A GREAT way to learn animation AND improve drawing skills

what if i told you that there is a way to improve your drawing skills while at the same time learn animation you know the whole idea of killing two birds with one stone let me show you and talk about a practice that has been considered underrated also stick around till the end i want to show you guys some cool student work [Music] hey guys this is siddique panto and today i'd like to talk about a great way and how you can learn animation while at the same time improve your drawing skills a lot of professionals and mentors in animation always throw life drawing as an advice for anyone to get better in their drafts and ship and yeah i do think live drawing has its place you learn figure drawing you learn how to break down the anatomy you build up bigger invention skills and in a way it's a great way to learn drawing especially with the human body but you can only go so far with life drawing alone for me i think life drawing is great when there's someone leading that class that challenges you in how to see things or how to think things differently and the other caveat i have with life drawing is that the poses are pretty much still the models hold into place so you don't really get to understand movement sure the model can hold dynamic poses but learning how to move the figure is a completely different story and you know what you can be a great draftsman and a person with great technical drawing skill but your animation can also come off as awkward but of course to be able to animate full characters with full bodies you have to have a good understanding of figure drawing some bigger invention skills some gesture drawing and anatomy because animation is its own different world yet it still requires decent drastic shift for you to be able to pull off animated characters so what if there was a way where you can improve your draftsmanship anatomy and figure drawing skills at the same time while learning how to animate so one of my best friends rune benecke when he was still at disney animation florida he and a few friends would basically just copy frames from live action footage and of course he had several reasons in why he would do it one was to get a better grasp of animating more naturalistic looking things and the second one was to build on instinct but he would also do these practices to study something that's related to the film he's working on so for brother bear he would study footages of bears but imagine this if you wanted to get better at your choreography skills or your fight scenes or maybe dancing or maybe just subtle action of like some person taking off their coat for example and you find live action footage references for those it's a great way to study something but at the same time it's also a great way to experiment with your shorthand your rough animation style a way to experiment with your own drawing language to make it more applicable to animation thus the gesture drawing method that you were taught at life drawing classes work in animation so again it's a great way to see what works free and what doesn't in terms of drawing so with that being said i've actually replaced a lot of my life drawing sessions by just studying live action footage so you know what anyone can do this whether you're a beginner an advanced animator there's always something to benefit from just studying live action footages what's great about youtube is that there is a way to pause the footage and then go through things frame by frame by just pressing the period and comma key or the sharp brackets and from then on you just copy the frames from the live action footage into your animation file if this is your first time doing something like this i would encourage you to draw the poses every four frames or eight but i would suggest four so that means you press the previous frame or the next frame at least four times and then whatever you end up with you just copy those drawings and if you can in your animation file you can make those drawings last for four frames matching the live action footage now some people like to go for every two frames or every single frame but if this is your first time i highly encourage just trying four frames because a great animator can get away with a few drawings yet have those drawings feel like they're moving a lot with just a limited count of drawings it's also to get a feel of how animating on force feels like usually when i animate there's a lot of force in my animation for the first pass so for this practice i'm going to be doing the straight head and i encourage everyone to do the straight ahead too meaning that if you decide to skip two frames or four frames in the live action footage and copy that do that one drawing at a time as you move forward you want this to be spontaneous and straight ahead builds instinct as for the drawing approach this is where you can really experiment to see if your drawing approach is applicable to animation so if you were taught the glenn vilpo way of drawing the figure try that out if you were taught the andrew loomis way of breaking down and drawing the figure try it out on this but for me i don't really use a lot of those methods because i like to just draw what i see and just try and capture that and break it down and one thing i noticed is that my drawing approach approaches change depending on what i'm seeing on the screen sometimes i just draw the silhouette of the figure because sometimes the shape language works better in that the way i usually draw is i draw a very rough loose version that kind of represents a sort of silhouette or a blob and then added details now i'm not trying to like break the figure down into specific forms or technical shapes or structure like that i'm trying to capture what i'm seeing on the screen so facial expressions hair cloth folds cloth shapes one thing i highly benefited from this especially if you're dealing with something that has a lot of dynamic action and the actors have a lot of overlapping action or cloth you should try and capture those shapes now like i said earlier my drawing approach changes depending on what i'm animating so if it's a full body scene then maybe i'll try and break it down into more structured academic shapes but if the characters are much closer to the camera i'm really