examples of how to ink our stuff

Here is my original in blue.
Here is an ink/cleanup by Kali. Note that she very carefully preserves all the nuances in the drawing. The varied shapes and forms. The asymmetry. The flowing organicness of the curves. The construction.

Note also that many of George's parts have been inked on separate layers. That's so individual pieces of him can be animated in Flash. This is similar to 60s TV limited animation-like the Flintstones.Here she colored each layer so you could easily see how it works. Each individual part has to be inked all around, even where you won't see it in an individual frame.







****Note- see where I made the pencil lines thicker in the indentations of the smile line? That makes the cheeks and smile feel fleshy and full. Follow that through in the inking. It helps the expressions read.

The same thing applies to the lines that indicate the eyelids. They are thicker in the middle, which also helps you see the eye expression.
Note that wrinkles and minor details are generally thinner, but they still follow the directions and planes of the larger forms.

Individual teeth lines should be thinner than the line that outlines the complete set of either upper or lower teeth. That holds them together as a set. It's a hierarchy of important and less important lines. Big important forms generally get thicker lines. Details that wrap around the bigger forms get thinner lines.
If you are applying for inking or cleanup, these are stellar examples of what we need.

Mort Drucker Compositions/Layouts

Mort uses the same big picture idea that Owen, Gross, Kurtzman and Frazetta uses, but also adds little details (like crosshatching) on the last levels.




Hierarchy:
First Level: Ground plane and Sky.
2nd level: Driveway on Hill and road
Next level: Hill split into driveway and vegetation
Next level: Vegetation split into grass and bushes. Note that there is more negative space (the grass) than filled space (the bushes)
Next level The bushes make a long organic form that flows along the hill and driveway.
Next level: Then the bushes are broken into separate rounded forms that flow along the overall long form.
Final level: Each individual bush is broken into an outline of leaves hat radiate along the organic form of the bush.

7 levels- each smaller one is subject to the form of the next level up. No level exists in its own wonky abstract plane ignorant of the the overall picture.

Howie Post, Tree King

Nate, pay attention!


I love Howie Post's backgrounds. They are caricatures of the general Harvey house style. You notice right away how interesting the details are-the shapes of the trees, the creative bark textures, the clever and stylish shapes of the leaves.

But details don't make a good picture!

LARGE NEGATIVE SHAPES

DRAW YOUR EYE TO THE

POSITIVE SHAPES THEY SURROUND.

SPACE AROUND THE MAIN OBJECTS

What makes the individual objects read especially well is his use of not only the shapes themselves, but the spaces surrounding the shapes, and the spaces within the shapes.

SMALLER SUB FORMS WITHIN THE NEGATIVE SPACES
(MORE SPACE THAN SUB-FORMS)

He doesn't fill a whole tree evenly with bark textures. Note that some areas have bark details close together - but these clumps of texture are separated by other clumps with ample spaces in between.

The characters are always clearly framed by the bgs and the negative spaces between the characters.

The empty spaces are just as pleasingly designed as the positive shapes of the characters and objects.

All the details are small and in organic (non-mathematical) proportions. That's so the details don't draw your attention away from the much larger forms that they wrap around.
He has an infinite amount of ways to draw leaves, without having to draw each individual leaf.


Sometimes his foliage looks like it's from another planet.

Post uses hierarchy of forms and spaces beautifully. All those girls running towards Hot Stuff fit within a flowing organic shape. Plus, they are not evenly spaced. That makes it appear natural, even though Howie is completely controlling the image.

Again, besides marvelling at the beautiful cartoony tree, look at how much negative space there is - both:

1) Surrounding the tree

2) Within the details of the tree. (Nate!)

Each layer of sub forms describes a clear and distinct form, which is in turn subject to the larger form it wraps around.

HOT STUFF REPRINTS

more sides of George and the Science of Close Ups

A specific expression contains more than one emotion. This is an expression of wonder, discovery and eagerness.The above is an accent expression. It's close up and more detailed to tell you that his emotion has changed dramatically. The closer the framing is on a character, the more details you can add and more important: THE MORE CONTRAST YOU CAN DRAW IN THE BASIC DESIGN.

In close ups I always caricature my own character designs. Just the same way as I would caricature a living human by exaggerating the contrasts of someone's face.

***Be sure that the extra details flow around the larger forms. Hierarchy!

The smaller the character is in a scene, the less detailed and less contrasted the proportions can be.




