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40 Days of Art: Drawing from the Screen
Back in the day, when I was an animation nipper just learning the ropes, if I wanted to learn how to draw an animated character, I had to deconstruct what I could from pictures printed in art books, the occasional colouring book if it was drawn well, and low-res jpgs from Altavista image search. We didn't have a VCR that would do frame-by-frame very clearly, and if you left it on pause for more than a minute it would turn off. You kids are so spoiled these days with yer DVDs and yer Quicktimes and yer 1000x1200 online images! Why back in my day –
Wait, I had a point here. Oh yes! Drawing from the screen. One of the really brilliant things about DVDs is that you can pause and stop-frame to your heart's content, and see clearly everything in the frame. A useful exercise which has been made available by this technology is to do drawings off the still frames of a film. As with any sort of replication of a drawn character you should start with the construction and the basic shapes and add detail from there, trying your best to draw it as the animator would have originally drawn it. I am continually amazed at how much I learn from doing this – the only thing more amazing is how infrequently I actually do it, considering how much it helps. I have come to think of it as a sort of auxiliary life drawing – drawing from life is irreplaceable, of course, but when you do so you are studying the world in all its amazing complexity. When you then go to draw your own simplified, stylized cartoon character, you somehow have to translate what you have internalized from complex reality into only a few lines. Some people are naturally gifted at this, but I am not one of them. For example, I find it challenging to describe the wrinkles in the bent elbow of a sleeve with nothing more than two shapes and an interior line, when I know from experience that there are about five different wrinkles just in the elbow, with stretch lines and twists leading from the elbow to the shoulder and wrist ... You can often tell if I'm having trouble with a drawing because I will overthink it, which manifests in a very detailed study of all the physical processes going on therein, instead of something simple and clear.
Drawing still-framed animated characters (so long as they're from a well-drawn production,* of course) is, in a way, life drawing cartoon characters. You get to study interesting poses you might not have thought of before, design choices, an exaggerated and clarified depiction of what an action looks like, and – what I find most intriguing – how other people simplify complex ideas. I learned a lot about clothing by drawing people on the bus, and more when I started at Disney and they had a costumed life drawing class, but it wasn't until studying how they simplified clothing (especially coats) in Treasure Planet that I knew how to apply what I'd learned to the drawings I was doing.
Drawing from the screen is also good for learning how to push your characters, both in pose and expression. Usually the nice keyframes they print in art books and use for publicity are very sedate, which gives you a limited impression of what you can do with your drawing. In the animation of a scene you have to push and pull your characters all sorts of different ways to get the action or acting to read. Sometimes you don't even notice how much they're pushed until you start drawing them.
*A good rule of thumb: if it was sent overseas to get animated cheaply, do not draw from it. I don't care how good the storyboards were, find another production.
Wait, I had a point here. Oh yes! Drawing from the screen. One of the really brilliant things about DVDs is that you can pause and stop-frame to your heart's content, and see clearly everything in the frame. A useful exercise which has been made available by this technology is to do drawings off the still frames of a film. As with any sort of replication of a drawn character you should start with the construction and the basic shapes and add detail from there, trying your best to draw it as the animator would have originally drawn it. I am continually amazed at how much I learn from doing this – the only thing more amazing is how infrequently I actually do it, considering how much it helps. I have come to think of it as a sort of auxiliary life drawing – drawing from life is irreplaceable, of course, but when you do so you are studying the world in all its amazing complexity. When you then go to draw your own simplified, stylized cartoon character, you somehow have to translate what you have internalized from complex reality into only a few lines. Some people are naturally gifted at this, but I am not one of them. For example, I find it challenging to describe the wrinkles in the bent elbow of a sleeve with nothing more than two shapes and an interior line, when I know from experience that there are about five different wrinkles just in the elbow, with stretch lines and twists leading from the elbow to the shoulder and wrist ... You can often tell if I'm having trouble with a drawing because I will overthink it, which manifests in a very detailed study of all the physical processes going on therein, instead of something simple and clear.
Drawing still-framed animated characters (so long as they're from a well-drawn production,* of course) is, in a way, life drawing cartoon characters. You get to study interesting poses you might not have thought of before, design choices, an exaggerated and clarified depiction of what an action looks like, and – what I find most intriguing – how other people simplify complex ideas. I learned a lot about clothing by drawing people on the bus, and more when I started at Disney and they had a costumed life drawing class, but it wasn't until studying how they simplified clothing (especially coats) in Treasure Planet that I knew how to apply what I'd learned to the drawings I was doing.
Drawing from the screen is also good for learning how to push your characters, both in pose and expression. Usually the nice keyframes they print in art books and use for publicity are very sedate, which gives you a limited impression of what you can do with your drawing. In the animation of a scene you have to push and pull your characters all sorts of different ways to get the action or acting to read. Sometimes you don't even notice how much they're pushed until you start drawing them.
*A good rule of thumb: if it was sent overseas to get animated cheaply, do not draw from it. I don't care how good the storyboards were, find another production.