Leo Learns To Animate

Caricatures

2008-09-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a great book called Face Off, by Harry Hamernik, and following the lessons. Here are some recent practice results.

My Reviews of Daily Comics

2008-07-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

This list refers to strips appearing in the daily Seattle Times.

Keepers

These are the strips I look forward to every day:

Luann (Greg Evans) – A must-read strip every day. A favorite of mine ever since Brad met Toni Daytona. The story lines are (almost) always interesting, and keep me wanting to check in and see what's happening next. Engaging, believable characters. I enjoy the breadth and variety of character types and differing points of view.

Pickles (Brian Crane) – Great observations on an endearingly crotchety elderly couple. Consistently funny setups and punch lines. The art is functional; always clear.

Between Friends (Sandy Bell-Lundy) – Both well-written and well-drawn. As a man, I appreciate the intelligent and believable conversations from a women's point of view (unlike Cathy).

Frazz (Jeff Mallett) – Interesting characters with unique points of view, although it is sometimes repetitive, and not much happens. Nice graphic style; good use of varying lines weights adds interest.

Candorville (Darrin Bell) – I like the storylines, especially the relationship between Susan and Lamont. I also appreciate the diversity.

Herman – Inventive and funny, wryly cynical. Very distinctive look.

Frank and Ernest (Thaves) – Worth keeping for the occasional gems. A recent favorite: One anteater says to the other, "Sure we eat ants, but we shouldn't let that define us." Another, outside the insurance claims office: "They say they don't cover 'acts of God,' and boy, are they ever pious!" These gems make up for the usual faire, which plays on obvious puns.

Betty (Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen) – Lots of interesting ideas make this strip enjoyable. On the minus side, the characters don't have clear individual personalities, and the drawing is a bit flat.

The Duplex (Glen McCoy) – Inconsistent, but sometimes very clever and funny. One of those strips that are drawn so stylishly they're hard to look at.

Crankshaft (Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers) – The only reason I enjoy this strip is because it is drawn so well. It is well-grounded in good drawing principles, almost to the point of not being cartoony enough. I wish Ayers could hook up with a better writer.

Monty (Jim Meddick) – Although this strip is stiffly drawn and features several characters that are to me indistinguishable, it's offbeat inventiveness keeps me reading.

Losers
The sooner you drop these, the happier I'll be...

Lio (Mark Tatulli) – I avoid reading this strip because it annoys me so much. When it was first introduced, it looked edgy and engaging. I can see why you chose it. But very soon it became apparent that it has no range: it's just about an unappealing boy who exhibits cruel and/or dangerous behavior. Worse, Tatulli has no idea how to pay off a joke. Example: Lio is reaching into the cookie jar. He reaches deeper and deeper. In the last panel, only his shoes remain on the counter next to the jar. And the punchline is… Oh sorry, that was the punchline.

Prickly City – I would like to think I'm open-minded enough to tolerate a conservative-minded comic strip in the funny papers. But if so, it's not this one. The last thing we need in this country is more sloganization and reduction of important issues into reductionist he-said/she-said sound bites. Give me a strip where the honorable values of both viewpoints are lovingly respected. (Stantis is also an editorial cartoonist, and from what I've seen of his editorial work, he's on much stronger footing making his political points directly. He's also a much better graphic artist than this strip would indicate.)

Garfield – Please let this past-its-prime turkey die a decent death. What's the joke, that being fat and lazy is funny? Every one of the flatly-drawn characters looks the same, with different hair styles to distinguish them.

Get Fuzzy (Darby Conley) – Seemed interesting at first, but I've never been entertained by this strip since it first appeared. I stopped reading it long ago. Waste of time and space.

Cathy (Cathy Guisewite) – Same old, same old. If this artist hasn't learned to draw by now, she probably never will.

Family Tree – Terribly drawn scribbles, with non-interesting stories and characters.

Wouldn't Miss 'Em
These strips are okay. I don't mind them, but I wouldn't miss them much either.

Baby Blues (Jerry Scott & Rick Kirkman) – A pleasantly cartoony style that still reads clearly, but the jokes are not particularly funny.

Adam @ Home (Brian Basset) – Well-drawn, interesting concept, but not particularly funny. Pretty much the same joke every day.

Wizard of Id (Brant Parker) – Nice, familiar style. Yes, familiar – I've been reading this strip for the last 40 years.

