Sunday, July 10, 2011

Animation Drawings: Seen and Felt

Some drawings are meant to be seen (such as attitude poses), while other drawings are meant to be felt. These are drawings that convey movement that are accents and action.

When figuring out how to draw an accent or action, I start by imagining the emotion I want to convey, then analyze what tempo conveys that emotion. Let's take the emotion of enthusiasm. That would be a bouncy tempo...maybe a 4 to 6 frame beat.

Then I imagine what type of action my character will perform to convey his enthusiasm. In this case, he's going to spin in the air, making a complete rotation in 4 frames...and so on and so forth.

The above is all timed out on my exposure sheet before I make any drawing. (Note: I use the old school reference of 24 frames per second.) The reason I time everything out first, is that my analysis of the character's timing will dictate how the forces moving that character affect the body in motion. Thus, I draw the body squashing and stretching based on that analysis.

I offer as an example, drawings from the Hank the Spider Monkey test I posted previously. In creating these drawings, I started each drawing from the area of the body that was instigating that particular phase of the movement: head, shoulder, leg, etc.

19

20

21


22


23


24


25


26


27


28


29


30


31

32

33

34

35

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

53 

And below is the finished animation in color.

12 comments:

  1. I love the tail action follow-thru. It seems to pull it all together.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love the exaggeration on the tweens on frames 23 - 27!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beautiful clean-ups, too.
    Did you you do those as well?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you, Michael, Brett M & Brett K.

    Brett K: Yes, I did the clean ups as well. All part of the finger-limbering exercise. I have not had an assistant to follow me up in over 10 years. I don't know if the schools today are even teaching that phase of traditional animation drawing --- the technique of plusing an animator's rough sketch, so that the animator can concentrate totally on the movement and acting.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Really nice animation and drawings, John. Thanks for posting them large. I really enjoy seeing the pencil tests . (More please!)




    "I don't know if the schools today are even teaching that phase of traditional animation drawing"

    Some of us are still trying to.

    Would you post the X-sheet too, please ? I'm teaching traditional animation at Academy of Art University and I always emphasize to students that even if the animation is being done paperless on a Wacom tablet the traditional paper X-sheet has it's place as a tool for planning out the timing of the animation (then all that information can be transcribed to the X-sheet in ToonBoom or TVP Animation or Digicel Flipbook, whatever software is being used).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Let me amend my comment above: what I meant was I like seeing the pencil drawings, but would also like to see your rough pass pencil test and the final pass clean-up pencil test posted for comparison, if you've got 'em saved.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi, David. Thanks for the very nice comments (here and elsewhere). I don't know if I still have the rough pass pencil test. But I do know that I have the hand written X-sheet. So, give me a little time to scan that and see where my rough poses are, so I can rescan some of them and post them side by side with my cleanups.

    ReplyDelete
  8. The level of exaggeration is awesome and the squash ans stretch is just the right amount. I'm too poor to go to school again for animation, like I originally wanted, so I've been practicing on my own. Hopefully I can become this good someday, just takes a lot of practice!

    ReplyDelete
  9. just discovered your Blog, So awesome..

    ReplyDelete
  10. very inspiring for newbie animator like me, thanks

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi,

    Hello,
    I have a question, you've clean up with cintiq or with real pencils?

    thank you

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous: I draw only with real pencils. I then scan the drawings into Photoshop.

    ReplyDelete