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You are dedicated to your craft. You have spent countless hours honing your skills. You have a boundless curiosity for the underlying theories and structure of communicating ideas. You are the artist who finds the connections between your medium and other communications media. You are the artist who relishes in a setback; after all, it's a new opportunity to learn and grow. Inspiration is more than a haphazard mode of thought requiring constant nurturing: it is your natural state of mind.

Lean Into Art is where you go when you're ready to push yourself as an artist in new ways. As a place to learn communication arts online it combines an art-journaling approach, the best of live and time-shifted classes, and a recognition system that encourages students to finish projects, give feedback, even participate in teaching.

It's a big art challenge - that's why we put the enticing warning in the name. You have to lean into it.

Lean Into Art Quests

Mini-challenge exercises for fun and practice

  1. Quest with us on Twitter using the hashtag #liaquest and the quest number.
  2. Link to your work to complete the quest, link to other examples to share powerups.
  3. Jerzy and Rob report on the latest quest and announce a new quest on the Lean Into Art Cast!
« LIA Quest 4: Smell of Funny | LIA Quest 2: Harvester of Borrow »
Monday
Feb042013

LIA Quest 3: Evil, or Just a Jerk?

DateMonday, February 4, 2013 at 2:23PM

Jerzy here as quest-giver this time.

Bad guys and gals are often the most fun characters in fiction: they give us a catharsis, they represent a self-possession we long for, or they're just plain more colorful. But developing a "bad guy" isn't as simple as it may seem, especially if you want an audience to react to them.

A few years back I participated in a discussion on episode 82 of the Art & Story podcast, where we broke down a few rough categories of bad guys, which were:

Megalomaniac: The character who wants to control everything and will stop at nothing to achieve that.
Examples: Cobra Commander, Beast Wars Megatron, Skeletor, Doctor Doom, RJ Fletcher.

Madness: The crazy villain, either a victim of society or a victim of his or her own hubris.
Examples: The Joker, Green Goblin, Two-Face.

Revenge: The villain who seeks revenge (or, in the villain’s mind, “justice”) against a hero.
Examples: Khan, Magneto.

Greater Good: The villain who does something morally reprehensible in the name of solving an insurmountable problem.
Examples: Kodos, Magneto.

Force of Nature: Not having an evil intent as such, this character is often an expression of the repercussions of mankind screwing something up.
Examples, The Gill Man, Moby Dick, Jason Voorhees, Maskatron.

Sociopath: The character utterly without a sense of right and wrong, who does dark deeds by compulsion.
Examples: Anton Chigurh, from No Country For Old Men.

Tamas, or Dark Inertia: A villain who destroys for destruction’s sake. No creative impetus. Almost demonic.
Examples: Ellsworth Toohey, Birgil.

The quest:

Normal Quest: Write a blog post assigning your own lists of villains to these categories, and why you put them there. 

Heroic Quest: Design your own bad guy or gal and explain where they’d chart in these categories. Are they a Greater Good/Revenge character? Are they Madness/Megalomaniac? It doesn’t have to be a super villain!

To turn in the quest:
Tweet a link to your post with the hashtag #liaquest3

To offer a power-up:
Share a link to a similar kind of post or tutorial on how to design really neat bad guys/gals!

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