Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey, everyone. My
name is Mike in. I'm an old school animator who specializes in
traditional animation. I've animated for ten years creating short
films, work wheels, and small pieces, incorporating
character animation, effect animation,
and storyboards. Sharing all that
I've learned from my mentors to old school
animators like yourself, will be a rewarding experience. I look forward to having
this time to show you the wops through my animation
tutors here at Skillshare. The first class of
the series will focus on character design. This class will show you
from start to finish, how to create an
illustrative caricature of some like yourself. Throughout the specific class and the project you will
be undertaking here, I'll be teaching you how
to design yourself as a character with some of the principles of
illustration and carcature. This will include
drawings of a man, a woman, and drawings of the arms to hands from
various perspectives. These drawings will
help you plan out your animation down the
road in the classes ahead. This is a class aimed at students who are either
just starting off in the medium or for students who already have some prior
knowledge of the art form. This class is great
for beginners, hobbyists and professionals
in the field, because you can use
these skills and your understanding of
character design to create your own character
with the principles of illustration through your distinctive
artistic sensibilities. You can apply these
skills to situations outside the class with
characters of your own choosing, whether it's yourself,
someone else, or a character out of your
very own imagination. I encourage all of you to
show your projects around here because we're on the same boat reaching
for the same goal. By the end of this course, you'll be able to create
cartoon characters out of simple shapes with the basic understanding
of the human figure. Not only will this
class help you come up with a few visually
appealing characters, but it will ultimately guide you in your animation for
the classes ahead. Thank you for dropping by and I hope you enjoy this class.
2. Drawing A Man: Let's get started by
drawing a man first, followed by a woman, and then the arms and
hands. First the man. I'm drawing the circle, followed by an axis, then a diamond shape
to pinpoint where the ears and the
parts of the head go. I'm drawing the chin,
followed by the eyes, the pupils, and the eye brows. Nose is always of
great importance to a character because you
know the old saying, the nose makes a character. So I like to make sure that the nose captures the essence of the person in
this case, being me. So now I'm adding the
hair and the neck, followed by the
smile and the ears. As you can see from here, the eyes rest on the axis, The placement of
the ears can vary depending on what you
want to have for it. Sometimes the ears
can rest on the axis, or sometimes it can fall between the eyes and the
edge of the nose. I've seen animators
through it both ways. It all depends on what
you're feeling for it. I'm going to now start
adding the bear. I'm going to add more details around the hair to give a
bit more of a weight to it. I'm getting some
blushes on the cheeks. At this point, I'm now
refining the drawing further, which, I would say
is always necessary and a required part of
the animation process. As animators, we always refine our work no matter how
we might feel about it because further
refinement will only make the product the final product
better in my opinion, at. The pupils, of course, if you've seen cartoons, you'll notice sometimes they
can be just black circles, like Barney's eyes
on the flintstones, or maybe like some of the
other Disney cartoons, you might have a
white circle in it. I'd like to add the white circle in at least for this character, to give him more
of a personality. But there's other characters that I would definitely prefer the black dot
approach as well. L et's see a little
bit more detail here, fixing the edges of the face, and those are the
first two drawings. Let's do another set. Shall we? I'm drawing the
circles first, then the axis. As you can see, I just do a
curve line for the spine. The curve is a important
part of the body, that matter if it's an
animal or a person, the spine gives it the dynamic pose or action that we seek
for the character. Learn more about the curve
in class than before, which deals with gestures and how we do a gesture
path and animation. But just to repeat, the curve line is very important when we create
our characters because they give it a sense of action of dynamic ability,
that sort of thing. Here, I guess you can
think of this as a preview for the future video lesson
on the arms themselves. The arms, they like cylinders. Only these cylinders,
they start big, but gradually, but ever so
subtly, they get smaller. It gets smaller, once
it reaches the elbow, and it further gets smaller, and it reaches the hand. Here you can see me draw
the back of the head. The back of the head or the
back of anything can be hard at first because You know, we tend to draw characters that have
faces facial expressions, which is different if
you're drawing from the back because we don't have those features that can guide
us in drawing the figure. So this is where, you know, your drawing experience
comes in, you know, if you study drawing
the human figure, that would help you in drawing the person perspective when you're
seeing from the back. I would definitely
recommend George Bridgeman. His books are always a
good read for drawing. As you can see on
the other drawing, we can see that we're applying the same approach
as we learned from before where the head is the same
while the body has shrunken, which creates a carcature
or an illustration. That simply a copy. I give it some more detail on
the beard and the mustache. Just to make another point, I mentioned this in
the other class, I posted a while back. But the use of multicolor
pens paints is very helpful. It helps us see the drawing. It helps us pinpoint specific
features of the drawing, and just visually makes
the drawing better. There you have it.
