Dripping piece of paper

Here is my feeble attempt to animate a piece of paper dripping on the floor. It is made with Pencil (open source traditional animation program) and Gimpshop (open source image editor).

Jumpman

Well, another combination of Pencil and Moho.

Playing with Pencil and Moho

Well, that was just some test animation I did. The frames are drawn in Pencil and the translation and rotation was done in Moho.

More Pencil animation

This animation was fairly easy to create in the traditional (hand-drawn) animation program Pencil (also see yesterday's post). I only needed to draw four stages of a step, trace those for four stages for the next step, and the rest was paste, copy and drag in the correct position using onion skinning. The mask was drawn on a separate layer, and the animated GIF was created using Gimpshop.

Of course, it helps that I have some experience in animation and inbetweening.

Pencil for traditional animation

Traditional animation is probably the best way to learn how to animate for complete beginners, because you're only limitation is your drawing skill. Of course, you'll need some hardware to do that properly. The next best thing is a software program that lets you draw like traditional animation. Of course, you'll need some hardware as well to do this properly (computer and graphic art tablet).

There are some programs out there, some of them free, some of them rather expensive. A neat little program I found was Pencil, first developed by Patrick Corrieri, and taken over by Pascal Naidon, as an open source program for both 32-bit Windows and Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher (both programmers are also character animators).

The program is currently still heavily in beta (version 0.4.1b) and has some bugs, but it seems to be pretty stable. It can do what I want to use it for, which is draw individual frames with rather efficient drawing tools. It is based on Trolltech Qt, which is included in the application, so you don't need to install that separately (the install file is all-inclusive).

This isn't about creating animation fast, as with Anime Studio, but doing it proper. You need to sharpen your drawing skill and use the techniques of traditional animation to create a descent looking animation. I'm not there yet, but I feel my skills improving while I'm using this program. It is quite intuitive and therefore simple to use. An ideal tool for developing animation ideas.



I created this animation in more time than I would have needed if I had done it in Moho or Anime Studio, but the learning experience was so good. I can now try to implement some ideas more easily than with Moho or Anime Studio and do some Preston Blair exercises.

Rain-rain-rain

And not the purple variety, alas. Okay, that was a lame excuse for not drawing sketches today. It is, however, very hard to find humans in the cold rain, and if you do, it gets pretty messy with rain drops all over your sketchpad. So I did three drawings (yes, a whopping 3 sketches) from my window of people hurrying through the rain. I live in a very quiet part of town, so there isn't much traffic anyway.



That was a bit of a disappointment...

I'll do much better next time. Still 997 sketches to go.

Figure drawing according to Vilppu - Gesture

The first article on figure drawing by Vilppu (see here) seems to be sensible.

First of all, draw with your mind, not with your pencil. Think before you draw. Try to analyze what you see. Gesture is one of the most important features of a good animation drawing, because animation drawing is about conveying a clear message through a clear drawing. Body language is the first thing you notice about someone, even before you can see someone's face.

He gives a clear method (a tool, not a rule) of sketching a gesture in 10 - 20 seconds.

1. draw a circle for the head; mark the top of the head with a dot, and possibly the eyes with two small circles
2. draw an action line from the head to the hips, clearly stating the pose and intent of the gesture
3. add action lines for the legs
4. add action lines for the arms and hands

The lines should not be continuous, but still flow into each other. The lines should not represent existing lines, but rather want you want to express, what the body language is.

As a refinement, thicken the figure with additional lines, which signal the contours of the body. Again, the lines should not be continuous, but rather flow into each other.

Vilppu did let his pupils do this for six hours before progressing to the next stage. I guess I should at least be doing the same.

Rising Sun

Just now I made this animation of a rising and traveling sun. The idea was to give the a "cartoony pop" when it rises. The traveling was done to give an idea of depth in the scene.

Animated girl

Some days ago, I made this animated girl to demonstrate some animation principles to a newbie animator in the Anime Studio Forum. I thought I was a newbie, but apparently, there are even those who are newer to the art than I.

Excellent articles on figure drawing

I found a series of excellent animation articles on figure drawing by Glenn Vilppu in Animation Magazine World online. It is drawing advice for novice animators, based on Vilppu Drawing Manual. Below is a list of the articles with a summary made with Summarize, which is built in Mac OS X. Of course, this will only give you a flavor of the articles.

