How To Draw Like An Animator

Cartoon for Animation

When I started my own studies in animation several years ago, I did not beginning with Disney or Warner Brothers. I started with Jurassic Park (the first one); I was dazzled by the computer animation which looked then existent! I decided that I would larn as much about figurer animation as possible. I am fairly proficient on the calculator; I assumed that I would just demand a few programs, some tutorial books and I could start making episodes seven, 8 and 9 of Star Wars.

Well, non quite. You come across, within a few days, after looking effectually on the Internet, I discovered that the first piece of advice that computer animators gave out was acquire how to breathing with a pencil. And guess what advice those low-tech, pencil animators gave out was. LEARN HOW TO DRAW!

I don't care if you want to work at Pixar or Warner Brothers; for whatever blitheness or animation-related chore, you must still acquire how to describe.

What yous'll need
Not much. ONE large sketch volume, to start with. MANY soft pencils (H-3B will do fine, merely near people prefer to outset with 2B'southward). A Fair AMOUNT of time. One lock on your door to keep annoying siblings out. And a BIG imagination.

After the second exercise, a live model becomes an amazing asset. How volition you larn to draw people if y'all don't draw people? If you can't afford a model, either enquire a friend, or try to observe a substitute like a expert statue. Best of all, take a life drawing class, where you lot take professional models and art teachers too. Retrieve, though - you lot can always describe people on the street, on the bus - they won't know or care.

I am not past any stretch of the imagination (I'm sure I've said this before!) a professional or master artist. But some of the exercises which are helping me may besides be of help to yous. Click here to outset. Good luck, and happy drawing.

Cartoon Lessons #1: Draw what you Meet

The biggest trouble that artists must overcome is non 1 of technique or of inspiration. The biggest trouble is the lack of seeing. When people go through their lives every twenty-four hours, they do not meet. They expect. There is a very simple reason for this; no-one could maybe detect every particular in the world around the states. So the encephalon filters out the details for us. When you lot are walking downwardly the street, you come across the street, the sidewalk, the other people, and the buildings. You lot practise not find the cracks in the sidewalk or the weeds growing in those cracks; the quality of the pavement or the type of cars on the street; the expressions of the faces of the people around you; the texture of the bricks on the buildings yous pass. All of these things will have an impact on you, simply mainly on a hidden level.

The role of the brain responsible for this filtering is the left side of the encephalon (all those who accept read "Drawing on the Right Side of the Encephalon, please skip to the first exercise). It replaces the bricks in the building with the word "wall", the vintage Model T with the word "car". But when you really start to notice and discover what is around you, you can forcefulness another role of your encephalon into action; the correct side.

The right side of the brain is what controls your unconscious, your instincts. Talking is a right encephalon role; when you talk you do not call back in terms of article - field of study - preposition - adjective - adverb - descriptive verb. However, when most people depict, this is exactly how they call up. To draw a person, y'all draw a head, a torso, ii arms and two legs, the hands, the anxiety, the pilus, and the clothes. Just, y'all are not actually drawing legs, arms, heads, etc. You are simply cartoon "symbols" that you lot have learnt for these things. A leg is two long straight lines, sometimes bent a flake. A head is an elongated circumvolve. In curt, yous are cartoon what you lot think these things are, non what they are.

I volition for now omit the further explanations of how and why this happens, merely all serious fine art students should read about how the brain works in the marvelous book, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence . For now we will concentrate on the exercises that will remove cartoon from the left side of the brain and shift it to the right.

Contour drawing of my hands

Okay, the torture's over. Relax your hands, and note the interesting blue colour underneath the fingernails. After you lot havemassaged them back to a more normal color, yous may at present look at your drawing. Ahhhhh! It looks awful! Well, don't worry, that's normal. You meet, the point of this exercise is non to make a cute piece of work of art (although that is rare only pleasant side effect). The point is to finish using those symbols I was rambling on virtually a few paragraphs ago. If you tin't see what you lot're drawing, it'due south a lot harder to draw an ellipse. And by forcing yourself to describe slowly, you will commencement to observe details you never saw before. The indentations in the skin of the knuckle. The irregular folds of mankind of the hand. The webbing betwixt the pollex and palm.

