Designed Shapes

So I think that there is only one kind of shape in cartooning- and that's a designed shape. Unfortunately it's really difficult to draw a designed shape, because drawing a shitty shape is so damn easy. What is a shitty shape?

It's basically any shape that's easy to draw. A square, a sphere, circle, rectangle, an amorphous blob, hairy psycholined nonsense.

So one must mold a sense of not making a drawing easy and too undesigned. One must practice a design shape sensibility, and become extremely sensitive about the difference.
There are a number or reasons why a design shape is so difficult to draw:

1. A design shape depends on all other design shapes.
2. A design shape has number of definite lines.
3. By "definite" lines- they are not wonky- they are either a straight, a C-curve, or an S-curve. But its extremely difficult to draw a "real" S-curve, and not a wonky S-curve, so for now I say only Cs or Is.
4. There's always some kind of offset- a design shape does not have parallel evenly length-ed lines, because even lengths and parallel lines make a shape INORGANIC.
5. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING- a design shape leads your eye to where you want it to go.

Because you have five difficult criteria to juggle in your head to make a design shape work- I'd say putting a straight versus a curve is never a fluke; yet drawing squares and spheres is- because easy shapes are part of a child's geometry, they're shapes everyone knows. Designing Straight vs. Curves is more like an analytic proof in some college level math class.

Those Damn Spheres!

Random habits

The best phrase to say to yourself before you put down lines is "I know that . . . _____"
that way anything you draw is confident.

NEVER DRAW

Never "draw"

Always be designing. I'm coming to believe that the most intuitive state of what drawing is . . . is coming upon a generic solution of how something should be in theory . . . so when you put mere theory into practice, it will tend to look, and be . . . generic.

When you are always designing you are creating unique shape design solutions to your problems, which will always be more concise and beautiful than a 1000 gradients and hatchings. So I summed this up in a poem:




Also I've come to dislike the term "drawing the action". It's vague.

So you instead merely design the posture, because body language IS posture. Posture is a mere matter of knowing the shape design of the head entering the neck, the extent of straight vs. curves at the hips

Hand Reference Sheet & Exercise Ideas

CHARACTER DESIGN
1. Draw basic proportions of a character (shapes)- front and side view, then draw two head views- 3/4 front and 3/4 back, then draw eight action poses head to feet of just the gestural character shapes (30-50 secs each), only after that, draw in the faces and hands on all eight poses. Ink (and maybe color) the poses. Now you have a character.

Examples:









PROP DESIGN
1 (a). As if your character is going to be made into an action figure, design a bunch of suitable props that would be packaged with it. In the action poses, have the character interact with the props.

SET DESIGN
1 (b). Draw a 3/4 diorama the character interacts in. (It helps to design a general sense of the four walls, a ground, and a ceiling beforehand).

Dot in where you'd put imaginary cameras in this diorama. Then thumbnail the shot the camera sees off to the side- include a downshot camera, an upshot cam, and a wide establishing shot cam. Draw the character in the environment in film-aspect ratio in the shots, using only black & white- no tone.

HANDS
2. Practice sketching hands from memory, and then clean them up using this hand reference sheet. (I compiled a bunch of hands from artists I liked (mostly Bruce Timm, a bit of Glen Keane, and some Belgian BD artists) and photoshoped them into a convenient reference)



ANATOMY
3. Draw in anatomy wireframes over nude photos. Start with buffer people, as you grow more advanced put them in less muscular people where the anatomy is not obvious.

COMPOSITION
4. Find a bad photo, and write why it's bad, and how to make it better compositionally. Then find a great photo, it must be exceptional, and write why it's exceptional. Attempt to use the ideas that the exceptional composition had in a thumbnail sketch.

Usually it all comes down to a composition using some kind of a contrast device to make a focal point stand out- the difficultly is being simple about it.

Example:




ACTION/FIGURE IN GROUPS
5. Draw from ballet, dancers, porn, wrestlers, MMA, people swimming underwater- anything that has contextually dynamic action/interaction poses.

ANIMALS
6. Draw animals from memory and correct them with photos.

PERSPECTIVE
7. Buy RapidViz, go thru that book.
8. Just draw a lot of grids, and get really good at freehandedly giving the illusion of the grids receding/densening.
9. Get really good at drawing ellipses- make sure they are sharp.
10. Exaggerate the wrap on cylinders, and always bevel edges.

ACTING
8. Draw two serious looking people arguing with a cartoony-looking person in a mall, catching the attention of a crowd of diverse people in the background.

STORYBOARDING
9. Take an old Marvel Universe handbook and pick a few random heroes and villians- using post-its, thumbnail them fighting from the top of a ferris wheel, transition them to fighting on a tightrope using unicycles, and then transition them to playing chicken between a Porsche and an Astrovan on a crowded parking lot while it's raining hot dogs that can come alive and suck your blood.

Feet and leg shortcuts

Head Tilts in Composition