Charlie and the chocolate Factory).