Four poses of a man. Tune into the next
video lesson where we will draw four more
poses of a woman.
3. Drawing A Woman: Okay. So now that
we've drawn a man, let's draw a woman out
for this video lesson. So I'm going to draw the circle, followed by the axis here. And the diamond to pinpoint
the points of the head, like the ears, the
forehead and the chin, and now I'm going
to draw the chin. The nose and the eyebrows, followed by the pupils
and the eyelashes. The longer the eyelashes, the more cartooning is. At least that's
how I approach it. So the longer the eyelashes, the more cartoon
it would appear to be. I'm drawing the chest. I'm ta like a upside
down trapezoid. Have triangles to help
me draw the breast in. Now I'm drawing the arms. For the woman's arms, they are thinner
than the man's arms, so I won't be as slick. Now I'm going to draw the hair. The hair in other am
characters like aerial. You'll notice that the
top part of her hair, they tend to fall over the head, almost like it's
hanging over the head. I try to emulate that. You'll see that there's
a shading that I put on the top left portion
of the hair to show that there's a shadow
underneath that way. I also put if you look
at the other drawing, a shadow to tell us that
there's hair behind her. I'm adding some freckles
here. Let's see. I'm adding more detail to the
hair to make it more wavy. Se I'm fixing the neck,
fixing the collar. I'm not liking where that arm is going on the left drawing, so I know I'm going to
have to redo that drawing because it's not giving me
what I want in the arm. Expect me to replace that
arm in a few short moments. I do a little bit
more refinement here. That's more detail here. I take out the arms
that can do it. Again, I emphasize
the importance of using different colors to
help us in character design. I personally like that because if we look at the same drawing, the same color, like
if it was red or blue, then it just hurts our eyes. I like ding it iclor
because it helps the image visually stand out
and it won't hurt eyes after we spend so much
time on these drawings. Of course, when it
comes to animating, once we clean up the image, we would have to
use the same color. Which is why we're driven to madness or we're animating
because when you look at the same series of
drawings over and over again, you're driven to madness. Okay. Let's try the second
set of images here. Like before, I'm
drawing the circle, followed by the diamond to pinpoint the features
of the head and face, the chin, the eyes
and nose, and so on. As you can see from
the other drawing, I'm drawing the back end of it. Like with the man,
I'm drawing it from the perspective of you're
seeing the person from behind. I'm drawing the face so that we see just a
glimpse of the eyes, but nothing more, and maybe
just a bit of the nose. She's not quite as turned
back as the guy was, but still more or less from
the back, just not as much. As for the other side, you
can see I'm drawing more from the side perspective.
