40 Days of Art: Beginners' Books
Mar. 15th, 2011 06:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinLess than a week in and I'm already behind!
I promised myself when I started this that I wouldn't make this a general 'how to draw' series ... it is, somewhat, but there are lots of existing 'how to draw' resources out there. It would probably be good to share some of them, eh?
When I was in high school there weren't many animation books out there – I seem to have been at the leading edge of a generation that grew up on Disney's renaissance in the 90s and wanted to become animators, but most of the really helpful books were published after I left school.
The books I relied on most heavily before going to college were:
The Art of The Hunchback of Notre Dame - it was my favourite movie and the art book was incredible, so it got traced out of and pored over more than anything else. I learned how do draw hands off pg. 87. The other Disney art books are good too, but this one might have the best balance between art and information. Tarzan's is great, but it was published just before I left for school and I never got to know it as well. In retrospect my local library was extraordinarily well-stocked with animation books, but it was in the days before cheap used book dealers online so I suppose that's just as well.
The Illusion of Life - Sometimes called 'the Bible of animation,' it's much more than just a how-to, as it covers a lot of Disney history and is full of little anecdotes about studio life and how they figured out things. Even though it's full of pictures it took me three weeks to read on my summer vacation, so be warned! It also weighs about 3/4 of a ton.
Disney published 'How to Draw' books for each of its 2D releases in the 90s but most of them are relatively useless as they just teach you how to draw one of the official licensed illustrations, and not really understand how to build the character. The one for Mulan, though, is very good – they've taken most of it, it seems, from the actual model sheets, so you get a really thorough approach to the character no matter what you're trying to do with them.
In college I encountered what is probably the best basic cartooning/animation drawing material I have yet come across: Ben Caldwell's Fantasy and Action Cartooning. Really simply laid out, explained, and illustrated, it'll give you a good grounding in construction, action lines, staging, design, everything. The two books overlap quite a bit, so pick up the one with which your aesthetic lines up the most, and then use the other to fill in the gaps.
Someone helpfully gave me Tony White's Animator's Workbook. I read it, and used it to do some very rudimentary animation in high school, but having since learned anything from anyone else I have to leave you with this:
DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.
Seriously, it sucks all possible joy, spontaneity, and intuition out of animation, reducing it to something so mechanistic that even the most techy of CG animators would say 'wow, that's dry.' AVOID.
I promised myself when I started this that I wouldn't make this a general 'how to draw' series ... it is, somewhat, but there are lots of existing 'how to draw' resources out there. It would probably be good to share some of them, eh?
When I was in high school there weren't many animation books out there – I seem to have been at the leading edge of a generation that grew up on Disney's renaissance in the 90s and wanted to become animators, but most of the really helpful books were published after I left school.
The books I relied on most heavily before going to college were:
The Art of The Hunchback of Notre Dame - it was my favourite movie and the art book was incredible, so it got traced out of and pored over more than anything else. I learned how do draw hands off pg. 87. The other Disney art books are good too, but this one might have the best balance between art and information. Tarzan's is great, but it was published just before I left for school and I never got to know it as well. In retrospect my local library was extraordinarily well-stocked with animation books, but it was in the days before cheap used book dealers online so I suppose that's just as well.
The Illusion of Life - Sometimes called 'the Bible of animation,' it's much more than just a how-to, as it covers a lot of Disney history and is full of little anecdotes about studio life and how they figured out things. Even though it's full of pictures it took me three weeks to read on my summer vacation, so be warned! It also weighs about 3/4 of a ton.
Disney published 'How to Draw' books for each of its 2D releases in the 90s but most of them are relatively useless as they just teach you how to draw one of the official licensed illustrations, and not really understand how to build the character. The one for Mulan, though, is very good – they've taken most of it, it seems, from the actual model sheets, so you get a really thorough approach to the character no matter what you're trying to do with them.
In college I encountered what is probably the best basic cartooning/animation drawing material I have yet come across: Ben Caldwell's Fantasy and Action Cartooning. Really simply laid out, explained, and illustrated, it'll give you a good grounding in construction, action lines, staging, design, everything. The two books overlap quite a bit, so pick up the one with which your aesthetic lines up the most, and then use the other to fill in the gaps.
Someone helpfully gave me Tony White's Animator's Workbook. I read it, and used it to do some very rudimentary animation in high school, but having since learned anything from anyone else I have to leave you with this:
DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.
Seriously, it sucks all possible joy, spontaneity, and intuition out of animation, reducing it to something so mechanistic that even the most techy of CG animators would say 'wow, that's dry.' AVOID.