While pure contour drawing has no direct link to blitheness, "normal" contour drawing does. All cleanups are essentially profile drawings; they are drawing slowly and painstakingly, just like the one y'all just did. Check out the instance in the margin of Pocahontas to see what I mean - the cleanup probably took well-nigh 4-5 hours.

A patience exercise: Find a place where you tin work undisturbed for half an hr. Place your sketch book open on a table on your right hand side, preferably tilted towards you. Hold your pencil lightly in your right hand, and place it roughly in the middle of your paper. Now, turn in your chair until you are looking in the opposite management of your paper. Your right mitt, the pencil and the paper are now behind you. Place your left manus on your knee and relax. VERY SLOWLY, showtime to trace the contours of your hand. Nether NO CIRCUMSTANCES Look AT YOUR Paper! Depict everything y'all see. Do not endeavour to name something (like a fingernail) and so draw it, because y'all cannot see the paper y'all are cartoon it onto. Only "trace," as accurately every bit you tin, the contours of that matter (which just so happens to be a fingernail).You should start by cartoon for about 15 minutes at a time (apply a timer!), and gradually work upward to anywhere from i/2 hour to 2 hours per mitt. After you have been doing this do for several weeks, yous may look at the paper occasionally to reposition your pencil. Only do not movement the pencil until you lot are over again looking away.

Drawing Lessons #2: Draw what you Experience

Volleyball Player

Yous have survived - intact - the rigors of contour drawing. At present the fun begins. We volition larn a technique called gesture cartoon.

With profile cartoon, the name of the game was detail. At present, the game has inverse; information technology'due south called structural movement, which means, oddly enough, move of the structure. This proper name is a bit deceptive as it implies that there is concrete motility; in reality, this motion is imagined. Does a flower accept structural movement? Sure it does. If I put my pencil nigh the bottom of the page and try to describe a rose, my pencil will exist drawn, almost on it'due south own, to the petals of the flower. Once there, the line volition shoot out to the tip, only to fall again to the center, and re-emerge on the other side of the petal. Information technology's simply following the structural move of the flower. Once more, you'll understand what I mean after you've done information technology yourself.

A gesture drawing does not show the surface details of an object, rather the forces that are contained within that object. Similar contour drawing, information technology involves an well-nigh complete loss of witting thought and allows you simply to react to what you see. Okay, I'm starting to feel like I've rambled plenty. Time for an do.

Drawing do - Have any complicated object. A live model (clothed or nude) is all-time, just a bloom, institute, pet, ribbon, or any other organically shaped object should do fine. (I would not recommend using your paw this fourth dimension, as gesture drawing is very concrete and involves the whole upper body and you will non be able to keep your paw yet). Prepare your timer to xv seconds. Yup, you lot heard right. You've got fifteen seconds to draw the object in forepart of you. After the time is up, move the object or get the model to change poses. Repeat a minimum of ten times. Now set your timer to 30 seconds and repeat 5-x times. At present set it to two minutes and echo near five-ten times. Notation that your cartoon speed should NOT Alter; when you lot have 2 minutes you should draw like you accept 15 seconds.

And truthfully, that'due south all there is to gesture cartoon. But in that location are some 'tricks' you can utilize to make your drawings more dimensional and lifelike:

Directional Lines:: Imagine that every cylindrical function of the trunk (arms, torso, legs, even the head) is covered by circular lines. These lines wrap around the body like a mummy. If yous draw these lines, yous volition automatically proceeds a amend sense of space. (If yous are using a blossom, these lines would wrap effectually the stem and would loosely enclose the flower itself)
Eye of Move:: If a person is sitting, the middle of motion is the torso. If the model is crouching, the eye is in between the 2 feet; if (s)he is hanging, information technology'due south in the arms. This strategy does non always piece of work, only is worth experimenting with.

margin for demonstrations

So what does this take to do with animation? Many animation roughs wait similar gesture drawings on steroids. Some of the most amazing gesture drawings are those by Glen Keane (in the margin). The primary deviation is that an blitheness rough must Always be to proportion - a gesture drawing does not.

