Terrytoons- "Champion of Justice" Silhouettes

If you remember awhile back in one of the animation lessons, http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-5-line-of.html
I talked about the importance of silhouettes in making your poses read clearly.

Here are some great scenes from an old Terrytoon.

"Champion of Justice" (1944), Terrytoon Cartoons

If you combine silhouettes with line of action, you can control your poses so that they tell the story well. Every pose should have a direction. Where you aim the body can tell you what the character is doing and what he is feeling. People tend to lean toward or away from things and where the lean helps give meaning to each moment.

Many cartoons today have no line of action or silhoettes. The characters just stand straight up and down. I see this even in a lot of full animation and in a lot of animation students' cartoon drawings.

In this animation, you can see the real value of clear staging using line of action and clear silhouettes. The limbs are kept in the clear.



CLICK HERE TO SEE CLIP! (3.29 mb)


Here we have no line of action and barely silhouettes:


Here's fake line of action:
Samurai Jack has a line of action.
The other characters have arched bodies which would make you think you are looking at a line of action, but the arches don't have direction. They don't aim or point anywhere. You need your characters to aim somewhere to have a line of action.

Here are some jumbled undirected poses from expensive modern cartoons to compare approaches.

http://www.disney-dreams.net/gallery.php
I know the animators are totally capable of clear classic principles. I assume that it's the management that thinks if something looks classic, then it's too "cartoony" so they bend the artists towards what they think is more like what imagine live action is.
If you are thinking that those don't have line of action or silhouettes on purpose because they are "realistic" then take a gander at this Frazetta painting:


I think old school clear staging whether in cartoons or illustrations is more effective than modern stiff awkward stuff.



It's hard to stage a fat guy, but this drawing shows a lot of skill and thought. The line of action is clear even though the silhouette is not.


If you wanna see tons of old classic cartoons that you can't see anywhere else, you gotta visit Asifa's amazing animation archive. If you are in LA, be sure to drop in and experience cartoon heaven!

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/03/meta-visit-archive.html#comments

http://www.animationarchive.org/
Or better yet, be a volunteer and help them archive all this great stuff.

Animation School Lesson 5 - Line Of Action, Silhouettes

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/meta-100000-animation-drawing-course_31.html
Click the link to get a nice big hi rez version of the page above.

Hi students. You've been doing great on the construction lessons, so now it's time to learn another important principle: Line of Action.

This principle is different than construction in that it is not based on tangible reality.
Everything in real life has construction.
Line of action is an artistic concept that sometimes by accident happens in real life but not always.

BUT! It is an important tool for artists.

Line of action helps your poses "read". It makes them clear and understandable and gives them a distinct non-ambiguous direction.



Here are some examples of strong line-of-action in the poses from classic cartoons.
Lines of action can be obvious and exaggerated as in this pose above from Kitty Kornered and the one below of Tinkerbell.

Note how the details follow the line of action and don't go in opposite directions.Here above is a more subtle line of action in the body pose of Wart, the character from Sword In The Stone. Look how the artist combines solid construction with a flowing line of action to create a solid and clear easy to read attitude.
When drawing your line of action-use another principle to help the line of action read even more clearly.

SILHOUETTE: See how the frame above combines construction, line of action and clear silhouettes to make an easy to read composition-even without having any details in the drawings.

How do you get a clear silhouette?
By using NEGATIVE SHAPES.
See the empty spaces between the arms and legs and major forms in the drawings above? Those are negative shapes. They are as important to your drawing as the positive shapes. They help make the silhouette read.


All the drawings above-the Preston Blair page, the Clampett frames and the Disney drawings are using the same basic principles. They superficially look different in style but to the trained eye, only slightly different.

The Clampett drawings are looser and more flowing and rounder, while the Disney drawings are more angular-but they all use the eaxct same fundamental principles.

Today, sadly these fundamentals have mostly disappeared.

Most cartoon characters now are rigid, they stand straight up and down, have no clear silhouettes, no construction, no line of action and no design at all. Characters now look like pieces of broken glass that don't fit together and certainly don't flow around the forms and line of action of the characters.



