Appeal in Ugliness - Basil Wolverton

Do you think this is ugly? I'm sure Frank and Ollie would. I don't. I think it's immensely appealing.

Don't look at the itchy details. Look at the shapes that make up the whole image. I broke them down into their construction up here.

Although there are many itchy artists who preceded and followed Basil Wolverton, many artists can get lost in the details that obscure what's more important - the overall instant impression of the drawing.

Basil Wolverton has traits that I find appealing:

FUNNY: The Illusion Of Life's 12 principles of animation left out the most important one - that cartoon drawings should be funny.

DESIGN: Basil has a great design sense. Each shape he draws is fun and interesting and he arranges them altogether with great skill and with the final purpose of making us laugh.

What the Disney animators consider "appealing" is not really invented design. Instead, they evolved a community style that at its best balanced a few cute approved shapes in a non-offensive manner. Bambi is the epitome of the style at its most appealing. You can see their designs evolving away from the rubber hose style of Donald, Mickey and Pluto towards Bambi from the mid 30s to the early 40s. Once they got their appealing balance of shapes and squirrel mask down, they kept it going for the next decade; Lady and The Tramp are exactly the same designs as all the Bambi characters. They just take their appealing squirrel masks and wrap them around slightly different forms - and all the forms themselves are basically the same - even the humans.

Disney resorted to a "safe balance" of shapes, rather than inventing new designs from scratch on a regular balance. As far as I can figure, they didn't actually have a designer - they just let the animators work with the characters on each movie until they naturally evolved into a functional evenly proportioned design that was non-offensive.

Basil Wolverton is a superior cartoon designer of the top-tier because of his great imagination and his control of shapes and hierarchy of sub-shapes and details.

The difference between these cartoons and some of the itchy ones I posted before is that these are not really ugly. They are cute and upbeat. Each of these characters seems to be unaware of his or her own ugliness - they seem to all be delighted to be ugly.

I know when a lot of young cartoonists try to imitate my style, they tend to focus on the scenes that were supposed to be ugly. There is a way to do pretend-ugly that is still appealing.

Here is a guy who is definitely blissfully happy to be ugly.
How does Basil make his superficially itchy detailed stuff look so unique and appealing?

He uses some of the same tools of design that animation designers use.

SILHOUETTES: His characters have a totally clear silhouette. That makes it easy to read, and it shows a command off design clarity. His designs commit to the idea. They aren't timid vague non-descriptive shapes.
FILLED SPACE VS NEGATIVE SPACE

NEGATIVE SPACE IS NOT JUST A TOOL THAT YOU APPLY TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE CHARACTER. IT SHOULD BE USED WITHIN THE CHARACTER'S SILHOUETTE AS WELL.

This guy's face is well forward of his head. We can see his face clearly because of the space behind it - between the face and the ear.

COMMITMENT TO OVERALL STATEMENT

This woman's head is bullet shaped. Nothing vague about it.

The bullet shape is the major form of the design. The next level of the forms do not distract from the bullet. They are smaller and move horizontally, rather than vertically like the bullet.

HIERARCHY: The 2nd level of forms also have clear overall shapes - the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ring of curly hair at the bottom. The details - the individual hairs, the warts etc. are then wrapped around the forms in the same directions that the forms themselves have.

This Russian guy has an overall boxy form. That's clear and non-ambiguous. Basil doesn't let the rest of the sub-shapes distract from this.

Within the overall form, the next level of forms has a lot of contrasts - in size, in direction, in shape. The image isn't cluttered. There is lots of space between the funny parts. Space is a designer's friend.

Speaking of which, there is a space on everyone's head that a lot of amateurish cartoonists ignore or are not aware of - that's the space between your face and the back of your head. The face is at the front of the head, it should never fill up the whole head. I have had to explain this to so many of my own artists, that I go into a trance whenever I have to explain it again.

THE "ITCHY" DETAILS

I love Basil's cross-hatching. It doesn't fill up all the space in his designs. It helps define the forms. It isn't random noodling. And on top of all that it's funny. The sheer idea that characters who are so ugly deserve all this extra work refining them kills me. This is the inspiration for the close up detailed paintings in Ren and Stimpy. The best of them aren't actually ugly. They are very beautifully painted, with much love by the likes of Bill Wray and Scott Wills. I have seen this idea copied since (even in the Games Ren and Stimpy's) and perverted by actually being ugly, either by a cluttered mean looking drawing, or by later cartoons with just plain sloppy painting technique.

