He's Losin' It, Man...

 Here's some crap me and Jim and Alex made

 here're story sketches that the animation translated

Ernie Models To Print

 These have some general tips that can apply to all characters...see the labels for general construction of faces and how to use space and organic forms.

Some of these drawings may look anarchic but they still have to obey some general drawing principles in order to be effective.

One of the hardest concepts my artists have to learn is to make funny asymmetrical drawings - that still look like they are wrapped in flesh and stuffed with cartilage and teeth.

Many cartoonists have been conditioned to believe that construction consists of perfectly even, symmetrical circles and ovals - all arranged on a mathematical grid. So when they translate gutsy storyboard or animation drawings to layout or cleanups, they tend to even everything out and make the characters look like flat robots - or traced model sheets.

Hopefully these tips might help avoid that.

A REALLY IMPORTANT CONCEPT TO REMEMBER: 

CHEEKS, SMILE AND EYES 

ARE ALL CONNECTED FORMS!

Your mouth smiles because the cheek squeezes and pulls it up. When it moves up it also can effect the bottom of the eye shapes. Almost everyone seems to have trouble grasping this. There should be a whole course in this in animation schools I think.

 

http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/

Cartoony Principles 1: Contrasts

I did this drawing the other day in a private lesson as an example of exaggerating what you see by using the principle of contrast.My student had copied this Preston Blair drawing above and had drawn the proportions too conservatively. The baby's head was too small in comparison to his body. I'll ask him if I can use the drawing to show you, but basically he undertured it.

He was actually trying to measure the proportions and get the drawing to be exactly like Preston's original. In all my experience in the assembly line process of animation I have found that the vast majority of cartoonists -when they try to copy a drawing, automatically tone it down. They lose the contrasts and I always have to push them to go farther and overshoot what they think they are copying.

Drawing By Adjectives:

Here Preston describes what makes a baby look like a baby. His adjectives could just as well describe a real baby as a cartoon baby. The words are very general and don't give a precise description of the proportions and details.
Babies have big heads, right? Well not really. What does "big" mean precisely? It means relative to what we think is small. A baby's head is big in comparison to its body- when you again compare the size relationship of an adult's head and body.

So the difference between drawing realistically and drawing cartoony is that when you draw a real person, you are trying to draw fairly acurate measurements and when you draw a cartoon you are trying to draw the emotional essense. You are drawing opinions rather than reality.

You can use the same adjecties to describe a person in real life as you can to describe a cartoon character, but in your cartoon you exaggerate the contrasts. "Big" becomes "bigger". "Sickly" becomes "sicklier". The relative contrasts are heightened.

There are all different types of contrasts, not just contrasts of size.
You can have contrasts of:

Curves vs Angles
Diagonals VS perpindiculars.
Shapes VS Fills
and more

Other Principles Depend On Contrasts
Silhouettes and lines of action depend upon contrasts. The greater the contrasts, the easier it is to see the point of the drawing and what the artist means. Great cartoonists instinctively use contrast and therefore make stronger visual statements. Bob Clampett and Tex Avery are the masters of contrasts in animation. Weaker cartoonists are timid and conservative. They don't like strong contrasts and think they are in bad taste. In my opinion that makes their statements less forceful, less entertaining and less committed to their own ideas.

I was using "Uncle Tom's Cabana" to explain a variety of animation principles and techniques to my student and started drawing the poses and compositions to show how Tex and his animators used very strong contrasts to make every point in the story. We also noted that Tex liked to experiemnt with graphic styles throughout his career. He used different designers and layout men, yet all the cartoons have the strong pointed visual statements, a confident certainty in every idea Tex wanted to present. There is nothing vague or mushy in Tex' best work from about the mid 1940s on.

Other Cartoony Principles:

There are generally known (well known at one time) principles of animation as explained by Preston Blair and Frank and Ollie, but they don't cover what makes something "cartoony" or not.

I thought maybe I'd start compiling the tools, techniques and qualities that separate cartooniness from blandness and do my own set of cartoony principles.
Some others off the top of my head are:

Simplicity: Real life is full of busy details. Cartoons boil them down to the essential ingredients that make a visual statement clear. Simplicity by itself is not enough to make something cartoony. There are a lot of simple cartoons on TV today that are positively moronic from a visual standpoint. Kids draw simple, but without control or understanding. It doesn't make their drawings cartoony.

Puposeful Impossibility: Cartoons can do what you can't do in real life and it's what really separates itself from other media. For some reason most people in animation (and still cartoons and comics too) are ashamed of this and won't take advantage of this great gift.
Visually Funny: A good cartoon can make you laugh at the visual alone. Dialogue, story, appeal and other attributes are gravy, but not essential or exclusive to cartoons.

