Drawing for Animation - (Week 2)

At the beginning of this drawing for animation lesson we set up our objects on the table in the middle of the room - we then sat and drew a section of the setup, making sure at least some of the objects were overlapping, as it was important for this lesson and its teachings.

We looked at overlap in this lesson and how important it is in animation - our teacher showed us multiple children's drawings and got us to identify what was inaccurate, and then what had improved in the drawing skills in each one as they aged, like perspective, layering, using horizon lines to portray distance, making objects smaller to show they're further away, etc. When we looked at the drawing of the older child at around 12 years old, we saw that they used lots of hills in their drawing, layering them on top of one another, showing the depth of the drawing through that, and how these 'hills' are seen in many character designs to show depth as well, for example, in Cruella De Ville's design in '101 Dalmations':

The 'T' shape that's created at every overlapping 'hill' helps to portray that her arms are protruding out, and the sleeve is coming out forward into the depth of field.

Our teacher then told us about how you can make a character or an object into ovals, and then when you look at that object from different heights, the ovals get thinner and thicker, like it's being squeezed and stretched. This means that you can use these ovals as guidelines for drawing more complicated shapes like the human body and trees, where you will need to see them from different heights and angles in animated films.

We then picked an object from the still life set up in the room and had to draw it from different heights to see the ovals changing shape and to try and observe them accurately. I took about 5-10 minutes to draw these three glasses, as I found it quite difficult to draw the ovals without making them an eye shape, while also making sure their size is correct in relation to the other oval in the glass. The top right glass turned out the best, while the ones angled more from above were quite difficult for me, and as you can see the ovals and the sides of the glass are slightly wobbly and inaccurate, so I should keep practicing these and getting myself more used to drawing them, as they will be very useful down the line, especially at the story boarding part of animating when I need the structure of the scene and characters to be clear and accurate.