Shoe (Chris Cassatt) – Interesting drawing style, but I have never related to the characters. The jokes and situations are not that engaging.

Lola (Todd Clark) – Very clear and expressive strip with a ton of attitude. Rarely funny, though, and I don't actually like any of the characters as people.

Classic Peanuts (Schultz) – I don't read this anymore. It just doesn't hold my interest. How about something really classic, like Krazy Kat?

For Better or Worse (Lynn Johnston) – The drawing style always engages me, but I'm wary of reading this strip because it's so often uninteresting.

Sally Forth (Francesco Marciullano) – If this were a newer strip, I would have included it as a keeper, because it features believable characters and a wry wit. However it's pretty badly drawn and very repetitive. I'm ready to move on.

Arlo & Janis (Jimmy Johnson) – Mildly interesting. Not terribly drawn, but not very solid either.

Rose is Rose (Pat Brady & Don Wimmer) – I can see where this strip's romanticism might appeal to other people. I don't get much out of it.

Family Circus (Bill Keane) – A little apple pie never killed anyone, I guess.

On A Claire Day (Carla Ventresca & Henry Beckett) -- The characters are actually pretty interesting, but the fact that this strip is drawn in such a sloppy way insults the history of comics. If this were a newer strip I'd be more forgiving of the graphic deficiencies -- Greg Evans has improved his drawing skills dramatically over the years that Luann has been in print – but Ventresca has been drawing this childlike style for years, apparently with a dose of smug pride. I do like the writing in this strip, but I almost hate to see space given to someone who degrades the art form even further.

Chuckle Brothers and Argyle Sweater – I lump these together because they are indistinguishable to me. Both are obvious Gary Larsen rip-offs, drawn by poor artists who apparently admire Larsen's offbeat humor but lack his intelligence.

19th World Wide SketchCrawl: Seattle

2008-06-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't see anyone else sketching. It may have been too crowded for people to find parking.

Anyway, this is the food court next to the statue of Lenin, an hour before the parade.

After the parade started, the statue became a perfect perch for some:

George Liquor Practice Set 1

2008-06-11T10:39:00.001-07:00

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/05/need-artists-soon-draw-republican.html

Slapstick

2008-01-31T00:35:00.000-08:00

This is a sketch called "The Sticky Restaurant" that my friend John Clancy and I performed many years ago.

Regarding the discussion about whether cartoons are best "written" or storyboarded, I can say for sure that we created this piece mostly by acting it out, or imagining it and then acting it out. We wrote it down on paper only after we had the entire piece mapped out down to the exact timing.

Practice Eddies: "The Midnight Snack" (part 1)

2008-01-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

Eddie Fitzgerald keeps treating us with wonderfully silly stories illustrated by photographs he takes of his own amazingly cartoony face. I couldn't resist using these to practice drawing expressions.

These are pretty conservative in that I only caricatured (exaggerated) a little -- strengthening lines of action, etc. What I'd like to try next is applying these expressions to a cartoon character, like Bugs Bunny.

Thanks, Eddie!

THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

"It sounded like crying behind the walls, but that couldn't be."

Every once in a while she'd reach a point where she couldn't take it anymore, and she'd howl and bang her head against the wall."

HOOOOOOWWWWLLLLL!!!!!!! BANG! BANG! BANG!
"Um...er, something like that. Don't worry it was probably just the wind."

"They say that once a year, she'd get so intolerably angry that she'd manage to crawl up out of the wall into the attic, then down into the house, where she would kill the occupant of this room.

"It never occurred to her to leave here."

HHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLL!!!!!!!!
"Good Grief! It's bad tonight!"

"You don't suppose that this is the night she'll crawl out, looking for vengeance?"
"They say there's an axe hidden behind a trunk in the attic that she uses to....."

"Naaaaw! That's just a story! Don't think for one minute that I...."

Happy Birthday, Brandon

2007-11-22T12:29:00.001-08:00

Here's a caricature of my son Brandon that I made for his 28th birthday.

More Funner

2007-11-05T22:58:00.001-08:00

I've been wanting to loosen up in my drawings and have more fun with them. I tend to be sort of a pleaser and perfectionist - which seems to lead to dull drawings.

I remembered hearing it said that every artist has 10,000 bad drawings in him or her. And the sooner he gets them out of his system, the sooner he can start drawing good ones.

I realized that if I could do 10 every day, I might be a good artist in three years! That's not bad... I've been wanting it all my life without success; another three years is nothing.

