More on Glen Keane

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Lately when I think of life drawing for animation, I keep coming back to Glen Keane.  He really epitomizes what I mean to life draw like an animator.  I love his passion for the art.  I love in this podcast Glen speaks about hitting a wall in his animation:

"when you run up against a problem, you always think it's because, 'Oh I'm not good enough'.  It's not that.  You've hit the limit to your knowledge, and you've gotta go out and observe and get something more.  Those are the best times, when you're... in a rut, and the world is open and you're ready to learn something new.  You've gotta go, you've gotta take advantage of that." -Glen Keane

PODCAST interview with Glen Keane:
PART ONE
PART TWO

LIFE DRAWING by Glen Keane

Life Drawing: Some Gestures from the Week.

To create the illusion of depth draw on your knowledge of perspective.  You could help yourself in this type of pose by drawing a box in perspective representing the simple shape that the figure would be contained in.  Marking down the ground plane to weigh down your model and keep him planted.  In this pose, we also have overlapping forms (arms in front of torso, in front of legs) which further helps in creating depth or foreshortening.

You can slightly see my Line of action here in my light underdrawing.  It goes up the arm, down the back and swoops over the hips and down the leg. 

This is an easy line of action here(yellow line).  Figure is properly balanced.  You can see that if you drop a line straight down from the base of his neck, his weight is evenly distributed between both feet.

Woah, can you see the boxes?  I tend to shade two sides of my boxes, especially if that side of the box is in shadow(pelvis).  Simplifies my gestures in quick poses but adds form.  Notice the back of the knee caps showing the perspective/surface line in one stroke.  You can tell that the Left leg is coming towards us, Right leg is angled away.

Left figure is balanced.  Right figure showing form through boxes and a long line of action reaching up.

Can you feel the flow and rhythm of this drawing?

Boxes forming the ribcage and pelvis + flow down legs + balance and proportion = simple clean gesture 

Life Drawing: Gestures

Rembrandt shows us how it's done

3rd Year Design: For Katherine and Britney

Last week we looked at Model Sheets.  

Character Lineup

Character Rotation

Pose Sheet

Structure and Character Breakdown

This week we will begin to put into motion our characters.  It's not enough to simply design a character.  The character needs to be thoroughly practiced and posed.  Fine tune your character and alter it if you need to, until it's comfortable to animate.  IN DETAIL describe how  to approach this character in animation.  If you were working at a studio, this would all need to be clear on paper prior to production.  It makes more sense to give the animation team as much information possible before they animate, rather than try to explain it during animation or the revision stage.  Time is money, and you will surely learn that as an animator, you want to have as much information as possible  from the start.  Too often, I see unnecessary revisions after scenes have been fully animated.  Something as simple as a detailed model sheet could have been enough to prevent such set backs.  Plan, plan plan.

Below are some wonderful drawings from Hans Bacher's blog.   Designed by CHEN-YI CHANG for Disney's Mulan.

© disney enterprises, inc

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Your end goal is to have many industry standard portfolio pieces as possible.  Keep asking yourself, can I animate these characters?  Are they esthetically appealing?  How do the forms move in 3 dementional space?

Here's a beautiful piece of animation I found while looking through the 11 Second Club.  The short film was originally created by BJ Crawford for his 3rd year film.  He says he recently finished it up in collaboration with many talented animators and artists.  It's never too late!  Feel how the characters move.  They seem 3 dementional!

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Starbucks Break

Life Drawing