But you can do better.

Copy all the Preston Blair poses-using the same methods you did the construction drawings and then check them in photoshop against the originals to see where you are off.

Then when you are getting close to getting those accurate, try copying the Clampett and Disney drawings.

Design Appeal- Mickey Mouse Club - Cute and Wonderful Mickey

YOUNG CARTOONISTS PAY ATTENTION!
I'M GONNA HELP YOU BECOME GOOD...

Thanks to Marc Deckter for the frame grabs! There are more below:
http://duck-walk.blogspot.com/2006/05/em-eye-seekay-ee-why-em-oh-you-ess-ee.html

When I was a kid, I was mesmerized by Disney cartoons-by how cute and appealing they looked and by how smooth and magical the movements were. My only complaint about Disney was there wasn't enough of it on TV.
I used to watch the Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night and The Mickey Mouse Club every weekday. The shows were really frustrating because they were mostly vile live action. It was like they would just put enough cartoons in the shows to lure the kids in so that they could trick you into watching the amateur live action stuff.
My favorite part about the Mickey Mouse Club was the new animation-it looked different than the classic shorts-it was stylish and modern. The characters weren't just pears and sausages, they were pears and sausages with corners on them. This is different from what we have today. Now we have just the corners, but the nutritional parts have been thrown out.
Anyway look how Goddamn cute Mickey is in these great openings. When they talk about the importance of "appeal" in the Disney books, this is it in its highest form.
Mickey not only looks great in his design-he has all the fundamental principles of good animation drawing to back up the slick and stylish finish.

Solid construction.

Line of action.
Clean silhouettes
Perspective.
Squash and Stretch.
Asymmetry.
Organic forms.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/03/you-better-learn-to-love-classic.html

Disney animators were great at all the fundamental principles of animation and that's where it should all start! Without fundamentals, you really limit what you can do from an entertainment point of view.
You should see this stuff animate-look at the nice perspective on Mickey's cane-it really is effective in motion.




It's also cool that each animator-even though he followed the basic 1955 model of Mickey, still ddrew him slightly different.
This is my favorite of all the openings-the cowboy sequence. The way Mickey twirls his lasso while jumping through the hoops is amazing. What skill these animators had!

Here, watch it in motion!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp5BiDEEl1g

****TIP to Young Cartoonists!****

If you wanna learn how to draw for animation, copy these poses as exactly as you can-then go and copy the other great cartoon poses from classic cartoons all over my blog. If you do this a lot-and I mean a lot...you will absorb the principles I talked about above.
Get the Preston Blair book too and he explains how the principles work!
But start copying now and maybe someday you will be able to work for me (or any other real cartoonist).

In fact go buy the DVD collection of the color Mickeys and copy from all the cartoons on there!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000BWVAF/qid=1146608716/sr=8-3/ref=pd_bbs_3/002-0978918-1199251?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=130

WANNA LEARN TO INK? Ask Katie: http://funnycute.blogspot.com/2006/05/inking_01.html

Barber Shop 7 -readability

Hey go ahead and read the funnies and then I'll give you some bull afterwards.


OK, well I don't know how amused (if at all) you were but I'm going to tell you some other principles of good drawing and storytelling that have to do with readabilty.

By readability I mean how easy (or hard) it is to see the pictures and how well they draw you to the important points of the scene.
If you are already a pro, you probably know all these concepts, so I'm really just offering this stuff to young artists who could use some tools to help drive their ideas home.

Readabilty is made up of these tools:
Staging
Where you place your characters, BG and props within the panel (or screen if it's a movie).
I like to use simple staging and I usually focus on the characters.
I see some modern comics and shows that have complicated or cluttered images that make it hard for you to see in an instant what is going on.
I don't believe in filling the panel or screen with wall to wall detail. It makes your images and story hard to read.