I'm drawing the arms. And like I said the arms,
they're like cylinders, cylinders that begin bigger, but as you go down, they get slightly thinner
before it reaches the hand. I'm giving the
character a Ponytail, which was actually inspired by Judy Judson from the Jetsons. I always liked how she had the pony tail
behind her. For me. It's like a pure 60s visual
aesthetic that I like, so I put that in there. Adding more detail to the hair. Putting more detail on
the pointy tail as well. I'm going to finish off
with the rest of the body. I'm going to start doing the hip area and add more detail on stuff in the
body like the back, the arms. You just fix that. Let
me erase that smile. I want to give it a better smile more of a subtle
smile like that. Let me add the hand here. You'll learn more
about the hand in the next video lesson
about hands and arms. Now that I finish
that, I'm going to finish the rest of the hip
by giving her address. Again, a 60s inspired
design, so to speak. And I want to say
that's pretty much it. I like where the drawing
is for both drawings, and that's it for those two. I have to say of
the four drawings, I like the top two more, particularly the one where it's just the face
looking to us.
4. Drawing Hands: The hands and arms. Let's start with the arms. As I previewed in the
previous video lessons, the arms begin bigger, but as you go down the line, down from the shoulder pad
to the elbow to the hand, they get smaller or thinner. And then we draw the hands which come right
at the tip of it. Think of them as like
cylinders or cones. They begin wide or big. But gradually as we go down the line or the slide or how way you would
like to think of it, it gets thinner or smaller. Now, let's try the hands. The hands like the body
are composed of shapes. We begin with the square, followed by the fingers, which come out from the
root as the square, and the fingers
can be composed of rectangles that either
go straight or curve, depending on how the fingers
are if they're pointing straight or if they're curved
or pointing somewhere. The thumb is usually
separate from those fingers. That comes off to the side of the square as opposed to the fingers coming
out of the top. And the thumb usually has two components in
contrast to the fingers, which have three components. As you can see
beginning of the thumb, as we go up to the index
finger and the middle finger, the fingers gradually get taller with the middle
finger being the peak. Then once we pass
the middle finger and go down to the pinky, the fingers get smaller once more or shorter, I should say. So before we call it a night, let's do two more final
hand drawings this time from two different perspectives from the front and
from the back. For these poses, I'm
going to draw the square and the three dimensional
perspective point of view, which will help me draw out
the hand from those angles. Like to think of the hand in
terms of geometrical shapes, purely geometrical
because the hand is a very intricate
part of the body. Unlike the head or the chest or the hip,
there's a lot of, a lot of subtle parts, the hand that may get missed
as we try to draw them out. Drawing them out in
geometric shapes helps us. That way, once you get
the basic form done, we can then round it off and
use those contra lines of the shapes as a mark for where we can soften the
features of the hand. To give it more for death, a weight, a perspective. That's why drawing out these shapes are
always important to our character and
our understanding of how the character
moves and flows. I'm going to add some more
detail to the fingers. I want to create
the impression that the fingers are heading
towards us, not away from us. As for the back end of the hand, I want to give the
impression that the fingers are further
away from us not going towards us and to give the impression
that the thumb is closer to us as opposed to the rest of the fingers of the hand
drawings that I've just done, I like these two the most. There you have it. All the
hand drawings right here.
5. Conclusion: Oce back everyone. Now that we have finished
the first class, let's do a quick
recap of what we learned before we dive
into the class project. First, we learned what makes a cartoon human character
and illustrative character. Secondly, we learned how to apply design methods
such as proportions, appeal, and caricature
into our characters. Lastly, we learned
how to incorporate some of the principles of human figure drawing into our work. That all said, let's talk about the project we'll be
working on for this class. Our task would be to
create eight drawings of ourselves in an illustrative
and carcature way, just like from the examples you saw earlier in this class. In total, there will
be eight drawings. Four drawings for
ourselves, man or woman, from the waist, and four more drawings of
your hands and arms. Screen capture your
drawings and save them as either JPEGs or PNGs. The drawings can be screen captured separately
or altogether. It really doesn't matter. You can screen cap them
in whatever way you want. Finally, just post your images here in the class
project gallery. Again, thank you for
dropping by and tuning in for the next class.
See you later.
Mike Ryan, Traditional Animator
