The Experiment Continues

Jeremy makes a surprisingly good art model.

For this round of gestures, I used a brush pen on animation paper.  Next time, I'll draw within the camera safe area of the paper so I can scan the drawings in properly.  

Although, the upside to this quick and dirty method is that the barriers to testing my keys (e.g. small scanner, too time consuming to scan, no tripod or animation camera) are removed.  I love animating, but find myself animating less because of dozens of tiny inconveniences involved with animating at home.  Now, there are no excuses.

Saturday Life Drawing Experiment

Lately, Jeremy has been religiously studying Richard William's Animator's Survival Kit.  If you were to call him at 3:15 A.M., on any random day of the week, chances are he is buried in the book with a mountain of notebooks beside him.

In the life drawing section of the kit, Williams recommends having a model take a series of brief, sequential poses.  As the model poses, draw the gestures on animation paper as if you were keying a scene.  Jeremy's face lit up like birthday candles and we couldn't not do it.

We took turns posing in sequence this afternoon, and below is the result of mine.

The experiment was fun, and so far, I can think of two applications for it:

1) To rough out difficult animation movements

2) A warm up exercise for upcoming Toons On Tap sessions

In the beginning of Toons, we did include segments of sequential poses.  Models David McKenna and Patricia Lewis (my sister!), specifically, would create thumbnail drawings of their sequential poses in advance and take the drawings onstage with them.

At this point, I'm deathly bored of cafe sketching and couldn't bear to draw another boring person with a latte.  Maybe I can convince my friends to hang out over beers and peg bars to do more of this exercise.