BTW Sorry for the long post, but I think this series of articles is important enough to spend so much screen real estate to cover it.

1. Gesture

Understanding and being able to create believable attitudes and movements, i.e. bringing our characters to life with our acting, is the basis of our art. A child, learning to speak, starts by mimicking the sounds that he hears and slowly develops the relationship of sounds and meanings that we call speaking.

...Everyone talks about being on a plateau, or hitting a new level, or experiencing the learning curve (a classical example), without actually understanding that each level of development is, in effect, a level of complexity that must be absorbed before one advances to the next level.

...The basis of my teaching is the development of an approach that allows you to acquire knowledge and visual skills in a systematic way, building upon your understanding and abilities in logical simple steps.

...Since the basic approach that I use in teaching is one where we analyze the model, and not copy it, the approach itself helps us acquire the knowledge needed about our subject.

...Long before we can actually see a person's face, we can recognize him by all those elements that make up that individual, such as his general bearing, proportions of his body, how he dresses, how he walks, and holds his head.

2. Spherical Forms

To do anything successfully you must apply three basic elements: first, you must have a plan of attack or approach; second, you need the knowledge to put that plan into affect, and third, you must have the tenacity to carry it through to completion.

...Start by drawing a series of spheres on your paper: first, singularly, and then, in pairs, overlapping and changing in size in relation to each other... Combining two spheres as one complete form but still having, clearly, two parts gives the form a sense of life.

...The most elemental skill is the ability to sense these basic volumes on the flat paper as if they were actually existing, being created by you as you move your pencil over and around their surfaces and through the magic space of the paper.

...Copying or drawing from other artists is an accepted traditional approach to learning in conjunction with drawing from observation and creating from your imagination.

3. The Box

It is a critical form that you must learn how to draw if you are serious about developing your drawing skills.

...Be careful that you maintain the feeling that the corners are at right angles and that you have a sense of foreshortening as the sides recede back in perspective. If you have no knowledge of foreshortening or perspective, or are having a difficult time with this, you should acquire a good book on perspective and take some time to study it.

...Now let's take this box we have been drawing and round off the sides so that it looks like a bar of soap... After you feel comfortable, I want you to see if you can give it life and a personality the same way we did in Lesson 1.

...Look carefully at the other examples on these pages to see how the box was used to help draw them.... The sphere and box are tools that help you to understand complex forms and enable you to depict them successfully in three dimensional space.

4. Introducing Material and Proportion

...Now let us introduce some variety into what we are doing and at the same time open up the possibilities. In Part One, the sphere and box were roughly the same size.

...Proportion is the relationship of various elements in a drawing which includes sizes, tones, textures, quantities and differences that give expression or character to the work. Proportion can be the size of the head to the body or just simply a large form to a small form.

...We will look more deeply into proportion in a later lesson, but for now I want you to have fun trying different possibilities with our simple forms.

5. Drawing Ellipses

A cylinder is essentially two ellipses connected by straight lines and, of course, an ellipse is a circle in perspective.

...Practice drawing ellipses that begin with a straight line and come to a full circle... Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) in his Dresdon sketchbook shows many variations on an analytical, constructive approach to drawing the figure.

...Now try some drawings where you make these tubes cross each other and intertwine.

...In drawing a cylinder, the two most important elements are the angle or axis of the cylinder, and the beginning and end of the cylinder.

...Do a series of drawings, adding cylindrical forms to the ones that we have created in the previous lessons.

...In some of the following drawings you can clearly see the use of the cylinder as a means of construction.

6. From the General to the Specific

All of the work we have done so far has been on the presumption that we were doing a procedural drawing where one element was built on top of the previous rather than a direct type of drawing where each line essentially was the finished line.

In this lesson I will outline a basic procedure showing how all of the elements that we have discussed so far fit in. The essence of this approach is that we go from the general to the specific, and that you essentially concentrate on one thing at a time.

...What is important at this point is that you concentrate on communicating the action in its totality, and not get sidetracked into copying details or becoming preoccupied with specific contours unless they somehow assist in communicating the overall gesture.

...Although all drawing is, in a way, direct, the point is that the sequence allows you to concentrate on one element at a time and go from the general to the specific.

