Turning Left

Continuing on the last post's theme, here we have some more contour drawings from tonight. On the left is a rather unflattering rendering of my girlfriend Sian, drawn while she was reading the newspaper, and on the right is part of an umbrella:
I drew these with my left hand. It seems that ignorance is bliss when it comes to contours; beginners do not end up resorting to their tried and tested drawing methods. Using your left hand (or your right if you are naturally left-handed) takes away all you have learned and allows greater concentration too.

I was struck by how difficult it is to keep within the boundaries of the page. I had intended to draw all of Sian, but ended up filling over half of my page with her head alone. The same goes for the umbrella. I meant to draw the whole thing, but only the top part fitted. That's the trouble with not looking at what your pencil is doing. I guess I need bigger paper!

The next topic in the "The Natural Way to Draw" is gesture drawing. I enjoy this form of drawing, but the way I do it is slightly different from how it describes in the book. More to come on that in the next post though......

Contour...tion

Right, if you read my last post, you will know that I was planning to work my way through the book "The Natural Way to Draw". Tonight I tried the first excercise: contour drawing. It is a form of drawing I have never tried before. It involves drawing without looking at your page.

The idea behind it is to connect your sense of touch with your sight. The author says that the artist is to place his/her pencil on the page and then look at the object they are about to draw. He must try to convince himself that his pencil tip is touching a contour on the object (effectively a line following the surface of the object) instead of the paper. He must then move his eyes along the contour, along with his pencil, with the purpose of coordinating both movements. The only time he may look at the page is when he reaches the end of a contour and must reposition his pencil at the beginning of a new one. However, no lines may be drawn whilst looking. From what I can tell, the excercise is designed to prevent the artist from attempting to draw a shoe for example (we often draw what we think a shoe should look like, but not necessarily what is in front of us), but instead 'feel' his way around for the details that make up the shoe.

I found this really tricky. It requires a surprisingly large amount of concentration to do. Other forms of drawing tend to get to be second nature after a while, so you don't really think about what you are doing. However with contour drawings it is entirely the opposite: you must really be aware of every movement your pencil makes. Anyway, here are two of my attempts:
In case you can't see what they are, they are of an old boot drawn from two different angles. They look like a child's drawings, but bear in mind that I wasn't looking when I drew them. I made several other drawings, but there's no real point in posting them as they are not drawings to be viewed in the same sense as normal drawings. According to the book, the experience of drawing by 'touch' is the desired outcome, rather than a nice looking picture.

Teach Me!!

Okay, although I am pleased with my progress on quick sketches, I have been feeling a little like I'm not progressing in general. A few years ago I decided to teach myself to play the guitar. I learned a lot in quite a short space of time, but then reached a point where I just wasn't getting any better. I'm worried that the same is happening here. The solution may lie in getting some tuition from somewhere, although with animation courses costing big money, I don't know where the teaching will come from.

Any animators out there willing to help?!

Well assuming that my feeble plea will not pay off, I have found an alternative. It's not quite the same as having a teacher or mentor, but it's the best I can manage. It's a book called "The Natural Way to Draw" by Kimon Nicolaides, which was kindly brought to my attention by Kevin Langley. It is full of assignments to try, which I hope will give me some idea of where to turn next. If you believe the introduction, it takes a year to get through the whole thing, so there is a fair bit there to try.

Well on another note, we went for a meal at a pub today and I took my little sketchbook along. I did a few sketches but was rather uninspired due to the fact that all the subjects were sitting down and generally being rather boring!
Hence why my drawings aren't too great and why I drew the walls. It's a shame there wasn't paint drying on them!

Mornin' All!

Well look at this....it's just after 10am and I've already got some drawing done. That's DRAWING......in DAYLIGHT! It's such a novelty to have some time on my hands!

So here are some quick sketches, imagined rather than drawn from reference this time:
Am I improving?

Quick Thoughts

Today we have some more quick sketches, drawn while watching TV:
I quite like the one at the top right. It was a girl in Big Brother crying in the Diary Room. You can't tell from this that she is crying so maybe the drawing isn't as good as it could be, but I quite like it all the same for some reason.

On another subject, today I was having a conversation by email with Kevin Langley. I was trying to describe the reason why I am always hesitant about attempting any actual animated sequences. I thought it was a blogable stream of thoughts, so I figured I'd post it here:

"Of course the most important thing I need to do, which I'm just not doing at all at the moment, is ANIMATION! You know when you have a fear of making a mark on your nice clean sheet of paper? Well I have overcome that fear, but I think I have the equivalent fear in terms of animating. I think it's because if I do a bad drawing, I can just do it again without too much trouble. However screwing up an entire animated sequence feels like it would be a demoralising experience! I remember when I made my first bouncing ball animation and I was scanning in all the individual drawings. I had my heart in my mouth with the fear that it wouldn't all come together well. I need to practice rolling my drawings as I'm drawing them to check them as I go along. Have you tried doing that though? It's really hard!"

