Building Drawings From The Ground Up

This is something I've discussed before, but it's worth metioning again, and again, and possibly a third time. It's about the importance of building a drawing up from a loosely drawn, rough sketch. Last time I talked about using different colored pencils for each stage a particular drawing goes through, which makes it easier to follow your "good lines" and avoid the bad ones. I find it also helps to leave any & all bad lines that you can, don't erase them, just draw over them with a different color. This will help you avoid the bad lines, whereas if you erase them, you will be much more likely to draw the same exact line again, which only leads to frustration.

That all said, I stumbled on this guy Comlock's site through a forum I visit. I'm not sure how to say it best, but what he touches turns to gold. He has his portfolio on his site, which I strongly suggest you check out. He also has a tutorial section in which you can see his artwork develop. Please take the time to look it over, especially if you have a hard time capturing weight, movement & emotion in poses. Don't worry about skill level involved, the same principles apply to building a drawing no matter what the artist's skill, and trust me, my best work can't even approach Comlock's worst, but I can & do learn from the approach he takes. Hopefully you will find his sketches, paintings & animations as informative & entertaining as I have.

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Some storyboards for intro to Early Birds & the purpose they serve...

Before I say anything else, let me make it very clear that I am not a professional (or even very good) storyboard artist. But I know I'm doing at least one thing right with it & that is leaving myself a very clear set of instructions for the animatic and eventual finished piece that are to come. This is of the utmost importance when storyboarding, as it is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the pre-production phase of any animation. A completed storyboard should resemble a comic strip, with still panels of the key moments in the action conveying the story. The finished storyboard will therefore serve as the best & only blueprint that you will have to work with as your project progresses, so you will want to put some effort into this phase to save yourself a lot of heartache down the line...

If I have an idea for how I want something to look, or how a certain action will be timed, I would never be able to make it work if I just started my project by trying to draw each & every frame once & once only. Everything is a process, and the storyboard is a big part of the animation process (not to mention TV & Film). If it is neglected, it will certainly be noticeable in the final product. Here is a great post I found in the archives of JK's blog which articulates the importance of storyboarding much more clearly than I could hope to do.

There are many sites that give lessons & tutorials about how to create storyboards, a simple google search will find you a bunch, & be careful as they don't all agree with each other completely. They do however emphasise the importance of clear communication. This may be obvious if you are working in a team environment, but is often overlooked just the same. Equally bad, many people feel that storyboarding is completely unnecessary if they are working on a project alone. Big mistake. Communicating effectively with yourself is just as important as communicating with a co-worker. There are plenty of times I go a day or two without being able to touch my work, and if I didn't leave myself clear notes & illustrations to come back to, I'd be totally lost. Saying you keep all your ideas "up here" in your noodle is just a recipe for disaster in which you are bound to forget that one perfect idea you had the other day.

There are storyboard templates available online to download, programs specifically designed for digital and/or traditional storyboarding, and of course the option I choose with most things in life... making your own. The template I've been using so far was created very simply in powerpoint, and is doing the job for me thus far. All I needed was a white rectangle, a yellow rectangle & a few lines for notes. I have a few alterations in mind, such as leaving more space for camera notes & dialogue, but I've been able to squeeze in what I need so it's nothing major. You could just as easily make your own with simple programs like paint, & powerpoint, or use something more advanced like photoshop or toon boom, and customize your template to your liking. Just check out some examples of professionally used templates online & include the elements you will need. Moving on...

I have a good number of storyboard sketches for the Early Birds intro that I'm working on. Some of them are rougher than others, but as with everything else, they will be refined along the way. Ideally, I want to use Louis Prima's version of "When You're Smiling" (or at least a portion) as the theme song for the intro. It has a great tempo, is catchy, & I think it will help with the old school feel I'm trying to achieve overall. What I've got so far will help me as I work on the timing of certain actions that I want to go along with specific parts of the song, & you can see that in some of my notes, if you can read them that is.








So far I have 16 sketches done, and I don't think I'll need more than 20 - 22 to finish it up. I will, however, add some more panels in certain spots to elaborate on key poses & action sequences. Some specific examples of this would be panels 2 - 7, in which Larry is all over the place. Ron's actions are slower & more deliberate here, but I will most likely draw out Larry's actions on a larger sheet & insert more panels (i.e. 2A, 3A, 3B, etc.) until I get the timing & flow that I want. I'll do the same with panels 13 - 14 as well, as I want to perfectly time Cyn being yanked out of the ground, stretching waaaaaaaay out, & then snapping back into shape. Also, the first camera moves happen through these panels, so I want to polish them up & make sure I get the right field of view. I also included the blank panels 17-20 to show how a tiny note to self can be so helpful. When I have time to work on it again, I'll know right where I left off & what I had planned at the time.

That's all I've got for now, I'll get the rest of the storyboard up as soon as it's finished, and hopefully an animatic shortly after that. I just downloaded a screen capture program as well, so I may take a stab at doing a video tutorial on something Toon Boom related.

Cheers for now...

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Drawing, poses, and character design tips

I made some comments about character design in my last post, and I've been involved in several discussions lately involving the drawing process (yes it is a process), so I thought it would be useful to show how these are of the utmost importance to a quality toon. I will start with drawing. When I first got into cartooning & started drawing a lot, I was absolutely addicted to my eraser. I used it more than I used my pencil, but my drawing skill was not really improving. Maybe eventually I got close to what I wanted, but not usually, & even if I did, it was hard to ink the right lines on a new page because of so many rubbed out lines on the first draft. I was advised by some people to stop using the eraser and instead use different colored pencils to correct bad lines. This was some of the best advice I have ever received, because by leaving your bad lines where they are, you can draw a good one where they aren't. Whenever I erased anything, 90% of the time I drew another line right over the one I just erased, then erased it again!(rinse & repeat?) When I started sketching in color, it became much easier to alter my drawing without erasing, & you can see that in a couple sketches on my last post. The end result of this method is that in time you will end up being able to make more confident strokes with your pencil/pen, and you will be LESS prone to making the same mistakes, whereas when you erase all the time, you will be just as likely to re-draw the same bad lines.
Another thing I find to be an integral part of the drawing process is making revisions. I usually start out with a very loose & rough sketch that captures the general idea of what I want, i.e. body position, size etc. Then on a fresh sheet & using a light table, I go over all of the good lines from the first drawing & tighten up the bad ones (this can be done digitally in TBS using the light table feature). This usually leaves me with a decent drawing but probably not perfect. This is where I look for details that could/should be added. Mouth positions, facial expressions & hand gestures can all add tons of personality to your drawing if they are done properly. Doing them properly requires as much or more discipline as it does talent. That may sound strange at first, but the fact is that the world is full of extremely talented individuals that never had the perserverence or discipline to amount to anything. *steps off soap-box*
So, now we need to work on some of those expressions & poses. This part of the process takes alot of thought, and the more you put into it, the more you will get out. The best tip I can give is to follow in the footsteps of Preston Blair. He was one of the most talented cartoonists there was, and whether you know it or not, you all know much of his work from Disney & MGM. The following pics are pages from his books that illustrate alot of what I said about building a final drawing through a series of revisions & stages. I'm sure his drawings carry more weight than my words, but to futher illustrate the importance of doing all this, I will give myself a homework assignment & try to duplicate the page of facial expressions using my character Larry. It will be a challenge for me, but I will be better for having done it, and I strongly suggest you do it too.

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