The basics of giving life to the lifeless

Topic: From Prussia With Love

Users: @Alexander @Graham @SuzyQ

irc.simpworks.com

[Morpheus306]

  I was thinking about Omar's pic http://www.simpworks.com/forums/index.php/topic,7735.msg101108.html#new  at work today and drew this up to help you guys along.  On the left you can see how I constructred the figure, this is how you should treat your subjects.  Always think of them as 3 dimensional forms with volume and wieght, never as just a flat image.  This is what will bring a sense of relality to your drawings.  Even the most stylistic and flat characters are drawn this way.  See how I drew thru each form?  I actually drew her legs and how they connected to her body, how the kness would bend, the ankles, everything is connected to the central body just like ours are.  Getting good animation drawings is very tricky and you have to have a firm knowlage of how the body works inside and out, as well as physics and acting.  Chuck Jones had a great saying that went "Every artist has 1000 bad drawings and 1 good one so the faster you get the bad ones out of the way the quicker you get the good one," which has a lot of truth to it.  No one is born knowing everyting there is to know about drawing, it's a skill like playing the piano or building a house.  The more you do it the better you become.  Anyway back to the drawing, during construction I thought of the story I wanted to tell.  I showed how Lisa is in a very extreame situation, one that she clearly isn't used to and how she's dealing with it.  From the way she's holding the bar, standing on the board, her posture, expression, all these things convey to the viewer a story about Lisa.  I know this may seem like a lot to have to think about when all you want to do is doodle, but you're already thinking of these things without even knowing, you just have to learn how to apply them.  All I thought about when I was drawing this was "how would Lisa react to this situation?"  now of course all characters are different especially in the Simpson world, Bart is obviously going to act different to cloud surfing than Lisa is.  This is where the actor in all of us comes out, as animators we become the character.  Know who the character is that you're drawing and become them on paper.  Convey your emotions thru them to the audience(the viewer).  Always remember character first details later; ever wonder why three circles make you think of Mickey Mouse?  It's the symbol of that character that people instantly reconognize not what kind of buttons are on his pants.  Ok I've rambled enough...the right pic is obviously a cleaned up version on model, and for those of you out there don't fret about model with these characters.  I draw them everyday so I'm familiar with all the tricks and rules but that doesn't mean you should give up.  Practice practice practice, that's the bottom line. 

[D.B.]

Informative as ever morpheus

If I may aska  follow up question? How much of getting the perspective right is following the rules, and how much just learning to draw 'what feels right'? All my stuff seems to turn out orthographic whether i want it to or not...

In your sample pic, for example, there's a lot of little subtle perspective effects, most notably in the limb lengths and relative positions. But i don't see any obvious vanishing point construction lines. Did you just eyeball it, or did you do a set of vanishing points and then rub them out?

[Morpheus306]

Informative as ever morpheus

If I may aska  follow up question? How much of getting the perspective right is following the rules, and how much just learning to draw 'what feels right'? All my stuff seems to turn out orthographic whether i want it to or not...

In your sample pic, for example, there's a lot of little subtle perspective effects, most notably in the limb lengths and relative positions. But i don't see any obvious vanishing point construction lines. Did you just eyeball it, or did you do a set of vanishing points and then rub them out?

  That's a very good question.  You have to have a very good understanding of basic perspective in order to just "eye ball."  In my pic I did just eye ball it because I can see the vanishing points without having to draw them.  It's one of those insticnt things that you develop the more you draw. You can see in the eyes especially where I was drawing myself vanishing points because I didn't want this to be a flat image, I wanted Lisa to have depth and dimension.  Those little perspective tricks are easy to do and come in handy a lot.  Another perspective trick is what's called "forced perspective" where you make something appear as if it's really close or really far away.  An example of this would be Lisa's right arm.  As you can see her arm tapers, or expands outwordly, to the hand which is a little bigger than her left.  This is a foreshortened arm because it's coming towards us giving the illusion of dimension.  Other things like the bar I wanted to actually go back "in space" instead of just a flat line so I applied a little force perspective.  Something to cosider too is how are we looking at the character? meaning are we looking down at it or up? side or front?  In my case we're looking slightly down on Lisa so we could see a little of the board she's riding.  ( you can see an explanation of angles in my tutorial).  I'm also going to do a basic plane tutorial soon for you all to use which will help explain all of this.  Good luck!

[Opus]

Dang it , I really need to get an animation table  as soon as I can, a tablet is not that easy to control, at least no to me.  Any strecher will do.   Thanks for the heads up, Dane, but could you help me with that Molly model if by any chance; she was around 14 yrs old.  I hope you find no problem in that.  I will really  appreciate it.