Good Posing For Both Animation And Comic Book Art

I use the same principles of drawing for both my animation and comic book art. I follow the same stages of development in both types of projects. (Check out the completed comic page at: www.bloodwingangel.com

The sketch stages are: 1) Thumbnail; 2) Rough Pencil; 3) Blue Pencil Refinement; 4) Final Black Line. See the following samples below.

1) Thumbnail sketch and its enlarged version.

2) Rough Pencil Layout. Note the dialog balloon and spotlight placements for composition.

3) Blue Pencil Refinement of the character poses. The dialog balloons and spotlights will be on separate levels. 

4) Final Cleanup/Tie-down Black Line. Did this using a Blackwing 602 and a Mitsu-Bishi 9850, then scanning it at 300 dpi and adjusting the contrast. As I said earlier,
check out the final completed comic page at: www.bloodwingangel.com

Star Wars Holiday Special Boba Fett Animation Roughs

Happy Holidays! Here's my Holiday Musical Extravaganza on YouTube!

How To Draw Animation (Part 3): Overlapping Action! Secret Sauce of Animation!

In this tutorial, I show you advanced examples of overlapping action, a basic animation principle.

If you like this video, please leave a comment on YouTube...and if you like my channel and need a coffee mug or a T-shirt, check out: http://www.cafepress.com/johntheanimatorguy

How To Draw Animation-Squash and Stretch More Than Bouncing A Ball (Part 2)

My latest video. If you like it, please leave a comment on YouTube!

How To Draw Like An Animator

My latest YouTube video is now published! Hope you like it, and if you do, please leave a comment on YouTube!

Cleaning Up Drawings & Spacing Charts

This is a cleaned up animation key pose using buffed down blue pencil for underdrawing, tied down with a combination of Blackwing 602 and Mitsubishi 9850 HB for the black line...Blackwing 602 for thicker lines and Mitsubishi 9850 HB for more delicate line work!

It's second nature for me to describe on my spacing charts what I plan to do on particular drawings.

2D Animation Work In Progress

I've been working on this two and a half minute short web cartoon on and off for the past year. It's my way of keeping my hand in traditional 2D animation, using pencil drawings scanned into ToonBoom Studio software. This file shows the various stages I go through to produce my final color...there are completed color scenes, cleaned up animation, rough inbetweened animation, and basic key poses.

For those viewers who can't see the below embedded file, please go to Vimeo at:
https://vimeo.com/152711633

A frustrating aspect of Blogger is how it messes with the quality of the uploaded HD video clips. But this gives you an idea of how my characters' relationships are developing.

The Zen of Animation

Animator: BILL TYTLA

 
Animation that is entertaining is an extremely taxing process, both mentally and physically...so, it's best to enjoy experiencing the process itself. If you do, you will spend many positive hours in "The Zone", where you become one with the drawings you create.

Animator: BILL TYTLA

 

Brad Bird and Jerry Rees Letter

One of my mementos I picked up along the road to developing as an animator is this letter I received from Brad Bird and Jerry Rees.

Notice the lack of a formal letterhead on this letter from Brad and Jerry. They definitely weren't wasting any of the budget on non-essentials.

Several months after receiving Brad and Jerry's response to my portfolio and sample animation scene of The Spirit, I visited with them at their KINETOGRAPHICS office in San Rafael, California and showed them my animation reel from "Rock & Rule," which consisted of my characters Cindy Schlepper, Officer Quadhole, and Mylar the Club Owner. At that meeting, I was offered a spot as an animator on their Spirit crew once they got the project off the ground...which unfortunately never happened. A few years later, Brad tracked me down and asked me to animate on his "Family Dog" episode of Steven Spielberg's TV series "Amazing Stories." However, my plate was extremely full at the time and I had to decline his offer.

The following is my interpretation of The Spirit for animation. It would have been fun to do.

John Celestri's interpretation of Will Eisner's Denny Colt aka The Spirit.

Nelvana Seminar Notes (circa 1981): Part Three

These are the third and final set of notes from my Nelvana seminar. Please remember that I was asked to explain my personal method of animating (and the Frank and Ollie tomb "Illusion of Life" had not yet been published). We were all youngsters, experimenting on our own and trying to learn from each other.

The third seminar session consisted of answering questions that were handed in by animators a week after the first two sessions. I believe that the material covered in this series is as relevant today as it was 30+ years ago.
 

The following is how I rough out my full-size poses after working out my thumbnails.

Above is my first rough pass at a Quadhole key pose.

Above is my second rough pass at a Quadhole key pose...I mold the character's form over the forces I laid out on the first pass, making subtle changes as I feel the body reacts to those forces. This pose would be cleaned up on a third sheet of paper.

The next three sheets show how I filled out the basic posing and interpreted the timing of the previous examples shown in sessions one and two. Please refer to the exposure sheets in session one to see how I described the action with particularity. I find that writing it out in this manner forces me to analyze the movement in terms of "anticipation, action, and reaction".

If you have a mind to, you can cut out the poses (registering them by their leg placement and shifting of weight), then film them in sequence as a rough pose test, using the exposure sheet for timing.

Nelvana Seminar Notes (circa 1981): Part Two

This post contains the notes from the second of three seminars I gave at the Nelvana Studio back in 1981. The Quadhole artwork included here is a portion of what I handed out during those lectures, helping to illustrate my personal creative process in molding my animation. In a future post, I'll include the rest of the artwork with those third session notes.

