TEACH YOURSELF | Sincerity

How do you take a drawing from "good" to "amazing?"

Many mentors from all corners of the internet believe the answer lies in "attitude." According to them, putting personality into your gestures/sketches is the single most important thing you can do to make your drawings stand out and have people connect to them on an emotional level.

Disney's Nine Old Men referred to this concept as "sincerity" and described it as the act of transcribing on paper what makes a character unique -- and therefore believable.

So how can you go about practicing sincerity in drawing? The answer from online sources: observation.

In a few lecture videos below, Glen Keane explains how he likes to make mental notes about what is going on with the pose he is sketching. He will ask himself what it is about the subject he’s drawing that makes them unique and worth depicting. He will not only put a verb to the action of what is going on but also observe exactly how the character performs the verb. 

The drawing has to be saying something – it has to communicate a feeling or a unique characteristic of the subject. Capturing this attitude takes a gesture drawing to the next level.

Keane begins his lecture at 2:17.

All the things that you observe out in real life help you put truth into the characters you animate. Your observations help you make each character unique. Just think about it – when you sit down to animate, you start with nothing and have to create a believable performance out of that thin air. You’ll need to know a lot about human behavior to do that; you'll need to know where to draw inspiration from. 

So what are the little things that people do in real life? How do people differ? How would a shy person walk? A confident one? Through these observations, you'll have a reservoir of impressions to pull from when the time comes to animate or create a character design.

As Glen Keane says in the above video:

“If there’s anything that I want to communicate to you guys, it’s not principles of animation in terms of squash and stretch and overlap and anticipation. I mean, there are a lot of things that are really essential. But the most important thing that I want you to come away with is learning to see. Or I guess I should say, learning to observe.”

Here are a few extra quotes on the connection between sincerity and observation:

“My sketch books and the figure drawings are the source for everything I’ve ever animated. It’s all these observations. The little things that make a huge difference. You don’t see it unless you are drawing it, and you have to draw it. In order to draw it, you have to have observed it. You can see it, or you can really see it” – Glen Keane

“DUUUUDE, we live in permanent Christmas-land. There are all these presents, all these great faces, moments and stories just surrounding you, and you only have to open your eyes and look at them to have them. Incredible!” – Iain McCaig

Lastly, here is a link to a brief documentary about animation. About halfway through the film, Glen Keane and Joanna Quinn explain how they use their sketchbooks to make sincere observations that can later be used for their animation.

I hope these explanations prove helpful.

As always, thanks to the artists who have shared their advice online for us to teach ourselves.

You can read more of my Teach Yourself blog posts here

TEACH YOURSELF | How To Sketch

If you've ever been frustrated that the characters you draw from your imagination are missing something, perhaps your sketching practice is at fault.

When you use a sketchbook to study from real life, this enhances your understanding of a given subject. By studying real life, you can make drawings from your imagination more believable because sketching can give you an understanding of what you are drawing -- an understanding that no amount of studying still images can give you. 

To help in finding techniques for sketching, I've included some of my favorite advice from all corners of the internet.

Advice

Copying from still images can only take you so far. Worst case scenario, it can actually teach you to only copy what you see. When you copy, you will be incapable of reproducing the character from your memory. Or if you do, it will be that specific character in that specific pose that you memorized.

This is similar to stretching only a particular muscle: you may be really good at stretching that muscle from a specific angle but as soon as you try to stretch it in a different way, you fall short and are unable to do it.

To avoid copying what you see, mentors across the internet urge artists to draw humans and animals that move around a lot. This forces you to capture the essence of each pose (the gesture). You get the impression of the person or animal and then you put your interpretation down on the paper, all within a matter of seconds so as to retain that first impression.

Sketching this way allows you to understand what you are drawing so that you can draw it from any angle based on your imagination. It functions like a brain exercise.

In these two videos, Aaron Blaise, a 2D animator, discusses how he approaches sketching animals:

Also, here are some handouts on drawing animals, possibly by Glen Keane, from Animation Meat.

When it comes to specific exercises to practice in my sketchbook, I have found the blog post, Doodle Dump, which suggests that you can draw a subject three times; the first time, looking at the subject; the second time, looking at your drawing of the subject; the third time, from memory. This way, you will ensure that you are not simply copying the subject and are instead drawing from and enhancing your memory.

I hope these tips will help you as you go out and sketch from real life. Let me know how you go.

TEACH YOURSELF | The Line Of Action

How can you convey the essence of a pose in a clear, interesting way that captivates the beholder of your drawing?

The 'Line of Action' is arguably one of the most efficient ways to do so.

On the internet, the 'Line of Action' has been covered by many artists and I am going to share some of my favorite advice in this post.

Let's get to it!

In these handouts, Pixar story artist Alex Woo explains that the 'Line of Action' is equivalent to the 'Main Idea' of the pose you're drawing:

(Source: woohoopictures)

Some more info on the ‘line of action,’ given to me by one of my CalArts teachers:

(Source: lindadornart)

(Source: sevencamels)

Finally, here is a handout from Griz and Norm:

(Source: grizandnorm)

Have fun studying these!

-Christine-