Back So Quick?

Okay, this is a rarity......two posts in one day! Be sure to look at my previous post as well as this one!

I sat down just after posting those circles and decided to just doodle using the pen I normally use for inking. I found myself drawing quick sketches of people on the TV. Now this may not seem anything special to you, but if you look back at this post, you will see how much difficulty I had the last time I tried this deceptively simple looking method of drawing. Here are tonight's attempts:
I don't know why I found it so much easier tonight. I haven't been practicing, so I can't put it down to that. I'll have to do a bit of pondering to find the answer!

Going Round in Circles

Yesterday frustration gripped me. Today I feel a little better. Not a lot of interest to show though! Just pages and pages of things like this:
I wrote to someone at Disney today, and they have passed my email and portfolio address to their friend in Disney Feature Animation. Whether anything will come of it, I don't know, but I'll keep trying until something does happen!

If anyone working for Disney reads this, PLEASE HELP MEEEEEEE!!!!!!

Inversion

My apologies for not posting anything in a while, I've been busier than ever over the last week as I have been doing some freelance 3D animation as well as my normal job, meaning I have been working 14 hour days. I am happy about getting the animation work, I just wish it was more like character animation. I should really rename my blog to Andy's Character Animation or something as it's that that I'm most interested in.

Today I finished the job so I have had a little time to do some drawings. I heard somewhere that it's a good exercise to try drawing with white pencil on black paper for a change. I believe it is supposed to teach you to be more conservative with the amount of linework you do. I had a go at this:
I really enjoyed the change of colours, but I'm not sure whether I felt that I needed to be more concise with my drawing.
Maybe that's an indication that my drawing style is okay as it is, or maybe it's an indication that I have just misunderstood the whole idea!
Finally, just for fun, here's a couple of guys facing off.
Now, going back to this freelance job, I thought I should post it here since it's animation work. I hope that I someday get some work involving characters. I guess I need to practice that myself for a while first though!

Compass
Uploaded by andylatham82

This is one of four videos I produced for SAB Miller, a brewing company. I'm not completely happy with how it turned out, but I had a very tight deadline and so couldn't achieve everything I had planned to.

Facing a Worm

This was me tonight for a while:
I was feeling a bit down in the dumps, not helped by my poor inking skills! However I soon perked up as an idea came to me for a little animated short. It wasn't really what I'd call a flash of inspiration, but more like a gradual evolution of an idea, from making a cartoon about a fish toying with a worm on a fishing hook, to being just about the worm on the fishing hook.

Anyway, I decided to start storyboarding it out. I have never really drawn a storyboard, so it will be a first for me. I say will be a first, because I never got past the first picture. I drew a simple little worm:
I wasn't quite happy with the frightened expression on his face, so I decided to try drawing it a bit bigger. However, I was annoyed that the expression I drew the second time was in no way like the first attempt.
I mean does that look scared? I think not! I looked at my first drawing and analysed the positioning of the eyes, eyebrows and mouth to try to determine why the expression was different. I scribbled down some more faces, trying to nail the right combination of angles and spacings of facial features, but was struck by just how different each looked, so I figured I'd post my attempts on here as I thought it was an interesting topic to write about.
The expressions seem to range from happy at the top right to horrified on the middle left, and from confused in the centre to something approaching scared in the bottom three. I still haven't managed to get it right though. Who would have thought such a simple face could be so tricky to manipulate?!

Ages ago I got a facial expressions book from the local library with the intention of using it to learn how to translate the real expressions into a characatured form. I never got round to doing it though. Maybe now would be a good time to check it out again.

Getting Grumpy

I drew this a couple of days ago:
I'm not sure what it is, but I thought I'd post it.

I've spent so much time gesture drawing lately that I seem to have forgotten how to draw simple cartoon characters! I sat down to make some up and found that I couldn't. So I got some model sheets and tried to draw them....but I couldn't! It's not nice to feel like you have forgotten how to do something you used to be able to do. I thought of giving up, but I decided to just look at my newly aquired Walt Disney Sketchbook and take note of the details of the seven dwarfs. I drew some characters of my own, taking into account the details I was looking at. I must have absorbed some of them though, since I found myself unintentionally drawing Grumpy.
I figured I'd ink him up and colour him in Photoshop:

Cutting Hair, Not Trees

I have two tips that may seem a bit strange, but they are things that I have noticed again and again over the years. They don't just apply to drawing, but to anything where you are trying to motivate yourself to do something - novel writers spring to mind.