 

 

To see how the phrasing of Quadhole's acting works with his dialog, please refer back to my exposure sheets in my previous post.

Nelvana Seminar Notes (circa 1981): Part One

It's been a very long time since I last posted. I always promised myself that I wouldn't write just anything just for the sake of posting something on my blog. Now I have a topic that I believe will be of interest to those visiting here.

Recently in a communication with Ken Duncan (Owner/Executive Producer of Duncan Studio), Ken said "John, when I was in Paris in the 80's I thought I saw some 'how to' notes that you'd done during Rock 'n Rule.....
1- Am I delusional?
2- If not, are they available to see?"

Well, Ken is not delusional...and after searching through my files I found the original typed notes that were xeroxed and handed out at Nelvana during the production of Rock & Rule. Basically, it was an explanation of my approach and work-flow method, going from initial thumbnails through to tie-down drawings.

Originally, there were 20+ pages in my handout for the three session seminar, which took place over three afternoons, using poses of my character Quadhole the Policeman to illustrate my approach. Because of the amount of material covered, I've decided to post them all here as a series. I have also supplemented the examples with Cindy Schlepper development material I created months after this seminar was given.

(Note: At that time, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's bible "The Illusion of Life" had not yet been published. Young animators such as ourselves were basically learning from our own experiments...studying the silent results on the studio's Lyon Lamb Video Animation System...not seeing if it worked with the dialog until it was shot on 35mm film and synced up on the flatbed.)

The following are my original typed notes from the first session. I'm including the exposure sheets and samples of my thumbnail analysis of a couple of Cindy Schlepper scenes.

 

These above poses were my very first exploratory sketches of Cindy Schlepper.

 

 

 

Above are my thumbnail analysis of the first time we see Cindy.

Cindy has arrived at Club 666 and is excited. "Oh, Boy! Mutants in the foyer!"

The following exposure sheets are for a Quadhole scene---the poses of which were originally handed out as a packet including the typed notes. I'll be posting those drawings in the next installment...and you can then cross-reference them with these sheets.

For those who are not familiar with the process, there's a lot to digest on these pages.
Hope you find it informative and useful.

The Animator's Team

Historically, the best way of producing animation in terms of both creativity and hitting production quotas was to set up animation units, whereby the various members of a unit could concentrate on certain aspects of bringing a scene to life. This was how the Disney studio set up its animation teams. At its most successful, it made for a great sense of pride and security amongst the team members that they could count on one another to get the job done.

It was also a great way of having an apprenticeship program by which everyone had the opportunity of being trained to go up to the next level; or it became apparent that a person could not handle the next stage and he/she'd gone as far as ability would let them. (The fact there was studio politics that stood in the way of deserving talent does not diminish the validity of this team concept.)

Before there were animation schools, on-the-job training was the only way to learn more than just the basics (which you can teach yourself). Even today, an apprenticeship program would be the best way of developing animation talent. But that would mean a commitment by the studio to keeping its artists employed from production to production.


The following is a basic Old School Unit the way I remember it on the feature Raggedy Ann & Andy:
1) Animator
2) Rough Inbetweener
3) Assistant Animator
4) Breakdown Assistant
5) Clean Inbetweener

Work flow:
The Animator draws the rough keys and eccentric partials. These are shot for a pose test. When the pose test is okayed by the director, the scene goes to the Rough Inbetweener who rough inbetweens the entire scene for the first action pencil test.

Once the director okays the rough pencil test, the Animator may go back in and add the important lip sync (if he hasn't already included it in his rough pass). The Assistant Animator then cleans up the keys, making adjustments so that the character is on model, and checks the exposure sheets to make sure that any leveling of the figures, overlays, etc. are correct.


The Breakdown Assistant then cleans up and completes any eccentric partials and crucial inbetweens, leaving the Clean Inbetweener to finish off the rest of the drawings.

But let's not come away with the mistaken idea that working this way was a bed of roses. The pressure on the artist to produce has always been enormous. The following is a 1976 cartoon by Eric Goldberg showing a bit of foxhole humor during my last few days on Raggedy Ann and Andy. I was leaving to start my first gig as an animator at Nelvana...and there was the assumption that I would be introducing Hollywood animation production methods to that studio in the Great White North.

Forms and Forces By Master Animator Bill Tytla #2

I never cease to enjoy looking at Bill Tytla's work.

Here are some rough poses of Grumpy being washed by three other Dwarfs (Bashful, Sneezy, and Sleepy). These drawings are of pure forces affecting form. The choreography of the interaction between the four characters is amazing. Study these well. This is pure animation...no Motion Capture here.


These drawings appeared in the December 1978 issue of CARTOONIST PROfiles as illustrations for Grim Natwick's article about Bill Tytla, who had passed away ten years earlier on December 29, 1968 at the age of 64.

Pose A

Pose B

Pose C

Pose D

Pose E

Pose F

Pose G

Forms and Forces By Master Animator Bill Tytla

Here are some rough poses of Dopey slapping water out of his ear. These are drawings of pure forces affecting form. Based on frame by frame study of the finished scene, this is a cycle where the last drawing hooks up to the first with 3 inbetweens.


These drawings appeared in the August 1970 issue of CARTOONIST PROfiles as illustrations for I. Klein's article about his friend Bill Tytla, who had passed away on December 29, 1968 at the age of 64.

Dopey Pose 1

Dopey Pose 2

Dopey Pose3

Dopey Pose 4

Dopey Pose 5

Dopey Pose 6. Hooks up to Pose 1 with three (3) inbetweens.