Traditional Drawings

Wow! two posts in less than a week! Today I am presenting some drawings I did for work to be used as a template background. I was asked if I could provide some images that look like traditional animation drawings. I first did some roughs and then decided to even clean these two up complete with fake charts, paint to lines, and reg marks.

I tried to think of characters that might feel right in some older classic cartoons. It's funny how I started drawing a blank (pun intended) when trying to think up some of these characters. Kind of like when you go to the video store and suddenly all the movies you had been thinking you wanted to see slip right out of your head.
These are two of the ones I left rough. I love doing these kind of rough drawings, getting a nice attitude and line of action. In a way this is how I do my thumbnails when I am animating a scene. Besides just getting the acting down an animator has to create pleasing drawings. That's where being a good draftsperson comes in. I find it's best to just get something down on paper than to sit there wondering what the best way is to start.
As I've gained more experience I've found that it takes fewer tries to get the result I want. All animators have their own way of approaching their work, some are rougher than others while some artist see it completely in their head before they begin to draw. I tend to fit somewhere between the two. If I can't seem to get the right pose I begin from a rougher state but often once I am used to a character my drawings become cleaner because I can see it before I draw it.

Lot's of Stuff

This year has started off with a bang! First I am working on a quick development project that might lead to something cool. I did these three development pieces in a day and am now doing a sample animation with them. I wanted them to have a rough stylized design. I like the textured backgrounds and wanted the colors to be very bold.For the animation I plan on panning between and past the characters while the backgrounds morph from one color scheme to the other. The nice thing about this kind of style is it's loose and requires no clean-up. I'm having fun with it because it's quite different from my film and I'm able to be broader in the animation.
next week I will share with you some drawings I did to be used as part of template backgrounds on MyToons. They were done to look like classic animation drawings.