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| Old School 12Field Guide scanned on basic home scanner |
One of the biggest expenses in creating animation electronically is buying a Cintiq or some such tablet. The mistake is to think that having the latest equipment will make your art better.
Getting the largest Cintiq to draw on doesn't mean you'll be able to draw better, it just means you'll have the ability to draw more complex designs. But since most modern day animation is being watched on small devices like iPhone, iPads and computer screens, I suggest character designs should be simple in order for facial expressions to be legible.
And if you want to draw those simple characters on paper, you can use 8.5 x 11 inch paper, scan it on a basic home scanner/printer, and import those JPEG files into a basic animation/coloring program.
Let me point out to you that all those classic Warner Brothers, Disney, Max Fleischer, MGM, and Terrytoons theatrical short cartoons were drawn on a maximum 12 field area...and projected onto screens at least 15 feet high and 45 feet wide.
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| My 16-year-old Epson scanner |
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| One of my rough poses scanned on my old scanner |
The following three Popeye animation poses appear to be drawn on 8.5 x 11 inch paper.
Here's a scan of some Batman and The Joker animation poses I drew on 8.5 x 11 inch paper for that series of Zeller's Batman TV commercials run in Canada back in 1988.
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Speaking of field guides, the one you posted on top reminded me of a silly show Nickelodeon once aired in the 80's called "Out of Control", starring a pre-Full House Dave Coulier. The show was like some sort of mock news magazine of sorts that featured animated bits done in a cut-out style a la Monty Python, but in particular, the opening and closing of every episode featured the field guide (I assume the same one offered by Cartoon Colour Co.) that many of us kids probably thought it was some sort of TV test pattern anyway, but that image stuck with me all these years.
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