George's Soft Side:

Many people (esp. hippie ladies) think that all Republicans are evil all the time. They yell and scream and live by archaic blind rules of societies long dead. This is only one side of a regular guy, though.
George doesn't yell and scream all the time. He has softer elements to his personality. George has much empathy for God's creatures, especially the ones that recognize their place in the grand order of things.
George doesn't hunt out of malice for animals. He just believes that it is man's place to destroy the environment and that God put us here and gave us the wits and hormones to do it.
In these images by the extremely complex Jim Smith, George is explaining this with great empathy to a poor lowly creature before he takes him out.

There is more than one emotion happening in these drawings too. He is not only showing his concern for the lesser creature's feelings, he is also asking for you to understand and approve of his murderous ways. He wants you to absolve him of any guilt and way down deep inside he knows that there is probably something wrong with killing for sport.

Some urges are so powerful and ingrained that they are impossible to resist even when you know they might cause harm. Like the urge to pull triggers, an urge that has been implanted in man by God. For George, it just feels so damn to tug a trigger that he has to find honest and decent justifications sanctioned by God, America and tradition.
So you see, hippie ladies, George is not always mad. And is not all bad just because he has manly urges.

George gets mad when something doesn't follow the rules; when he can't control a situation, but as long as you obey the natural order, he loves you. He'll still blow your brains out if there is a good enough justification, like any good Republican would, but he should still be loveable.

More BG Layout Notes - HIERARCHY of Form and Composition

BG Layout artists, or the persons who will help me design the main scenes and setups will have to be able to draw a variety of types of forms, and use some basic principles of design and composition to make the scenes compose well with the characters.

The BGs should provide an instantly readable organic environment for characters to play out their stories.

Hopefully some of these qualities below will help you see what I am aiming for:

TREES - Build Trees out of overall forms, don't start with the details.

Each of these trees has an interesting overall form. Even the foliage is contained in a form; it's not a mess of random leaves.



When you go outside, squint your eyes when looking at trees. Try to see the form of the tree, rather than getting lost and confused in the details of leaves, bark and branches.



Each kind of tree has its own unique plan, and each member of each kind of tree has its own unique variation on the same overall plan.

Buildings/Cars- Man Made Organic Geometry

Man-made objects, such as houses and machines are made of simpler more geometric forms than nature's forms, but to be well-designed, they still have to have appealing, solid forms.

And, they also have to have variety in the shapes, details, textures, arrangement of forms.

Lots of negative shapes!

Composition. The biggest forms in the picture have to make the overall statement instantly. A viewer shouldn't be distracted by a lot of cluttered details and an absence of negative shapes.

What details there are should be much smaller than the bigger forms they help describe. They wrap around the bigger shapes- going in the same directions. Not in a strictly 100% mathematical way. there should be very slight organic imperfections, but not so much that they destroy the forms they are part of.




The bricks, windows etc. on the walls below are not drawn with a ruler; there are no 100% parallel lines. Edges have slight curves. Not all the shapes mirror each other.

The details are not evenly spaced apart.

The background is composed to make the character read easily in his environment.

This is the kind of thoughtful control I would like in the layouts of my cartoons. No haphazard wonky flat modern look.

Stylish but planned.

A car is more organic than a house, but still has an overall form, and again: the details wrap around the form. They don't go off in their own directions.
The door follows the form of the side of the car, the lines on the seats follow the shape of the seats, etc.

Nature - Organic Forms, but still forms

Good BG design makes the largest forms in the picture make a statement: a controlled purposeful instantly readable composition.

The details are less important.
The details follow the same perspective and physics as the larger forms.

Not all areas of detail are filled equally. There are sparse areas or completely empty areas.

THE DETAILS ARE MUCH SMALLER THAN THE LARGER FORMS

This is so important. If the details get too large, or stick out of the silhouettes of the larger forms, they make it harder to see an overall form.

This Frazetta drawing looks elaborate and detailed, but follows the same ideas and planning of the more cartoony art above. All the little details - the bark texture, the moss, the flowers and mushrooms are much smaller than the twisted solid tree root. The tree root is the important graphic statement.

If the details were too large, or didn't flow around the root, or stuck out of the silhouette of the root more, you wouldn't feel or see the root so clearly.

There are sparser areas of detail on the root-between the areas of moss, for example.

I don't need anything this detailed in my cartoons, but the principles are what I am after.

The big picture should be solid, interesting and instantly readable as what it is - and not get in the way of the characters..