Tip 1: Get a haircut!
Often I have struggled to get my brain into gear, both with drawing and with things in the past like studying for Physics exams. Time and time again though, I have come to realise that after having my hair cut, my concentration and my learning ability have increased. Why this is, I have no idea. Maybe it's the removal of weight from my head or increased brain-cooling!

Tip 2: Dress up a bit!
How many of us just wander round the house in scruffy clothes? Well I do. They are comfortable and so you'd think that you would be able to work better in them. Wrong! I have often noticed that I feel more up to doing things that require effort if I'm dressed a bit more smartly. I don't mean put a shirt and tie on, or dust off your tux. I mean just wear things you would be willing to be seen outside in.

I know these sound ridiculous, but they really do work, and the combination of the two can give quite a dramatic effect.

Right, one last tip, this one specifically for drawing:

Tip 3: Decorate your desk!
I've lost count of how many times I have sat at my desk to draw and have suffered from artist's block. My new solution to this problem is to have pictures of cartoon characters all over the place. Little stickers of Mickey Mouse or Yogi Bear or the like. If you are struggling to get something down on paper, just pick a random sticker and draw what's on it. You could either draw it to look like the particular character, or you could just draw a simple gesture, like I do.

Ok, that's enough tips for now. Next some drawings. I think I mentioned on here recently that I had asked my friend Craig to collect scrap paper from his office for me to draw on as I'm always conscious of the huge amount of the stuff that I get through sometimes. He's currently fuelling me with a large supply of paper to scribble on, which is great because it removes the worry of waste. Of course the two ultimate benefits are that less money comes out of my pocket in purchasing sketchbooks, just to fill them with practice circles, and also I'm helping (albeit in a small way) to save the planet. What's better than that?!

So here are some doodles made on the said scrap paper:
You might notice the ears. Yes it was drawn from a Mickey Mouse sticker! I also had my hair cut today and am wearing a nice comfy but smart ensemble....see? I'm putting my tips to use!
The above one was Donald Duck. As I said, it doesn't have to look like the character. It's all practice. The next one was just one I dreamed up:
As was this last one:
I did draw a load of other gestures too, but I'm not posting them yet. I'm working on a project for someone I got talking to after buying a Mickey Mouse calculator from them through eBay....

.......no it's not sad!!

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho......

I'm sooooo tired at the moment - the result of many late nights and early mornings as a slave to work - so I don't feel up to drawing anything tonight. Well nothing that will further my level of skill anyway. Fifteen hour days really don't do me any good! So I will just post some drawings I did a couple of nights ago. I drew these whilst watching TV again, but I can't remember what I was viewing.
This next one made me realise that I don't know the anatomy of a horse's legs. Well I do now, because I made a point of finding a picture of one and memorising how they bend, but I didn't at the time of drawing this. That's why it mainly concentrates on the head and shoulders.
The next two are similar poses, with someone resting their hands on their stomach.

Walt on Dwarfs

For ages I have been wanting to get hold of some books from the out-of-print Disney Sketchbook series. These are a collection of books showing production drawings from the Disney movies. From what I can figure out, they go from the old movies like Snow White and Bambi to more recent titles such as Toy Story. Most, however, are difficult to find and have a hefty price tag attached. The only one that seems to be almost readily available is the Bambi one, for reasons unknown.

I decided to get a book a few days ago after looking through eBay. I was going to get the Bambi one, when I came across the first book that inspired the whole series. It's entitled 'Walt Disney's Sketchbook' and contains Walts own drawings of the characters from Snow White. It's a 1993 reprint of a book published in the 1930s. I thought it would just be a nice book to browse through, but now I have received it, I think it will be far more use than that.
Much to my delight, it's filled with model sheets for each of the main characters, and so will be great for helping me with character construction. I have a particular passion for model sheets. I think they are fascinating things. As I said, the eBay description of the book said these were Walt Disney's own drawings. Now I have always heard that Walt wasn't actually a great artist and upon delightfully browsing the pages, I found myself checking for confirmation that the great man had indeed drawn these brilliant pictures. Sure enough on the inside of the dust jacket, the book description gave this confirmation.
I would love to scan lots of pages from this book and share them with my little group of readers, but I don't know if I would be infringing on copyright....or am I allowed to share the images since the book is no longer in print? Can anyone advise me on this?

I hope to collect more of these books. I think they are a great resource and fantastic inspiration.