There are more principles I'm sure and when I think of them I'll add them. Giving private lessons makes me think even more analytically about things as I witness what concepts are easy to learn and which are more difficult.

____________________________________

Caricatures Are About Contrasts:

Caricatures are not about making everything bigger as some people think. If everything is big, then nothing is big. Caricatues are about finding the actual contrasts in a subject and then making the contrasts more extreme. A big nose becomes a bigger nose, but a little mouth (like Simon Cowell's) becomes littler. Again these are all relative to the other features surrounding them.

Not all caricatures however, are "cartoony". The caricatures that I have been doing are not all that cartoony. I am exaggerating the contrasts for sure, but not to the extent I'd like to, and I'm not really simplifying the features. There are plenty of much better caricaturists than me. I think I am too hung up on figuring out how the anatomy works and what the features really look like, so when I exaggerate them, I am held back by the struggle of trying to learn things that I am not confident of yet.

I do know that the more I draw a certain person, the more cartoony the caricatures get.

L.o. 3a: Constructing a pose: Kaspar Tiptoe rough layout

Jojo was over the other night and so I showed him how to translate a storyboard pose into a layout pose.
Here's the pose. Notice that it's a scribble. Not every line is meant t be taken literally. You have to maintain the pose and the guts and expression, but make a finished sensible constructed drawing, using logic (and appeal).

You should see the action in context of the story:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/toenails-6.html

It's hard to put some of these things into words; it's better to demonstrate in person, but I'll try:

DRAW FORMS FIRST- my blue lines indicate the forms underneath the details. I started by doing the body pose in blue because that's the biggest part of the picture. I didn't start with the eye or the feet.

Forms are:

The body shape

the feet- made of more than one piece and bendable
Hands and fingers are 2 forms. Then group of finger form is divide up into individual finger forms.
Muzzle
Cheek and Smile line make a form in between them
This smile and cheek line below is wrong; because they don't together make a shape. They aren't related like they should be.

Eye masketc.

many of the forms weave in and out of each other

each form is organic but solid - and you draw them all the way through - even under things that cross over them

Hairs, Details
do details last. Remember that the negative shapes between the hairs have to be above the body form. They can't cut holes through the form.
LINES ARE NOT AS IMPORTANT AS FORMS
Lines are just borders around the forms. When drawing, look between the lines at the shapes they are bordering. Make the shapes appealing and sensible.

L.O. 7: Asymmetrical but Structural and with Style - keeping it alive

How do you take a scribble like this and make it look solid, while retaining the expression and style?

Well first, analyze it emotionally.
Kaspar is proud in a satisfied sort of way. He has completed a dastardly mission of tearing socks and has gotten away with it. His expression is confident as he gingerly puts back a destroyed sock.

Then analyze physically how that expression and pose is visualized in the rough:

His body pose is somewhat squarish, with the body leaning slightly back to the right.

His arm is in a soft kind of almost S curve.
His eyes are asymmetrical but have to fit into his facial structure.
His smile is off to one side. It pulls his nose and upper muzzle with it.
It pushes the cheek up with it.

His arm on the left (and shoulder) is raised - the other arm is lowered and at ease. That hand points to the drawer of misdeeds.

Are there mistakes that can be corrected? - the nose should be pulled along with the muzzle instead of being in its normal middle position.

All the wiggly hairs have to be ignored while drawing the construction.

OK, now you're ready to draw the structure of all this:



Here's a great article about how unnatural symmetry is:

http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Parity/FaceStudy/FaceStudy.html

L.O. 4 :From Storyboard To Layout

Kaspar sits up quickly, wide awake and excited.
This is the first couple steps I would expect a layout artist to take when translating my storyboard poses to layout. First-to understand what the character is doing and feeling, and second to analyze how to construct that sensibly and fix any mistakes in the rough.
For example, in the layout, I fixed the nose.

I, like most people did tone down the pose a bit, but that's because I was spending brainpower slowly analyzing everything.

What I normally do, is after I analyze a drawing and make something stiff, I will draw it again looser. Then judge it to see if it is as strong or stronger than the storyboard statement.

This was a tricky one below.

Kaspar is rooting through the sock drawer. He is being sneaky and doesn't want to get caught, so he looks over his shoulder to see if he is waking up the Rangers.

Again, I toned down some of the proportions (face to body) but I also fixed some scribbly parts. I made the feet more solid.

By flattening them at the bottom, and bulging them at the top. Remember this tip!

I have puposely left out details, like fur and stuff because it confuses everyone.

I wanna see everybody get this far:

Make the emotional story statement.
Solid construction.
Fix obvious mistakes.
Maintain angular curves (don't make all the curves even or parallel)

Make sense? Ask questions if you are not sure.

Your best friend

Johnny