This style is not itchy at all to me. By "itchy" I mean useless floating cross-hatching that doesn't help describe clear entertaining forms. David has some thoughts on this too:

david gemmill said...
richard willaims. the dude tortures himself. who the #$%^* would want to animate that &*#%@? at least Anime has some sort of redeeming quality, like maybe the robot sequences and action scenes end up looking cool or entertaining..but all of richard william's $&%@# is always just painful to watch...and not entertaining. Only hardcore animation fans *%&^ off to the technical expertise that was involved to make it (not creative expertise though).I feel sorry for the people that had to inbetween. And he had the audacity to animate on ONES. on ONES.

Animate this *^&%$* design on ONES.You can look at scribner, and freddie moore and see pictures of them smiling, or you can look at pictures of Dick williams who looks very depressed and methodical.Animating cartoons is supposed to be fun, work, but fun. not torture.

Jonathan Harris said...
I will admit that I was inspired big-time by Robert Crumb at a certain point in my life, and that I do still admire his stuff. However, I do find myself wondering how much this is just a product of my being born in this generation, and thus having grown up being made to like ugly things (I've been considering this point lately and it's making sense of a few things).I do also find Raggedy Ann and Andy themselves quite appealing (in the faces, at least), but the rest of it does look a bit too much like animation #%$^&*@$#& (I still feel I should check the film out again, though).Also WOW I thought that link said "Michael's Porn Animation" at first! It made sense given the context, too!




There are many sides to the concept of "appeal" and I have barely scratched the surface. There is also "spicy appeal", a kind of appeal that grows on you. It's not instantly cute and might even make you mad at first but is much more human and honest than simple Bambi cute. Virgil Partch, Don Martin and many other artists fit that category.

Animation School 13: Classic Animation Principles and Hierarchy Applied To Stylized Drawing

Is this a rebellion against Disney from within? I don't think so.I think it reeks of Disney to the core. This may look like a simple easy-to-do flat hip drawing like you see in modern cartoons, but it's nothing of the kind.

This is the result of a decade and a half of honing Disney principles, inbetweening and animating on classic rounded Disney characters. It's a Tom Oreb layout and he uses all the tools he learned doing the uncool way of animation drawing. Thanks to Amid for this Oreb composition of an early version of the fairies from Sleeping Beauty-they should have looked this good in the movie!

He came to this style the hard way. Toot WP&B uses almost all the 40s cartoon principles, with a couple of them toned down - which makes it look rebellious or cool.

This style is actually dependent upon MORE RIGID rules than the more organic 3 dimensional typical 40s cartoon characters. It is the extreme conservatism that controls the style and makes it so wooden and soulless. It's like an artistic math problem, existing solely for the challenge of its own problems.

When most people today draw flat, they are starting from no foundation of knowledge or experience at all. They see cartoons like Toot Whistle Clunk and Boom and say "I wanna be cool and rebellious too. Only I wanna skip the hard work and study and just go right to the top and be a designer." Then they draw from the details out with no master plan of organizing the designs. They start by drawing an eye, then a nose, then draw a head around it and eventually get to a finished chaotic picture of geometric shapes all in cluttered opposition and contradiction to each other.

Oreb is instead designing from the big shapes down to the small shapes and fitting all the smaller shapes within the plan of the larger shapes. Starting with the overall composition.
The image is made of two major shapes - the group of cavemen and the girl. These 2 shapes are separated with negative space - a big hunk of it. The cavemen shape is then split into 2 groups of 2 cavemen each-separated again by a negative shape - this one smaller than the larger one between the girl and the men.
Within each group of 2, the men are carefully, thoughtfully balanced against each other using lines of action, negative shapes, overlapping shapes, organic curves....

On the organicness. Here's the main key to the style. These aren't mathematical shapes. They aren't perfect circles, ovals, there are no straight or parallel lines as in today's flat cartoons. These are very organic but on a flattened 3dimensional plane - somewhere in between a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional space.

The negative shapes exist both in spaces between the characters or in their arm poses, but they also exist within the characters. The negative areas are contrasted against the filled busy areas to provide readabilty and to make you focus on certain areas. If everything was filled up with detail equally, it would be a cluttered mess.