So I was re-reading Mark Kennedy's blog about elements of design that make good drawings, and he mentioned the rule of contrasting sizes. It often works well to have something big, something medium, and something small, overall. I looked at the Betty Boop I've been working on, which I find appealing as hell, and what do you know? Big head, medium hips, and tiny torso. (Or it could be long legs, medium head and tiny torso, either way.)

So I decided to get in a few of my crappy drawings specifically trying for contrasting sizes.

They're still crappy, but I actually laughed when I drew them! I haven't done that in all my meticulous Preston Blair copying!

(But they would have been better if I had constructed them. But I wanted to draw quicker and looser so I made myself use my new Copic instead of a pencil that I could keep erasing over and over.)

Betty Boop

2007-11-05T00:02:00.001-08:00

Copying a sketch by Grim Natwick. First try (mine in black):

Face way too narrow!

Second try:
Eye on right side too small, etc.

Third try:

Better, but the left eye is too close to the center.

Flip walk

2007-10-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

This exercise was harder than it looked.

I started by copying the key frames onto paper by eye. I started with Frame 4 because the body is fully stretched out at its highest point. I wanted to see the un-scrunched proportions. Then I compared it with the original in PhotoShop.

After making corrections:

In retrospect I can see that I didn't understand the actual head shape at the time. It's hard to make out from the original clip.

But I compared it again, and it looked okay:

Then I compared my outline of Frame 4 against Frame 1, so I could see how Flip moved from 1 to 4.

I did this so that when I copied Frame 1, it would be accurate in relation to Frame 4. Here's my Frame 1:

I drew the first four keys this way.

But they were crappy because I wasn't really seeing the underlying construction. When you study original animation frame by frame, you see a lot of wobblyness due to poor inbetweens and probably inking mistakes. Copying from that end result just makes it worse.

So I did this in Flash to analyze Flip's construction as he was walking:

It's true I traced. But I wasn't so much tracing the final lines as trying to draw what the construction underneath should have been. I actually cleaned up a lot of places where the inbetweens weren't quite right.

If I were going to keep working on this, I would:

1. Try to make the volume of the body egg shape more consistent.

2. Study how the body squashes. Some of the frames in the original have a very obvious fold above the tummy, which makes sense as the leg raises to its high position while the head is moving to its low position in the middle of the step. But I didn't do it consistently with the movement.

3. Study the arcs.

4. Clean up all the wobbliness.

P.S. I worked on this for over week before I realized why he leans forward and backward on alternate steps: because he's compensating for the weight of the papers under his left arm! (I left out that action because it would have confused the body construction lines, and I didn't need any more confusion.)

The JohnK Animation Curriculum

2007-10-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Just keeping track of all the great stuff JohnK is posting...

The Curriculum

JohnK Animation Course Level 1

First Principles of Cartoon Drawing

1. Heckling Hare: step-by-step construction lesson

First Principles of Cartoon Motion

Rubber hose animation basics
animating to beats,
how to read and write ex sheets.
Walks, double bounce walks, runs, basic movement,figure 8 motions,
Overlapping Action
Basic lip synch,
3/4 walks with animating backgrounds
Animating the impossible-using the medium to do what only animation can do.

1. The Beat (Kali does Bosko's Bounces)

Pedro Completes Bosko's Bounces

2. Oswald Dance

Oswald Ex Sheets, I'll help you out

3. 10 x beats. Flip the Frog: double bounce walk

Oswald Dance

2007-09-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

Updated October 13
I finished the Oswald Dance exercise, as suggested by John K's blog. It's not so great, but I feel like I learned a lot.

Here's a link to the Flash animation):
Oswald Dance Excerpt

I put the ears on a separate layer, so that I could reuse the drawings for the pivot cycle. The body pivots in six frames each direction. When it pivots back the other way, the same six body shapes are used in reverse. However, the ears have different shapes because they follow the movement of the head. So I'm reusing the same six body drawings, with twelve different ear drawings.

The mouth is also on a separate layer, again so I can reuse the body drawings.

I drew the body with pencil and paper. I drew the ears and mouth in Flash with a tablet.

Another Line of Action drawing

2007-05-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

Truth to tell, I'm fully loaded with another project. More later, when my current project is finished.

Lesson 6: Katie Rice's Funny Cute Faces

2007-04-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 6

This was so much fun. But not at all easy.

It probably goes without saying: the red drawings below are Katie's originals. The black are mine.