HARVEY EISENBERG APPLIES ALL THESE IDEASHIERARCHY OF FORMS AND COMPOSITION

APPEALING SHAPES

NEGATIVE AREAS
DETAILS FOLLOW FORMS

A VARIETY OF FORMS AND TEXTURES

ALL COMPLETELY CONTROLLED TO MAKE AN EASY TO READ FUN PICTURE

SO DOES MEL CRAWFORD
STYLE WITH CONTROL

Milt Gross Crowds

Most cartoonists I know fear drawing crowds.

Crowds are hard to draw in these areas:

It's hard to compose a lot of characters together.
It takes more time for more characters.
It's hard to make each character have a different pose.

It's hard to design lots of different character designs. Most comic artists, even great ones like Jack Kirby tend to draw the same character over and over again in a crowd.Here's a dandy crowd of 'tudes with all the faces the same.

Milt Gross has none of these problems!
He draws crowds filled with different characters and with each one having their own faces, body shapes, and body attitudes.
Look how each of these top hatted fellows have a similar angle-but not exactly parallel. They are a group and individuals all at the same time.
This whole group has a single silhouette. They together make a single fun shape. Yet each character is an individual and s on a slightly different angle.

HIERARCHY OF FORMS- The specific details obey the general idea

Gross is a master of hierarchy. His individuals contribute to a group form.
Just like details on a face follow the construction of a cartoon face.

The specific parts obey the general idea.

All these snooty folks have a haughty demeanor, yet none are exactly the same. A variety of individuals that fit a type.

Hierarchy, rather than anarchy!




He has lots of different designs for women too.


Milt Gross is the opposite of today's rubber stamp comic strip artists. The ones that use the same stiff poses and expressions over and over again.
Look at the bustle of life.
The lines of action of all the high society folks here all work together to create an organic group flow.


I can't believe how many funny head shapes Gross concocts.

SEE THE LATEST LOST GROSS COMICS:

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/10/comics-fulfilling-milt-gross-challenge.html

TIPS ON DRAWING CROWDS

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/composition-4-staging-groups-of.html

Writing for Cartoons 5 - Humor, Structure: Nurse Stimpy Outline

Humor

You should be funny if you are going to write cartoons. I have yet to meet a cartoon writer (who isn't also an artist) who cracks up all the other folks at the studio every day with his funny stories and acting.

Once I have an idea for a cartoon, let's say...Ren gets sick and Stimpy decides to nurse him back to health and his caregiving is worse than the illness. There's the premise to the cartoon. I have a purpose and a goal for the cartoon entertainment to achieve.

Then I have a "gag session" with the funniest artists in the studio-my "writers". I tell them the premise and everyone starts tossing out gags. I'll take any gags as long as they fit the purpose of the premise.

Someone will take notes and then we produce a list of the gags from the session in no particular order.

Of course just having a bunch of gags in no particular order doesn't make a story. The gags then need to be organized in a logical building sequence.

No matter how funny you are, you need to have an understanding of structure to most effectively present your ideas. Stucture is not that hard to learn, but it is essential and it gives you control over your ideas and story elements.

Structure
Even if you are naturally funny and have ideas and a point of view, you still need to learn some skills.

All art needs structure.

Structure helps you put your ideas in an effective order.

It gives you a hierarchy: Your story needs a main purpose, and all the gags and bits in the story should fit basically into the story. Your details should hang neatly on the major points and help emphasize them.

You don't want to get lost in tangents that confuse the audience.

You don't want to have your best ideas and jokes in the first 2 minutes and then have the rest of the cartoon be an anticlimax. (This happened in my cartoon "Black Hole". It had funny ideas and gags, but the structure was faulty and didn't live up to its setup.)

With the aid of logical structure you can have your cartoon build and move inexorably forward and keep your audience on the edge of their seats.

The stucture in a cartoon is worked out in an "outline."

An outline is a list of the story elements and main events of the story - IN ORDER. It doesn't need to have every detail worked out and it shouldn't. You want to leave room to add gags, acting, personality and visual ideas for the storyboard stage.

The best form for an outline again is a list. Simple sentences that just tell the next guy what happens, so he can start boarding it.
It should be easy to read, like this.

The way cartoon scriptwriters write is torture to read. It is very hard to muddle though the bad prose and thick dialogue and awkward descriptions of action that non-visual people "write". Scripts are intended to impress and dumbfound executives. An outline is a working tool and is much easier to work from.

http://uncleeddiestheorycorner.blogspot.com/search?q=script

look how awkward this is to read:
You can see why artists go nuts reading this stuff. You muddle through the page, try to figure out even what the hell is going on and if you do manage to figure it out, it doesn't add up to any humor or entertainment. So what do we need this process for? It's just a huge waste of money that kills the morale of the talent and makes us not care about doing a good job on the cartoons.

compare it to this:
Now when we write this stuff, we have already done a lot of sketches, so we don't need to spell out the details. We know the drawings are going to make every line and description funnier. This outline is the working tool for the artists, not the final entertainment product for the public. The public will get the cartoon.


