40 Days of Art: Flipping
Mar. 19th, 2011 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThis is mostly a trick used for animation, but it's so useful I don't see why it can't be used by anyone for anything.
As you're tracing your image, building up the construction and laying down contour lines, you're likely to get so much junk on your paper that you're unable to see the source image very clearly anymore. This is where flipping comes in! There's probably some part of your drawing hand that's always touching the paper (for me it's the pad down the pinky side of my palm) – use that to anchor your paper at the bottom, then lift the opposite corner to look at the image underneath. Lay the paper back down. Lift it up again. And back down. Faster. This is flipping!*
If you do this quickly enough you should be able to picture, briefly, the source image superimposed on your drawing. This is called the persistence of vision: our brains hold on to am image for a fraction of a second, so if you interchange two images quickly enough it will hold both at the same time. A handy demonstration is the thaumatrope:
The persistence of vision is what enables us to enjoy flipbooks, animation, and film as moving images. If the change between one image and the next implies sequentiality, your brain fills the blanks between the images flashed at you every 1/24 of a second, and you perceive the series of still images as motion.
Anyway, you can use this phenomenon to transfer an image from one page to another, focusing on a section at a time – a nostril, the upper eyelid, the outer curve of an ear – seriously, really tiny sections. With exercise you can lengthen the amount of time your brain holds on to an image, and having to do so will force you to think more about what you're drawing – if you can understand why it looks how it does, you're more likely to replicate it precisely.
You may end up budging your page a little with the motion of flipping but you can always realign it based on what you've drawn; with practise you can minimise the amount your page might budge when you flip it. If you want to get really fancy you can buy some removable ('blue') tape and use it to anchor your drawing page instead of your hand. Regular tape can be made slightly more removable by playing with the sticky side a bit and letting the oils from your fingers inhibit the stickiness, but I wouldn't use this pseudo-blue tape on any source image you care about as it is prone to malfunction.
*And it's what Naveen does with the storybook at :25 in this video ... but he's using it more for its animating purpose. Oh, inside jokes! Ah hah hah!
As you're tracing your image, building up the construction and laying down contour lines, you're likely to get so much junk on your paper that you're unable to see the source image very clearly anymore. This is where flipping comes in! There's probably some part of your drawing hand that's always touching the paper (for me it's the pad down the pinky side of my palm) – use that to anchor your paper at the bottom, then lift the opposite corner to look at the image underneath. Lay the paper back down. Lift it up again. And back down. Faster. This is flipping!*
If you do this quickly enough you should be able to picture, briefly, the source image superimposed on your drawing. This is called the persistence of vision: our brains hold on to am image for a fraction of a second, so if you interchange two images quickly enough it will hold both at the same time. A handy demonstration is the thaumatrope:
The persistence of vision is what enables us to enjoy flipbooks, animation, and film as moving images. If the change between one image and the next implies sequentiality, your brain fills the blanks between the images flashed at you every 1/24 of a second, and you perceive the series of still images as motion.
Anyway, you can use this phenomenon to transfer an image from one page to another, focusing on a section at a time – a nostril, the upper eyelid, the outer curve of an ear – seriously, really tiny sections. With exercise you can lengthen the amount of time your brain holds on to an image, and having to do so will force you to think more about what you're drawing – if you can understand why it looks how it does, you're more likely to replicate it precisely.
You may end up budging your page a little with the motion of flipping but you can always realign it based on what you've drawn; with practise you can minimise the amount your page might budge when you flip it. If you want to get really fancy you can buy some removable ('blue') tape and use it to anchor your drawing page instead of your hand. Regular tape can be made slightly more removable by playing with the sticky side a bit and letting the oils from your fingers inhibit the stickiness, but I wouldn't use this pseudo-blue tape on any source image you care about as it is prone to malfunction.
*And it's what Naveen does with the storybook at :25 in this video ... but he's using it more for its animating purpose. Oh, inside jokes! Ah hah hah!