Cartoon Lessons #3: The Human Figure (1)

So, nosotros've drawn contour drawings for hours, and gesture drawings for seconds. The results of these exercises are not supposed to look "real". Merely, when we're talking nigh drawings, what is real anyways? The drawing is a flat page, so "real" tin't mean three-d. A colour photograph looks existent, but we're not using colours (withal). The first thing that makes a pencil, charcoal or conte cartoon look real is PROPORTIONS.

Exercise: Pick a point on or near the model (say the tip of his index finger). Then pick some other signal (say the tip of his nose). Describe a single dot on the paper - that is the tip of the finger. At present, using your pencil at arms length in front end of you, measure the bending betwixt the finger and the nose. Without bending your elbow or wrist, bring your arm downward to the paper until the bottom of the pencil is touching the indicate. Pick whatsoever point along the resulting line - that is now the tip of the nose. These two points will make up one's mind the size of your entire picture.
Now option another betoken - say, the model's elbow. Measure the angle from finger to elbow equally before, but instead of marking a point, trace a line. Now, measure out the bending from the nose to the elbow. Trace that line. The intersection of the ii lines is the position of the elbow. Bingo! Now echo this for the other 5000 body parts yous tin see. Good luck!

Now, there are several ways to go near getting accurate proportions into your drawings. You know how in movies, artists are always sticking their pencils out in front of them to mensurate distances? Well, although artists do that, occasionally, a far better utilise of the pencil is not to measure distances, just to measure angles. There are several reasons for this: if you move your hand even slightly closer or farther away from you lot between the time than yous measure the object and the time that you draw it, the proportions could go wildly off. You can only describe the model "life size" - that is, the size at which you perceive him/her. And then in that location is the fact that nosotros are trying to draw poses, and a munchkin tin can usually attain the same pose as a basketball player, fifty-fifty though he is a fraction of the size of the basketball game player. What the munchkin and Micheal Jordan will have in common is the angles at which the dissimilar parts of their bodies relate to each other.

Eden10

So, read the above and do the practice. Contour cartoon is starting to look exiting. Surely this isn't what animators exercise? Of course not, only information technology is a useful do to get you thinking about proportions. By the mode, this is a sort of drawing which combines left and correct encephalon functions - the correct encephalon does the angles, the left checks to make sure they're right (no pun).

Run into what yous can do with the previous iii exercises. Why don't you measure out the proportions of the effigy, using perchance 5 points (hands, feet, head). Then do a 2 minute gesture drawing, just trying to stay roughly inside the confines of the v points. Darken in the best outlines of the effigy, noting both the five points and your gesture drawing. Finally, practice a profile drawing, but look down and the page from fourth dimension to fourth dimension, making certain that you stay on the rough outline that you lot've already drawn.

Now, if y'all're smart (and I know you are), y'all'll take noticed that this practise doesn't actually have much to do with the human figure in particular. Does this hateful I've just been blabbing away at my keyboard for no real reason? Well, aye, just this is also intended as another manner of getting you to think nigh the figure. When we next revisit the human figure, we'll start to report a bit of anatomy.

Drawing Lessons #4: Exercises

Nope, non real exercise - those are for your model (at least in exercise 4!). Keeping fit is your own concern; for now, bank check out these exercises. Some I made up; others (where listed) come from a volume.

Turtles, exploring

The I Minute Character Sketch

Selection a character, whatever character. Now pick and emotion, or an activeness (eg happy, excited, aroused, fearful; walking, talking, exploring). Set your timer to beep every minute. Now, every infinitesimal, brand one concentrated (no close-ups) drawing of your character in whatever emotion or motion you have chosen. Keep going as long every bit you can. I generally run out of ideas at nearly the xxx sketch marker; if that happens, take a break and try again after. This exercise teaches you about staging (composition), as well equally expression emotions with the total body (equally at that place is not plenty time to describe the face). I recommend one hour of this exercise, with breaks every 20 minutes or half hour (apply another timer to time that).

Source: Animation: From Script to Screen

Dancer

Cafe Drawing

THIS IS Important!!!!!!

Also known equally the flash pose, this merely involves drawing anyone or anything around you. In the case of the drawings on the left, I was getting bored at a rehersal so I simply started to draw the people effectually me - in this instance, a girl practicing a dance from "Jesus Christ Superstar". This exercise is where you learn to draw FAST because you never know when people volition move, or people may be moving already. The drawing is not quite a pure gesture because, to a sure extent, you are trying to get a rough likeness, but the style of drawing is definitely very gestural.