Katie's drawings look like they were made in a matter of seconds. I wish I could dash them off nearly as easy! But it's hard to copy something exactly.

I love that face, above.

Although Katie's drawings look very rough, there's no doubt that every line she draws is exactly the right shape and in the right place to suggest the three-dimensional character in an appealing way.

I hate when I straighten things out and even things up, like I did with the girl on the left -- losing some of the fun and appeal. (Although even with my meddling, the design still has plenty of appeal.)

I really wanted to nail the one of the left above, because she's adorable.

I'm so amazed how big a difference just a fraction of an inch can make in placing a line. It seems to change the whole personality. Even when I thought I'd copy it well, if my drawing looked like a different person, I just had to start over.

I didn't really understand the drawing on the left, so I had trouble reproducing it.

I made a lot of the faces a bit wider than Katie did. That's one reason hers look more glamorous!

Well, I'm no great designer, but I can say I know all about stick-out mouths.

Champion of Justice

2007-04-09T23:16:00.000-07:00

Waste of time or not, here is less than a second of frames that I copied from "Champion of Justice." This is an animated gif, and it runs a little slow.

This "extra credit" project was based on ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 5 and JohnK's follow-up post, which has a link to the longer silhouette sequence.

I just thought, "If I'm spending so much time copying all these drawings from Preston Blair and other old cartoons, I might as well try drawing a sequence of frames."

I probably paid too much attention to copying the silhouette and not enough to trying to imagine the underlying construction.

There's really an underlying contradiction in animated cartoons, isn't there? On the one hand, you want these free, loose, fun, wild, expressive, cartoony drawings, and on the other hand, your figure has to move believably in three dimensions and show believable weight and volume -- all of which require a technical mastery. Art plus science!

Lesson 5, Part 5 (conclusion)

2007-04-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

Here's the last of the drawings that I'm copying from JohnK's Lesson 5.

Good grief! What was I doing with that muzzle?

I made three attempts at Tink; always had a problem stretching her out along her line of action.

Wart is pretty good. The only error I see I that I made his face slightly too wide. (This was all just by eye.)

Lesson 5, Part 4

2007-03-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today I finished copying all the Preston Blair drawings from JohnK's Lesson 5.

This one of Tom sneaking on his tippy-toes was really hard for some reason. Below was my third attempt:
And here is the comparison of it with the Preston Blair original. Not too bad. If I want to focus on the successful parts, that front leg is pretty exact!
I really enjoy drawing Jerry.

Comparing it to the original, mine was again pretty close. Except I really underestimated his ear.

Tom again, and once again this was kinda tricky.

I made the head too small, as you can see in the comparison below:

The next one is interesting. If I just saw the finished drawing, I wouldn't have seen the line of action as clear as Preston Blair draws it (bottom picture). But being aware of it, you can see how all the parts of this drawing fit around that line.

I'm getting a little faster at these but it takes me almost an hour per drawing.

There's still a bit more to Lesson 5: JohnK included some extra frame grabs including some actual silhouettes, plus some Disney pencil sketches with good line of action. Plus just a few days ago, John posted a short animation of a great character running, tying a rope and jumping on a bicycle, all in silhouette. I'm thinking of attempting to copy at least part of that animation!

Lesson 5, Part 3

2007-03-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 5

Here's the next set of five. I copied all of these from Preston Blair only by eye.

Click the first image of each pair for a larger view of my copy. The second image of each pair is an animated gif that compares mine (black) against Preston Blair's original (red).

Lesson 5, Part 2

2007-03-10T20:03:00.000-08:00

I'm grateful that there are so many poses with the same two characters. It helps to see how they can be stretched into such extreme poses.

This one was relatively easy. I worked on capturing that expression of disdain.

Here is the comparison to Preston Blair's original:

This one was really hard! It think just because it's so stretched out. I made many tries on this one, then finally traced the line of action before copying the figure itself by eye. The face is pretty damn accurate anyway. Again, I worked on capturing the exact expression.

Look how distorted Tom's body is. It's harder to see the underlying construction in this drawing, compared to simpler poses. Look at how his two shoulders are aligned, and try to imagine his pelvis in relation to his spine! You can see how Blair pushed the construction both to impart a strong the line of action and to create a strong silhouette. It's not that he sacrificed or ignored construction -- he just bent it to create a stronger cartoon drawing.