There are lots of contrasts of different types of shapes. Just compare each of their noses to start.

There are contrasts in texture - large flat colored areas against hairy busy areas.
All the characters fit into the larger shapes of the composition, but within each one all the features follow the construction or hierarchy of the overall structure of the individual character.

Next, I'll break down their head constructions and you'll see how they are well thought out and make sense. They aren't chaotic or random breakings of established rules. The eyes fit on the same plane of the head position;they relate to each other, they have direction.

When I first saw this cartoon (and the other handful of chapters of the Cal Arts Bible - Pigs is Pigs, Mars and Beyond and Paul Bunyan) I too wanted to be instantly cool. When I tried to draw in this style and make the characters look like they fit together and were doing something I quickly realized how hard it was to do. Now I know why.

I also realized the effort isn't worth it in terms of the ultimate entertainment value. I'll explain that later too.


This cartoon uses the same principles and more, but is far less restrictive creatively than the stylized Disney stuff.

Was this worth anything to you or did you already understand the style?

Prepping a drawing for painting it in Photoshop

People have asked me how I do my digital cartoon paintings so I'll attempt to explain it.

I'm sure there are many ways to do this but after years of trial and error this is the system I use.

First I draw a cartoon on paper. Then I scan it in and open it in Photoshop.

Once it's open, I up the resolution to 500 or 600dpi. A high resolution will make the final inking and painting crisper.

Before I start actually painting or shading any of the drawing I have to take some steps to prep the drawing to make it easy to paint. Basically I create a flat inked and colored drawing that has no shading yet. It looks like a 2d animation cel. 

This takes a few steps and a lot of layers and folders.

Usually I start by making a couple folders in the layer window, one for the head and one for the body.

 For the purposes of this post I am just going to prep a head and a fairly simple one. I use the exact same procedure for the body when there is one.

1) Inking

I do the biggest shape first which usually is the overall silhouette of the head. I make a folder and call it 'sillo' for short. I make a layer in the folder and call that 'sillo' as well.

For more details on how to ink cleanly see my new Patreon site.

Then I trace the head shape using one of Kyle's Ultimate brushes called 'Smooth Criminal'. It's a very good inking brush with no fuzzy edges.

After the head I ink the next biggest shape which in this case is the bear's muzzle. I create a folder within the head folder and call it 'muzzle'. A layer inside is also called 'muzzle'. Every shape will get its own folder which keeps all the layers in an easy to understand hierarchy.

The next biggest shape is the mouth area so I ink that next. (I work my way down from the biggest shapes to the smallest shapes.)

BTW, I don't get a perfectly clean inking in one step. I ink each shape slightly rough and then clean it up after.

You can see that it took 4 strokes to get the shape of the muzzle. Each stroke is on a separate layer. 

Then I clean up where the strokes overlap to get a smooth shape. In order to do this neatly I clean one stroke at a time by turning the layer transparent so I can see where the lines overlap. I erase the overlap and then make the line opaque again and turn the next layer transparent and repeat the process.

Once all the layers have been cleaned up I merge them together to make just one layer.

You'll notice that this shape is not completely enclosed. I use the paint bucket to fill the shapes with color once I'm ready to color the whole drawing but I can't fill a shape with a color if it isn't completely
enclosed.

So for this muzzle I will make another layer to complete the shape and call it 'connect'. 

I don't want to see that line in the final painting which is why I keep it on another layer. Once I fill it with color I can turn off the enclosing line.

To fill a shape that is on 2 or more layers you have to select the shape by clicking the magic wand and also clicking the box that says 'sample all layers' at the top right.

...Or clicking the 3rd button at the top bar that appears on your window.

 

It depends on how your interface looks when you click 'W' for 'select'.

Then select the lines and the interior space.

Now that the whole shape is selected I can use the paint bucket to fill the shape with a color. I make a layer under the line layers and call it 'fill'.

I use this same inking step by step approach to finish inking the whole head doing the biggest shapes first and working my way down to the smaller shapes.

Next post: Filling the lines with colors.

If you'd like to see more of the paintings I've done this way, you can check out my Inbred Kitties NFTs. Just click this little unfortunate guy here: