Saturday, January 05, 2008

Takin' a little break...and Thanks!

Hi folks,

I hope you don't mind if I take a couple days off. I kinda wore myself out on the last few posts. Looking in detail at some of that Clampett punctuation really got me thinking about some new theories and ideas. I wanna let 'em gestate while I study some more stuff.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank some of the latest contributors to the site.

Hector Martinez

Patrick Sevc ***! a modern Medici!

Lisa Riggins

Leo Brodie

Allan Turner

Chris Baranowski

Jeff LaMarche

Laura Olsen

Amir Avni (Who's gonna clobber everyone, because he does the lessons and applies them to his work)

Daniel Chambers







Maybe you guys can let me know which posts you found most useful. And if you've done any lessons, post a link in the comments.

Did I miss anyone?

Coming up:

Curley Howard's custom visual language and punctuation inventions

The marvelous color stylings of a Cal Arts grad

Jack Benny's brilliant ads

More Ken Duncan

Tex Avery's clarity

Can cartoons ever be as funny as live action?


Practice Your Principles:

By the way, you don't have to wait for me to make new lessons to further your own progress. Just take some old cartoons and still frame them and apply what you are learning while copying the poses in the cartoons. The more you do this, the more you will understand how the principles work and the more you will build up a variety of poses, acting and other skills.
All these cartoons use the same basic fundamentals. If you don't have a good freeze frame on your dvd player, or don't have many old cartoons, this blog (and others) are full of great poses for you to copy.
Start with the line of action.
Build the basic forms around the LOA. (Check the negative shapes and don't eat 'em up!)
Break the basic forms into the next smaller level of forms.
Add the details and make them flow around the forms.
Check your copy against the original.
Critique it and find mistakes.
Redraw it and correct the mistakes.
Apply what you learn to your own drawings.
Work for me.