This is such a cute pose of Jerry. But speaking of stretching the pose, his left shoulder is coming out of his head!

Below is the comparison to Preston Blair's original:

Another one of Jerry:

I did the next one twice. The first one was too stretched out horizontally. This is the second one:

Lesson 5, Part 1

2007-03-06T21:41:00.000-08:00

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Meta: The $100,000 Animation Drawing Course- Lesson 5

I'm loving this, but I can't believe how difficult it is! Even just copying the simple lines of action faithfully is challenging.

Click below to see the animated comparison:

The "down" frame took me three tries, and it's still not right! Here is the best of the three:

But even though it's hard to match the proportions exactly by eye, I'm still "getting" the main idea of the line of action. I really appreciate Preston Blair's drawings more and more. Thanks JohnK.

Anyway, just for fun: here are Preston Blair's original drawings "animated":

Lesson 4, Part 7

2007-02-19T00:08:00.000-08:00

Yay for me, I finished Lesson 4!

I felt pretty good about doing this one.

Here's the comparison to Preston Blair's original. There are still some dumb mistakes - especially the size of the nose - but considering I did that entirely visually, it's a great improvement. Also I did it faster than the other ones in this lesson.

Lesson 4, Part 6

2007-02-15T23:31:00.000-08:00

I thought this was pretty good...

Until I compared it in Photoshop...

Lesson 4, Part 5

2007-02-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

This little guy took over an hour, but I did it without checking until I was done.

Comparison with the original (in red):

Click to see animated GIF comparison:

Lesson 4, Part 4

2007-02-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I'm really dragging this lesson on and on!

I bragged in the last post about how my eye was so much more discerning. Well, the next night I spent nearly an hour on this character swiveling his head around. (I think it's a mouse?)

Once again, as soon as I felt like I was finally done, I got ready for bed, then came back and looked at it. It was terrible! I'd straightened it all out. Yuck!

So the next night I started over with a clean sheet of paper, resolved to really see what I was looking at. I drew lightly in blue for maybe fifteen minutes, and I could already tell I was making exactly the same mistakes. The body didn't seem to be leaning forward far enough, and the head seemed too small. But I could not figure out how to correct it, and I didn't want to spend a whole hour barking up the wrong tree again.

So I cheated.

I scanned the rough and compared it in Photoshop (above). Wow. The differences in the lower body were subtle but important. The curve in the hind leg that I was making too vertically straight made a huge difference in the overall perception of how the body was leaning.

I was also amazed that I had so much of the head exactly right, except the face was pushed in a whole eyeball width! How could I not see that?

So the next night, working from memory of the comparison, I went back to the drawing board and corrected the blue, then pencilled it in black.

Finally I compared it again. Except for the hands and nose tip being too small, it's not too bad.

Considering I cheated.

P.S. I really enjoyed the feeling that I was drawing three-dimensional volume in this character. Especially the organic shapes of the belly and the head.

P.S.S. Bonus comparison. Yikes!

Lesson 4, Part 3

2007-02-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I know I'm making progress because it's easier for me now to see my mistakes on the paper, before I dash off to the scanner and do a Photoshop comparison. The problem is... I see my mistakes on paper. So drawing is taking longer and longer. I keep drawing, noticing it looks wrong, figuring what is wrong, fixing it and checking again. Over and over and over.

Using blue pencil, I worked on a drawing of the duck with the slingshot for nearly an hour. When I thought I was done, I realized it was fundamentally wrong. So the next night I started over on a new sheet of paper, and spent another fifty minutes just on the blue pencil. When I was done, it was close, but still visibly wrong. So the next night I spent another half hour fixing the blue, and then tracing it in black. An hour and half on a single drawing!

This is the result:

That looked pretty good to me. At least it was as good as I could get it without doing the comparison in Photoshop. It did seem somehow that the head was bigger than it should be, but the neck also looked just a tad longer than the original, so I couldn't figure out how the head could be bigger.

Finally I did the test:

It's okay (or maybe pretty good), but the mistakes are all too obvious.

Maybe I'm spending too much time on this. But now that I can self-correct better, I'm really trying to get each drawing as good as I possibly can. Also the time I spend, I'm training my eyes and hands, which after all is the point (at least partly). Hopefully this is a just a stage along the path, where I'm getting more discerning (a good thing) but I'm still not as skilled as I need to be.

I'm gonna leave this angry little duck be, and move on. There are three more characters in Lesson 4.