Belle

The I Minute Movie Sketch

This practise requires a VCR with freeze-frame; that is, when you push the "Break" button the picture should exist clear with no fuzzy lines. Put in a movie - any flick, animated or not - and start watching it. Set your timer to beep every infinitesimal, similar y'all did with the 1-minute character sketch. Start your timer. When the timer start beeps, pause the film. Now, draw - either the entire scene, or just ane grapheme in the scene. When the timer adjacent beeps, resume the moving-picture show. Repeate as often as you wish. This do will increase your awarness of staging and action.

I adult this practice on my own, and and then learnt about six months later that it is actually taught at Sheridan and other art colleges. So I estimate this one works after all!

Bowling

The Moving Pose

This rather interesting exercise is an obvious extension of the gesture drawing for the animation pupil. This exercise requires the use of a model (actually, a model exercising would be ideal). The model picks an action which he or she either repeats or which is a cyclic action (walking on a treadmill, using a NordicTrak, using a stationary bike). I have even drawn other people drawing other people. You now start to draw the entire activity on the aforementioned spot on the page. Usually you will starting time with the part of the model that is the most stationary and move out to the parts with the most move. This exercise tin be as long or as short equally you wish.

When you feel you take mastered this try seperating the poses. Determine, for instance, that you will draw 5 singled-out poses. Using a BIG sheet of paper, get-go to draw five unlike stages of the action. Practice non complete 1 before moving on to the other, rather, work on all five at the same time, just like in the practice to a higher place. When you lot're finished, you lot should be able to seperate the poses, feed them into a pencil tester and see the original movement once once more.

Source: The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study

Remember: none of these necessarily need to be done with a nude model!

Cartoon Lessons #5: The Human Figure (2)

Anatomy

Welcome to our standing lessons into anatomy. If you are looking for detailed, curtailed, clear and accurate descriptions of human beefcake, then you lot have come to the wrong place. These pages will simply give you lot the briefest of introductions to the human figure and what'southward going on nether the peel. The diagrams are not anatomically correct, but they are useful in that they will give you something to look for while you are drawing a person.

The Trunk

Anatomy of Trunk

For starters, let'due south look at Eden, lying on the floor. Now, this looks like a adequately simple, piece of cake pose to analyse and draw. Information technology's not. Your first impluse, upon seeing this, would probably exist to draw a large rectangle to represent her trunk. This is the worst possible thing you could do. First of all, allow'south look at these pictures more closely.

You volition see, coming out of the bottom of her swim accommodate, a dark streak going down the middle of her back with alternating light and dark patches (which did non survive the JPEG pinch very well). This streak is her spinal chord, or backbone. It is what holds the body together. It is NOT the line of activity, which flows through the whole trunk, rather, information technology merely flows from the hip bone to the base of the skull. All the same, the 2 often coincide, and at the very to the lowest degree the spine is an indicator of what the line of action should look like. So, when I began to draw this 'analogy', the start thing I did was to draw the line of action along the spine. Yous will detect that I fabricated the angle a little shallow, and and then the entire picture looks like information technology was taken at a slightly dissimilar angle - while this was a mistake, it shows how the torso must follow this first line. So: Drawing rule: look for the spine, and use it to notice the line of action.

In this same closeup, you should notice that the back is non, as you might initially have idea, one big rectangle. There are ii very dark lines that point towards the base of operations of the spine. This is actually the waist, the thinnest point on the trunk (for both men and women). At present, these two lines are visible because her hip is bent away from her upper back. This is easily seen by comparing the directional lines of the lesser of her 'bra' and the top of her swimsuit. In my drawing, I drew the directional lines all around her trunk, noting the change of direction at the waist. And so, as I drew the contour lines of her back, I let them dip in, roughly following the directional lines. These overlapping lines give the illusion of depth, and are very important. Think: Contour lines are only visible directional lines.