Wow, look at how many revisions they makes us go through!

The rise and fall of Construction in cartoons Pt 1 - principles discovered

1920S - 2 DIMENSIONAL GEOMETRIC SHAPES THAT BEND A BIT

Each part of Donald is disconnected from each other part. The construction is just piled on top of each other, rather than flowing along an overall statement or direction.

Where limbs and bodies bend, the bend is usually in the middle of what's bending-not organic.

Early 30s - 2 dimensional construction

The animators add a bit of dimension.
The details start to wrap around the circles.
The forms get a little more organic.

MID 30S - LINE OF ACTION BECOMES STRONG
CHARACTERS GET MORE ORGANIC. THE WHOLE BODY POSE FLOWS ALONG A CENTRAL LINE OF ACTION.

Disney lets animators experiment a bit with less generic and more cartoony designs.
Ward Kimball and others animated some really fun cartoony stuff in Toby Tortoise Returns.
Grim Natwick brings the East Coast stronger design sense to some shorts.

Characters get more detailed, but the details follow the forms.

LATE 30S ALL THE PRINCIPLES COME TOGETHER

Characters get more organic, yet still flow around structured forms.
The animators experiment with more interesting designs.

Doing caricatures forces you out of drawing formula shapes. Animation is such easy prey to formula. Animators should constantly caricature in the hunt for new shapes and ideas to keep us from falling into habit. APPLY THE NEW FACIAL FEATURES TO YOUR ANIMATION DRAWINGS!


Construction becomes a science of hierarchy. This cactus is an overall shape that is then broken into 2 main pieces plus limbs.

This is good. No one does this anymore.
Each of those forms in turn are broken into sub forms. All these sub forms within larger forms obey the same direction and perspective of the larger forms.

Remember the concept of HIERARCHY. It applies to good stylized drawings too.

The Animation Principles Style

The 7 dwarfs epitomize all the major animation principles working together.
Construction.
Hierarchies of forms.
Line of action
Clear staging
Squash and stretch and overlapping action (freeze frame their cheek movements and see if you don't get ashamed of what you're thinking!)
Organic everything.

This is the approach and high standard that evolved in the 1930s and influenced everything in animation all the way to today.

Bill Tytla more than anyone else combined all the principles and kept his characters looking very weighty and solid, yet organic at the same time.
It takes a ton of control to be able to make so many concepts work at once.

Everyone in the late 1930s aimed for this high standard of multiple principles and hierarchy of forms. It was too much for many animators but they nobly aimed high anyway.
Here is a weaker animator imitating the Disney style superficially, but he doesn't have the drawing skill needed to control all the skills at once, so his animation and drawing appear sloppy and the features float loosely around the bigger forms.

Each successive animation style through history is just a matter of subtracting one or more of the 30s principles away-with each decade more principles have been stripped away until today when we are just imitating poorly cliched expressions and poses that began 60 years ago.
Even Anime can be traced back to 30s Disney.

Ugly trends begin....

Characters get more human (taller) proportions. In the process Walt urges the animators back to generic design, while making the animation much harder to look convincing.

An audience is much more nitpicky when watching art that approaches an imitation of reality.

That's why humans always look so bad in cartoons. 2D or CG.

Walt and the animators learn this ugly truth from experience but Walt can't be swayed. He wants to impress the unwashed masses with animation that looks hard to do. He relies on rotoscoping to try to make the animation more "realistic" and what he gets is humans that are much less exaggerated or interesting in cartoons than the unique real life humans who live next door to you.

Art and animation needs to caricature life to make its point. This kind of drawing-the stiff animation "realistic" style is an "underture". It is less specific and cartoony than reality.

He forces Grim Natwick-a great cartoony animator to waste a few years of what could have been a creative explosion for him, if only Walt had encouraged his natural talents.

This insanity-animating generic designs with tall proportions and bland expressions - one of Walt's greatest follies has horribly influenced animation down to this day.

Here's what's left after you subtract all of the great animation principles of the 1930s and leave only Walt's poor taste:

I removed the Batman image, because I don't want the comments to degenerate into a discussion about superhero "cartoons".
The age of mannequins with rectangular holes in their faces that annoying voices come out of.

NEXT-1940S, COASTING ON PRINCIPLE at Disney's, developing specific variations derived from principles at Warner's.