Another method update

What I learned this week is to keep the fingers flowing with the wrist- and to definitely treat the legs more simply- like one big octopus tentacle.

Forearms & Shins

Lately Ive found you get much more accurate poses if you draw the forearms and the shins before
you draw the upper arms and the thighs, for some reason its easier to track the space that way.

I also like to construct the shoulder form nowadays as a roundish boomerang form . . .

Posing Tricks

In summary, I want to emphasize that ideally:

1. You put down lines that are contours of a form.
2. In the back of your head the form wraps around lines that have a "sensibility" of varying rigidity. Most importantly, the main line of action, which is always the centerline between the neck and the crotch.

Gesture: A Dramatic Purpose

I still think that gesture is about hitting a pose clearly. Before you can even reach that point, a vital step too easily overlooked is that gesture always needs a dramatic context no matter what, or else there's no purpose to the gesture. I mean, if there's no purpose to the gesture, you might as well be drawing perfect circles and ellipses anyway (which one probably should be doing from time to time anyway).

It's important to bring dramatic context to a gesture:

1. Milt Kahl did it: he would spend a whole day just staring out in space thinking about what he's going to do before he even does it.
2. It clarifies what you're doing without being very technical about it.
3. It gives you far more control and authority over what you want to achieve.
4. I have to stress that you really have to think about the dramatic context before you even lay one line down, and you have to have dramatic context even when you draw naked figures in space.

For example, lets say I was to draw a naked guy in space, inventively, . . . what are some things I would think about:

1. What does a naked guy in space do?
Stand, in some open space, like an exhibitionist, not just stand, but he's hitting a definite artistic pose, because he knows he's being drawn. He would probably look off to the side, or up in the air, because it would be weird to look directly at people drawing you . . .

I mean these sort of thoughts help you paint a visual picture, that lets your imagination fill in the clues, as opposed to jotting off lines and letting the muscle mechanics of drawing or happy accidents do the work of drawing for you . . .

Usually, you don't even intend to draw naked people in space, and an easy way to jump into a good pose when you intend to just sketch one character is to just imagine that there's some other character there that's just not shown- NOW you're character is doing something- DRAMATIC.


The only technical things about thinking things through is you want to definitely decides the hips, knees, and head are going to be for compositional/proportional purposes. Also it helps to draw the head tilt first, that way the character has a definite state of being- because a head tilt is never generic, a tilting a head a certain way is the most specific dramatic thing a human can do- they say it does more that words can.

Another technical thing I just discovered that is really awesome is to double up your lines like this:




There's something about it that absolutely clarifies every single line that you do- it's like your first line is always bad because you're finding something out, and then your second line verifies the statement.

Convex Concave other tips

Avoid right angles in poses. Make sure one side of limbs is smaller than the side facing you.

When drawing cartoons its best to exaggerate the attachment of the head, almost as if the head is a toy ball jointed onto the neck. But it can only look this way if the shape design of the head is very solid- the shape cannot look wobbly. In fact, most of the time, the head ISNT volumetrically drawn, when you overconstruct the head you loose the graphic sense of it- most of the time, the outline of the head itself, as a shape, has solid enough qualities to be graphic and solid and the same time, without overconstructing.

And the neck is something you just have to plain get right, because it's part of the spine. If the neck is off the entire body is off. 

Especially for the arms, legs, and hands, always refer to other body parts to size it out. Always know your peak, angle, and the width of a limb cross section before executing the outlines. Keep the outer contours of the limbs convex. 

Easy cartoon ryhtym (most of the time)- outer contours- convex, inner contours- concave.

If you are going to build a line don't lift your pencil to do it, execute the line as if you're coloring a coloring book. Build your lines for  inking things like hair, eyes, and lips, because they have soft complex curves.

Gesture

I can finally say what gesture is about in a way I am happy with-

Gesture is about hitting a pose CLEARLY.

The best tool to be clear is shape design- as it lends to graphic poses. When you want to draw an intended pose you have to have a graphic idea of the entire pose. To make sure you confine the pose as a unified shape design it's a good idea to mark the top, bottom and side boundaries- that way you pack in all your lines in the right places.

When you copy drawings you learn a graphic shorthand- that wont help you hit naturalistic poses necessarily. To hit naturalistic poses, you have to draw sets of graphic shorthands in relation to other sets- you have to keep all of your line placement graphically relational.

Always pay attention to where your line starts and ends.