Discussion

The question now arises: why is the waist the thinnest role of the body? If you look at the drawing to a higher place, information technology becomes articulate. To a higher place the waist, in that location is the rib cage. Below, there is the hip os. Both are made of hard bone. In the waist, still, there is zip; this is where the spine bends. As there are no bones holding the flesh out, if you are sparse enough it will "sag" (for lack of a ameliorate word) dorsum into the body. Women generally take thinner waists then men, both because of an (over?)emphasis on weight loss, reduced muscles and a wider hip bone. I think that it is for this reason that so many artists find women easier to draw than men; the thin waist forms a neat division betwixt the upper and the lower body, and it is far easier to draw to shapes at unlike angles than one complicated shape that changes angles. If a human being were posing in the moving picture above, those corking inward lines would be much harder to see, if they were at all present; consequently, it would be much harder to draw assuredly.

One last note: in the cartoon, you will notice 2 small triangles at her shoulders. Those are the shoulder blades. I'll talk about those more than in a minute - for now, just look at them and remember where they are.

Head and Shoulders

Anatomy of Head

To stop upward, permit's look at the head, cervix and shoulders. Here we have Eden, in profile view. There's not much to say - simply observe my notes in the drawing beneath. Some quick notes. The head is shaped roughly as a flattened ball from the front, and as a rounded square from the sides. The skull is very roughly sketches in here. Discover these things: First of all, when the mouth opens, information technology swings open up from point A, simply in front end of the ear. Remember to show the entire jaw moving when a character is talking - just opening the mouth will look actually weird. The eye is located in a hole in the skull. This hole is much larger than the eye itself. The eybrow is generally located forth the top ridge of this hole. The backbone fits into the skull just behind the ears. Notice how the dorsum contour of the head and neck is concave; as with the waist, in that location is no bone here then the flesh goes inward. Too like the waist, men generally take less in curvature, equally many of the back muscles begin in the neck in this area. Supermodels accept almost no dorsum muscles (they're called trapezoids) at all, making their necks very sparse and giving the illusion of them being very long.

Getting down to the shoulders, you volition notice that I have drawn a see-through view; you lot tin can come across the shoulder blades. In front end are the neckband bones. Beneath the neckband basic is the breast bone (or sternum). The breast bone holds up the ribs, and forms the principal shape of the upper chest (or thorax). For our purposes, the neckband bones are far more than interesting. You volition notice that, at the shoulders, they meet both the arm bones and the shoulder blades. You will also notice that they are reasonably apartment, when the shoulders are not existence shrugged. The neckband bones and the shoulder blades together form something called the pectoral girdle, which I discover one of the nigh usefull structures on the skeleton. Why? Considering they are physical directional lines, reaching all the way effectually the breast! When I am cartoon a figure that it even slightly bent towards me, exist information technology from a model or from imagination, the first thing I draw (after the line of activeness) is the girdle, from which I project the balance of the trunk.

Concluding notes

OK, I've talked enough and spilt enough of my "secrets". 99% of the things you'll use when cartoon, y'all must discover for yourself - tricks such as the pectoral girdle. You volition not observe hints like that in books, and I only gave it hither as an example. These things y'all volition observe will be your own secrets - the more you have, and the more than y'all do, the improve yous'll become. I will write one more than anatomy lesson - detailing the limbs - merely after that you lot're on you own.

For more anatomy, hop on over to the appurtenances page and get yourself an anatomy book. That's the all-time way to larn, unless yous experience like attention a dissection. Merely that'south not exactly life cartoon, at present, is it?

Perspective

"Ahh, why exercise I have to learn perspective? Don't computers do all that boring stuff now?"

'Friad not. Computers exercise occasionally generate backgrounds for feature films now (most notable Tarzan) merely the majority of backgrounds are still done by manus. And all those backgrounds are based on layouts, and all layout artists must be skillful in perspective. Not to mention that animators to animate on top of CG backgrounds must as well know enough perspective to brand the graphic symbol look like they actually exist within the background.

This is a very quick visual introduction to perspective.

The horizon line is the imaginary line at which the sky hits the sea. Information technology is sometimes just not always visible.

A vanishing point is a betoken to which straigh edges announced to converge. In 1pt perspective, all y-axis lines converge at a single indicate on the horizon line.

In 2pt perspective, all x-axis lines converge to one VP, and all y-axis lines towards another. Objects appear normal when between the two vanishing points; moving them outside can produce strange distortions.