A Hard Day's Night

I've been really struggling to draw lately. "So what's new?" I hear you cry! I find that I am at my most productive on the occasions when I have least time to draw. When I come home from work in the evenings, I have my food and head for the drawing board. However when I get there, I cannot give life to my pencil.

Contrast this with when I'm at work. No free time to do my own thing, yet I'm far more able to motivate myself to draw, and far more able to create a decent drawing. I really wish it was my job to draw. I'd be happy as a pig in slop. I don't know if the problem is my tiredness after a long day at work, or whether it is the fact that I have time to ponder what I'm going to draw in the evenings, whereas at work I just draw with very little time to think. I guess during the day, the left side of my brain is preoccupied, allowing the right side to go to town.

I find it so demoralizing though. When you not only fail to improve on the previous day's drawing, but actually deteriorate, it's very hard to persevere. A couple of posts ago I talked about my woeful attempts to make quick sketches. I compared it with my new ability to gesture draw. The problem is, I'm really struggling to even do that. I know I have the ability to do it. I have the drawings to prove it, but I just can't keep it up at the moment. I really need to make a breakthrough to boost my confidence.

Anyway, here are some flour sack drawings I drew on a notepad at work.

Gettin Back On My Feet

Ok, back to business! Over the past few days I have been spending little amounts of time here and there trying to get back into the swing of drawing. It has been difficult to say the least...not to mention demoralizing! Yesterday I managed to draw a picture that I didn't immediately screw up and throw across the room:
There were some people singing on TV who inspired me. It's pretty crappy really and I know I can't draw heads well enough.

Anyway, let's ignore that work of rubbish and move onto something that doesn't appear enough on this blog...ANIMATION!!

I was having a look at the lecture video of Glen Keane in my collection tonight and I liked how simple he drew in it. As everyone always tells me to study the techniques of the people I admire, I thought I'd try and employ this in an animation of my own. He did a mother losing control of her shopping trolley with her baby in it. I went for something much simpler - a guy standing up:

Standing Up
Uploaded by andylatham82

As you can see, I have only drawn five frames. I don't know whether I'll go back and draw the inbetweens, or whether I'll just try a more interesting animation. I'm not really sure what to make of it, so any comments would be very much appreciated.

I set my pencil aside for this animation. Instead I used a black china marker. I know a lot of people use these for their gesture drawings, but I don't know if people use them much for actual animation. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the change of medium.

In Memory

Well sadly my Nana died a few days ago, so bear with me while I'm not posting. Although it's not animation related, I thought I'd show you what I made for my Dad for Fathers' Day. I wanted to give him something to remind him of his mother, so I made a montage of photos of her. Click on it to make it bigger.
Her name was Doris, but everyone called her Doll. She was great fun and I'll miss her very much. I'm on there somewhere...can you spot me?

Anyway, I don't like to end on a downer. It seems that in all the commotion, I forgot about my blog's first birthday. It was a whole year on Saturday since my first post. I had planned to do a comparison post, showing my progress over the year, but haven't got round to it yet. I will do though!

So a belated happy Blogday to meeeee!!

Down But Not Out

My apologies for not having posted anything in a while, things have been a bit difficult lately as my grandmother is seriously ill, which has been very distressing for me. Perhaps emotional times like this are good opportunities to draw, but I just haven't felt like it. More will come soon though, I'm sure.

On a lighter note, you may notice that my little Leafletter portfolio has been removed from the top of my blog. This is to mark the completion (and thus official opening) of the Andy's Animation Portfolio site! The site will have some useful animation resources on it too, not just my drawings and videos. Already it has gained attention. Today I received an email from a marketing company offering me the opportunity of some freelance animation work. More on that soon!

I miss my old little portfolio though. My blog feels empty now. Maybe I can think of something else to put there for its first birthday on Saturday.

More Quick Tips

I got some more quick sketch advice in an email from Tao Nguyen, so I thought I'd share them here:

I think a couple of things will help-

1) Draw smaller. Start drawing people with about an inch or less in size. It's good practice because you don't have much room for drawing details, if you know what I mean. This way you'll fill up the paper with more drawings.

2) Try to draw in sequences like a little girl doing cartwheels, or jumping around, or a man sitting on the bench reading a newspaper, turning the pages, putting the paper down and looking around, etc. This will give you a chance to practice drawing the same thing over and over again with little variation - kinda like animating in thumb nails.