Drawing vs. Cleanup vs. Inking

A huge revelation- inking is NOT the came thing as clean-up. Clean-up is not the same thing as drawing. Drawing is neither inking nor clean-up. All of these things are completely different mental processes, and I feel that understanding this has been one of my greatest leaps forward in terms of progress. This is how I perceive the three tasks:

1. Drawing- drawing is about gesture, silhouette, acting, shape design, solidity/construction, getting the proportions right. You do these things to CONVEY AN IDEA QUICKLY. This is a drawing:


2. Clean-up- This concept exists only in animation. It's about streamlining the roughs- picking the right C, S, and I lines, avoiding tangents, avoiding parallel lines, and flipping to ensure it animates as intended. And you make these choices to ultimately ANIMATE. That's why clean-up is not inking.

3. Inking- Inking is NOT drawing or cleanup. Inking is rendering. Inking is about feeling out a hard or a soft edge, texturing, varying the line weight for clarity, spotting blacks. You make choices that ultimately get you to a CLEARER PRETTIER version of a drawing. It's only similar to clean-up in that you also have to be cautious of avoiding tangents and parallel lines.


The mistake I always made is that I always thought that inking was the same thing as cleaning up a drawing, and that cleanup is just re-drawing the gesture better. NO. YOU CANNOT DO THIS. All of these things are completely conceptually different! If you misunderstand this, you only end up with a bad clean drawing, or it only looks good because you shit it out of your ass and tried super hard.

The catch is- cleanup and inking help your fundamental drawing abilities tremendously- I think mostly in a physiological/memory associated way. The simple experience of feeling what the "actual finished" lines of a character brings you a greater understanding of how the lines are spaced out, and how much pressure you need.

More random tricks

I've been finding that when it comes to legs, the outer silhouette is most important- that is, the silhouette should be drawn straight away and it should show the structure straight away.

I've been trying to wean techniques of drawing from observation into how I would draw from memory.

One thing I've noticed is that when I draw from, say, a comic panel- something with a backgrounds & complexity- I spend a lot of time observing the center of interest- namely the placement and the size of the main figure.

This is to say that the simple process of designing in a figure in a box in an aesthetic and storytelling way is a delicate thing.

Oftentimes, its worth starting over and over again, just placing one figure in a panel in a relevant and clear way. The idea of the panel should be clear with only the fewest elements possible, and such elements should be drawn first.

For other people in a panel- design their body language in angles. Other people should be used to lead you to the main person.

Random Tricks

Active Phrases and Inactive Phrases

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.

Feet and leg shortcuts

Head Tilts in Composition

Head Drawing- 4-Axis theory

Overlap- Neck to Hips

So this is the beginning of a series of tutorials on overlap systems, where I will try to point out every major overlap problem. This part covers the neck to hip system.

I plan to do one these for the arm, the leg (human and animal), and the features (lips, eyes, ears).

More on Hands

Feet / Lower Body Momentum

I just wanted to add that you can wing the ball/ heel / and toe-bevel straights any way, it's just that those three straights are REALLY important. So long as you draw those straights first, you can connect the dots, and you have a foot shape.



Another EDIT (1/29/10)- it's actually best that every line in the foot is a straight, when I connect from the toe bevel back to the ankle, I should have used two straights instead of a curve. The ankle is higher on the inner side.

Momentum in Gesture

So this is a good thing to read when you wake up in the morning and forget how to draw.

Hand Gestures

A little addenda:

MACROSCOPIC PROPORTIONS

This is my personal method for committing proportions of characters to memory- in a macroscopic sense. That is, limbs, heads, big forms that generate silhouette. You've gotta think about your character as a big paper doll, and then relate every bodypart to another smaller bodypart that's within 3x it's size- the cleaner the number the better- you don't want fractions.

For example, I think it's kind of stupid to say "a figure is 7 heads tall" . . . it may be information, but it's vague information. What kind of freak of nature can ballpark "7" in relation to 1?

It's better to just commit a general size relationship between every bodypart to memory in the first place, and bury proportions behind you.

This technique works with any kind of character, so long as you understand why you picked the shapes you did. Everything I do relates back to gesture, so when you trace a shape, you do it with the understanding that you are going to plug your memory of that shape back in when you really attempt the drawing. This is why I sort of lowtail the limb shapes around joint seams- these areas manipulate the size a lot, but the middle segment of limbs is always consistent.