Animation School 15: Review: Drawing With All The Animation Drawing Principles Only

Here're some very early comics drawn by great cartoon technician Harvey Eisenberg. He hasn't developed his own unique style yet and that makes this very educational to study if you are a learning cartoonist.
These are drawings made up entirely of 40s animation principles. Starting with very strong construction. All the characters are made of simple sphere, pear and tube shapes. I say simple, but that doesn't mean it's easy to put them together so well.

Note that every character is the same design as Tom and Jerry and only superficial details that define the characters' species are differentiated. The chicken has feather and a comb. The dog has jowls. The pig has a snout and pig ears, etc...but everything else about them is exactly the same, just like Tom and Jerry. It made sense as animators were learning all the difficulties and principles of movement that they kept the characters fairly simple to draw - and solid, so they could easily turn them around in all dimensions. Many early characters hadn't evolved individual character designs yet. But they had everything else important to animating and clarity.

Clear Staging/composition
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/01/disney-principles-staging-3-make-your.html

Line Of Action

SilhouettesOpposing Poses
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/composition-7-compose-your-poses.html

The one stylistic statement that is consistent in this comic is that all the perspective in the backgrounds is rounded. Round streets, round fences and houses etc. This was a standard early 30s cartoon style and you don't see it in many 40s cartoons.

This Eisenberg comic is pure Tom and Jerry style. By the 1940s, most of the advanced studios had gone past this pure, rounded spheres and pears approach and were starting to vary their character designs, background designs and some directors' styles were becoming very individual. Bill and Joe hung on to this basic early 40s style longer than anybody. Joe himself was reluctant to change as long as his cartoons were popular and winning Academy Awards. He didn't start creating individual characters with their own unique designs until forced into television. Then he hired Ed Benedict who gave the Hanna Barbera studio a style and a cast of individual characters on the cheap.

Harvey Eisenberg continued drawing the HB comic books and strips and his style gradually became more individual
and he mixed it with Ed's later.
That was goodbye to pure pears and spheres (Preston Blair) and hello to more complex shapes, curves and angles, but it was not goodbye to good solid drawing principles. Not yet.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/05/eisenberg-subtleties-studies.html

His solid cartoon foundation that led to so many other styles later is really evident in this comic book:
http://comicrazys.com/2010/01/15/petey-pinfeathers-red-rabbit-comics-7-1948-harvey-eisenberg/

The point of this article: Learn Your Principles First,

40s animation principles step by step

and then style will come.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/09/good-cartoonist-can-adapt-to-different.html

Hey and lots of thanks to all the students and fans who contributed to the cartoon lessons. If you folks do any of the lessons, remind me and I will give you some tips:

Chuck Jones Drawings

All these great Chuck Jones drawings use the basic animation drawing principles, yet they are all uniquely his style.Construction, line of action, negative spaces inside and outside, clear staging, opposing poses, contrasts, organic...everything good

Some folks think that learning good basic drawing is a style. It isn't. The style is what you lay on top of the solid foundation - once you have one.

Some Real Old School Drawing

This may look superficially modern and even influenced by anime but it sure as hell is drawn well all around.
Saskia draws for real, no cheating. Here's someone who does life drawing and then applies what she learns from it to her cartoon drawings. Boy can she draw hands just for one thing.
She can draw difficult shapes from any angle. Look at those feet solidly planted on the ground in perspective.
This is cartoony but full of solid shapes. Again, the hands are genius. So are the legs and feet. They have lots of style but aren't just straight lines or mathematical curves without form or perspective. (nice color too)I don't know anything about her except that she is amazingly talented and skilled.
I'm, not sure if it's all just natural ability, whether she taught herself, or whether she went to a really good school and they drilled classic drawing principles into her. If so, I hope she tells us where she went!

It's funny to see anime influence actually drawn with anatomy and perspective - and having the facial features fit into the skull and flesh.
But she's not just superficially copying anime (like I tried to do). It's just a part of her influence among other influences that she'd have to tell you. And good old-fashioned strong principles of drawing.
These drawings make me feel guilty that I am trying to teach people to be able to draw simple solid balls, pears and spaghetti arms and legs.
Saskia should be teaching people. She's drawing for real.
A lot of this stuff is drawn on the computer which is even more astonishing to me.



It's funny to see her draw her influences better than the source material.
Style and knowledge perfectly woven together.








This is some good stuff.

Preston Blair Lessons

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-1-construction.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-2-squash-and.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-3-how-to-check.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-lesson-4-2-legged-characters.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-5-line-of.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-lesson-hands.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-lesson-6-construction.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-7-when-generic-is.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/06/animation-school-8-proportions-affect.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/animation-school-lesson-9-_116873606139658339.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/animation-school-lesson-9a-tom-and.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/03/animation-school-lesson-10-copy-old.html

What Causes Tit Eyes? - 1

I have a theory about it. And a few more about this period of Chuck Jones' career.
I think that once he teamed with storyboard/writer Mike Maltese, his cartoons started to become funnier. Maltese's gags themselves were not the only funny thing about the cartoons though.
The way Jones' drawings reacted to the gags really sold them to the audience.
In a way, I think Jones was competing with Maltese's gags by coming up with visual toppers -like the tit eyes that happen after each gag in "Mouse Wreckers". It was a way of punctuating the gags and competing for attention with them.
Mouse Wreckers is full of great gags, but the structure of the cartoon is built around Claude Cat's reactions to them.
You remember the gags of Hubie and Bertie nailing the furniture to the ceiling and tieing Claude up and pulling him through keyholes, but what really stands out in the cartoon are Claude's tit-eyes. The drawings and timing are perfect too.
Mouse Wreckers is from the period of what I think of as Chuck's funniest/best year - roughly 1948.
It's after the "Bobe Cannon period" and before the stylized angular pose to pose talky period.
More about all that in the next posts. This is a fantastic cartoon, don't ya think?
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/48mousewreckers/ClaudeCatTitEyes1.mov


Oh, to introduce another subject, after watching the clip, go back and just listen to the music. I'll do a post about different approaches to music sometime. This is one approach, where the music is added afterwards and has no melody; it's just there to help to punctuate the action - acting like sound effects.