3) Draw in the air first and then when confident, put that pencil or pen down on the paper. This is the same rule for figure drawing. Sometimes I just draw a quick circle to start out for the head placement - others like to start with the body first - it really doesn't matter either way as long as you put something down. Then you can work around it.

4) my final advice would to keep practicing and don't get discouraged. Try to immitate the artists you admire. That's what I did. Just keep observing and keep drawing.

Thanks very much for those tips Tao. I'll definitely give them a go!

Quick Tips

Feeling completely at a loss as to how to improve my quick sketching, I posted a request for tips on The Drawing Board. Thankfully I got a reply with some really great ideas to try so I thought I'd reproduce it here. It reads:

Hi Andy,

This is like an assignment my mentor gave me a year ago, which was to take my 18x24 newsprint pad and conte crayon and for 2 hours walk around campus just sketching people. It was awkward at first and of course people never held the pose as long as I needed, but that's the point. I came to really enjoy it, though.

Draw small relative to your paper size, as Stanchfield did in your example, and see the over-all design of the pose. Because of how our limbs are connected and the over-all range of movement available to us, this design will usually involve a series of triangles. In any case identify the largest, simplest geometric shapes you can see first, working progessively smaller and more precise. Looking at Stanchfield''s page in this context you'll see triangles all over the place. That first standing pose, for instance, is contained in one big triangle with one of the corners at the feet.

When I did this exercise, I came to find it useful to look at the person without drawing, noting the shapes of the over-all design, THEN draw, instead of drawing the instant I saw the person. It's like, instead of trying to draw the person WHILE he was doing what he was doing, I photographed him with my "mental camera", then drew from my head what he had PREVIOUSLY BEEN doing, so that often I was drawing the pose which attracted me after the person had got up and walked away.

It was possible to draw some people reading or napping WHILE they were posing, of course

I hope this helps. Stick with this exercise, you'll find it hugely rewarding, and remember, anything worth doing is worth doing awkwardly the first few times

So I'm going to try this as soon as I can!

Grinding to a Halt

Having spent the last few days practicing gesture drawing, I have been feeling my confidence with a pencil increasing. Tonight changed that. I decided that I should get round to practicing quick sketching. Now I don't know what your definition of quick sketching is, but in my opinion it is a more raw form of drawing - going for the pose without worrying about making it fluid or in proportion. Some people still call this gesture drawing, but I call it quick sketching to differentiate it from the type of drawing I have been doing. Does that make sense? Probably not!

Anyway, I sat down in front of the TV and tried to draw. I was shocked at how clueless I was.
I have got used to just sitting down and drawing. But tonight I experienced the fear of the blank page that used to cripple me when I began to do gestures. Hence the meaningless scribbles at the top of the page. I thought maybe they would cure my fear. They didn't. Through an hour of watching Ugly Betty, I made only three sketches, one of which enfuriated me so much that I immediately scribbled over it.

I was tempted to rip the page out of my sketchbook, crumple it up and hurl it across the room. The fact that I scanned it and am posting it here is nothing short of a miracle! I'm usually calm and tolerant about most things, but when I can't produce a decent drawing, I get filled with frustration. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Well I decided to put it on here mainly for the benefit of anyone else who happens to be in the same situation as me. I thought it was important to document the lows as well as the highs of learning to animate.

The only thought that consoles me is that I felt just like this when I first attempted gesture drawing and yet I have come on leaps and bounds with that. Possibly the most important thing that helped me to overcome my problems in that area was a video of Glenn Vilppu demonstrating how he does it. I have read lots of books on the subject but no amount of reading and looking at pictures can have the same effect as actually watching someone produce these drawings. This, of course, inspired my little collection of drawing demonstration videos. I really hope that I can find a video of someone doing quick sketches. That would help me so so much.

This is what I want to be able to produce:
These were drawn by the great Walt Stanchfield. You can find them in his lecture notes on the subject of quick sketching (but he calls it gesture drawing!). Other examples are these:
These were done by Tao Nguyen, a former animator who now produces children's books. I've met Tao. I wish I had asked him to demonstrate drawing them for me.

Ok, I'm going to sit in the corner and sulk for a while!