7. The Landmarks of Anatomy

In fact, it took a while for me to realize that you cannot draw something unless you know what it looks like, but knowing anatomy would not make me draw better. What I needed was a method of understanding anatomical facts, so that I could use these landmarks as tools of communication and expression, without violating basic anatomical reality and thereby, detracting from what the drawing was trying to communicate.

...While achieving a clear understanding of the action by amplification of the shift in the central axis, we bring into play fundamental dynamics of reality as well as basic design elements.

...Try standing with your weight equally balanced and then slowly shift your weight from one side to the other and see what happens.

...The end of the ulna along with the epicondyle of the humerus create three clear points that you can use in your drawing.

...The patella functions in much the same way as the end of the ulna does in the elbow,helping to give direction to the leg.

8. Seeing Anatomical Masses

The planes created by similar lines on the sides, those that separate the rectus abdominis from the external oblique, are important elements in understanding the major forms of the front of the torso.

...it is important that you remember that the large muscle in the front, the rectus femoris, does not attach to the iliac crest but goes between the tensor and the sartorius muscles.... , the gastrocnemius, or calf muscle, goes inside the tendons of the biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus, to create the characteristic squarish shape of this connection.

... it is important that you remember that the large muscle in the front, the rectus femoris, does not attach to the iliac crest but goes between the tensor and the sartorius muscles.... , the gastrocnemius, or calf muscle, goes inside the tendons of the biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus, to create the characteristic squarish shape of this connection.

... I have found that if you first start by developing your skill at drawing the simple forms of the animators' hand and then slowly introduce the real anatomical hand, it is easier to control the complexity and develop a method to draw and understand the forms.

9. Seeing The Figure As A 2D Object

In drawing from the model, i.e. reality rather than from imagination or an ideal, we must develop a set of visual tools to help us make that translation from the real three dimensional world (3D) to the flat two dimensional world (2D) of the paper.

...Since a prime requisite for doing this kind of drawing is very careful observation, the poses were, by necessity, very long. The student normally would start his or her training by first learning to draw from plaster casts, as is still done in many parts of the world.

...Some basic art school exercises to develop this skill in observation include cutting out the shapes with a pair of scissors the way children do with a silhouette drawing in grade school, copying photographs upside down, drawing with your left hand to make you look more carefully, and drawing a specific contour without looking at the paper.

...You can now move your arm down, turn it sideways, diagonally, placing it visually anywhere you wish on the figure to establish any point or size relationship in comparison to the size of the head, i.e. the navel three heads down, or the shoulders one head apart in this particular pose.

10. Using Tone To Draw

In learning to see spheres, boxes, and cylinders, we focused on seeing the corners of forms and used these basic visual tools to help us see the orientation of the forms in space and to draw them.... The three approaches, which are indirect lighting, direct lighting, and atmospheric perspective, are distinct but generally used in varying degrees together.

...Remember, it is the angle that a particular surface plane faces that determines its value (degree of light and dark), not how far away from you it is.

...After you have become comfortable using the modeling tone, as we have discussed so far, you can start adding some variables that will give your drawings a more natural look.

...In the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that we will be discussing three distinct approaches, "indirect lighting, direct lighting, and atmospheric perspective," and that, in practice, we usually use all three methods together to various degrees.

...Look at the details on the right taken from the drawing on the left and notice how this simple idea helped to separate forms and give a sense of depth to the drawing.

11. Getting a Handle on Direct Lighting

The basic elements of direct lighting are highlights, halftone, core, reflected light, and cast shadow. The luminosity of a drawing is affected by how the reflected light is surrounded by the core and the cast shadow.

...The core tone, which is created by the area between the direct light and reflected light that does not get any light, is a potent tool in describing how forms fit into one another. The core functions as a broad tonal line that helps delineate the form's surface with its changes in sharpness (describing the suddenness of change in the surface).

...As you move the light sources, you will see how this core describes the form in conjunction with the reflected light.

...The primary difference is that the cast shadow has a sharp edge and the core has a softer edge since the core is created by the turning of the form, while the cast shadow is created by forms blocking light from other forms.

..."Notice how the core clearly defines the corner of the form without being a straight line."

12. Using The Idea Of Atmosphere

The figurative artist has taken this sense of atmosphere and developed it as a strong tool of expression by abstracting the main elements and learning to use them while describing form.

...In this chapter, using the idea of atmosphere will be expanded upon to include its use as a basic element of design in the drawing to enhance the action of the figure and to clarify the three dimensionality of the form.