Sillhouettes and negative shapes
The characters in this comic have more details than in my cartoons because we don't have to draw as many drawings for a comic as we do for animation. We can spend more time on each drawing in a comic.
Details can be dangerous if not carefully placed or if your characters don't have clear sillhouettes.
Look at the panel 1 on page 1. The barber is holding up his razor. It reads because there is a big space all around the blade. His whole body reads becausem it is a simple sillhouette. There is almost a tangent where his little finger hovers above the mirror's border. Had I noticed, I might have moved his hand up a bit more to clear the border better.
If you look at almost every panel you can see big negative shapes that draw attention to whatever the import action of the scene is.
Negative shapes are just as important as filled shapes-not only in your overall sillhouettes and composition, but even in detailed areas-such as a face. Note that between the characters' eyes and the sillo of the head there are empty spaces that help draw attention to the expressions.
I see a lot of young artists who will fill a whole face with the eyes, nose and mouth, so that there is no empty space in the head. That makes the face a jumble and hard to read.

Line of action
Look at the last panel on page 1. You can draw a line right through the barber's body, then through his neck and his head. This line of action makes him lean forward.
This is a concept that has really been lost in many cartoons today. I'm amazed when I see whole TV shows or movies where the characters are just standing or sitting straight up and down or equally bad-every bit of the body is zig zagging in every direction.
Almost every panel in the comic uses lines of action. I just picked the last panel of page 1 because it is so obvious-but the first panel also uses one for the barber, although more subtle.

Asymmetry
Nature is asymmetrical or organic. Math is geometric.
I like art that is organic-that uses the rules of nature rather than the stricter and simpler rules of math.
When you see a scene that has 2 or 3 characters in it and they are all lined up with equal distance between them and they all are on the same angle, that to me is very artificial and boring. Poo on that.

On page 3, look at panels 2 and 5. Note that George and Jimmy are closer to each other than either is to the barber. George and Jimmy are almost one entity. No one is exactly in the middle of the panel either.
This concept of asymmetry is carried all the way to the details of all the forms. No 2 eyes are exactly the same, nothing on a character is exactly the same on one side as the other.
Even the eyes are different shapes on top than they are on the bottom. No perfect ovals.

Now even though this is a cartoon, I feel that making everything seem so natural makes all the crazy stuff that happens in the story more believable.
It's part of why people get so intensely involved in the stories of my cartoons. They just seem more real than what else is current.
It makes the cartoons warm. Many cartoons today are like staring at wallpaper that swears. You may laugh at the dirty jokes but it's very hard to be pulled into the stories because everything is so mechanical or artificial.
I invite cartoon designers and artists to comment on how many times their boss at some modern studio told them to make their drawings more even and mechanical.


Hmmm...a thought about characterization. I mentioned that I like things that seem natural. Well not just in the drawings but in the personalities of the characters too. Some cartoonists and all execs think you can define a character simply with a few rules and catch phrases-Chuck Jones for example. He says Bugs Bunny can never lose and can't ever pick a fight. I say, "Why not?" and so did the other WB directors. Some of Bugs' funniest films are the ones where he loses or is a big heckler-"Tortoise Wins By a Hare" is my all time favorite Bugs cartoon even though he loses.


Human nature is neither simple nor completely predictable. In modern cartoons the execs want you to figure out all 3 traits of a character before you ever animate a cartoon and then never to vary from this mathematical formula again.

Someone a while back told me I didn't understand George Liquor's character. Something to the effect of "George is a republican. Republicans are bad. Cigarette smoking is bad. Therefore George should smoke."

While I welcome the suggestion, I have to say that I grew up with someone very much like George Liquor who hates smoking and is very conservative.

I believe that all humans are full of contradictions and opposing motives. Which is why we are all crazy. And entertaining.

This story is about 2 conservative guys who have a lot of hate for certain things but they also have the capabilty to be soft and gentle. The pages in this post show that contradiction and I think that's what is funny about it.

My favorite panel is the bottom right of page 2 where Harvey just loses it and says what he really thinks about hippies.

Then in an instant both he and George lighten up at the generous suggestion that Harvey give the one decent young lad a couple nicks on the face and all is once again right with the world.


Now buy a Goddamn t-shirt and support natural insanity!
http://www.cafepress.com/happytime