just capturing the silhouettes and shapes that i'm seeing but one challenge that i've been urged to do from roon and something that i've been encouraging my students in animation is if you are studying from live action footage try and capture the feeling of what you're seeing rather than just mindlessly copy it so if you can actually see the tension in the facial expression or the cloth and there's a lot of force being applied to that cloth like really try and emphasize those in your drawing like really try to observe the tilts and angles the actors are doing oh another reason why i don't go back to like techniques and drawing methods that a lot of people resort to when it comes to academic drawing is that for me that can also build habits i want a job based on observation what i'm seeing approach things with more contour rather than building blocks and from this i can find unique shapes that can help express a certain gesture or feeling i treat each frame or drawing as if i was in a fast gesture drawing class so no more than 3 minutes i guess no more than 5 minutes but i would say i target around under 2 minutes for each frame if you want to get better at loose gesture drawing skills or your short hand pass i encourage you guys to do faster drawings now for me the most relaxing thing about this study is that i don't have to think too hard about how i'm going to animate a figure because the reference is just right there i'm basically just copying the poses and the performance from the live action into drawing i don't really need to think about timing or the right pose or anything like that so yeah i'm not really trying to think about post to post animation or really trying to figure out how things break down because one big thing i learned about studying live action footage is that movement is more spontaneous real life isn't all about pose to pose or breakdowns or anything like that those are just tools and philosophies that animators back in the day came up with to help them break down and build structure for their animation process so when you're copying these poses you're also going to notice a lot of micro movements and one thing you realize is that you're not going to be actively looking for these things you're just going to notice it as you flip back and forth between your live action footage and your animation oh yeah something that i should have brought up is that when you transition to your next pose or your next part in the live action footage whether that's every after two frames or every after four frames keep going back and forth between those poses and ideas and really just look at where things are moving how things are moving what direction something is moving so let's say in the next pose or the next part maybe the head is moving forward but the back is moving a bit back these are things you'll notice as you're flipping back and forth back and forth in your live action footage reference i think as far as it gets i think that's the only major thinking that you have to keep track with but you don't have to think too hard on the creative side as you're drawing these poses maybe some thoughts will come up saying things like oh shoot that jump won't work if this person didn't plant his feet over here or things about motion or things about spacing you'll notice these things as you animate straight ahead and again i would highly recommend doing this straight ahead because straight ahead for me relies on instinct whereas posted opposed is more really about the planning so when you're done with one drawing move to the next by moving forward two frames four frames however you decide to do it and then just sketch that now when you feel more comfortable with this practice try going for two frames straight ahead or if you're really ballsy draw every single frame so you're basically animating on ones but remember the less frames you skip the more you have to be more conscious about the spacing and the relationship between drawings from the next and previous drawings or frames however if you were doing this on force and you wrap up your session you can go back and add your in-betweens if you feel like you wanted to make those into twos that's what i would do when i just wanted to make things a bit more smoother but there's a joy to animating on twos because you're also going to notice a lot of subtle nuances so what kind of live action reference should you be using honestly it depends what you want to focus on or what you'd like to get better at or what you want to try it really doesn't matter don't depend on me to tell you guys what to study or what not to study that's really not up to me but if i were to have an opinion if you were starting out for the first time i would recommend highly action oriented live action footage so there's a lot of movement there's a lot of activity so fight scenes dancing things with a lot of physical movement because you can tell there's a lot of contrast and change so i would try doing those first and then eventually you can move on to more subtle things so maybe a person just sitting down on a chair putting on a jacket or cloth more nuanced motion maybe some acting choices with more energy so there's still movement and there's still a lot of energy within the actor and then eventually do something that's really subtle where the nuances are just based on the expression and body language the more nuance it gets the more you really have to observe and think hard about how you can capture that so if you're trying out for the first time do something with a lot of dynamic action then move on to things that still have a lot of body motion but isn't super dynamic then you can eventually move on to really subtle things not a lot of movement the challenge there is really trying to capture the feeling but personally i like to have fun and i do things with a lot of action so when i was teaching my animation class during the summer i would give my students an optional and supplemental homework where they have to look at live action footage whether it's a favorite movie show or something that they recorded or video off of youtube and just copy those frames frame by frame straight ahead and every time i taught a class i would usually get a variety of different students and skill levels so some students actually have animation and drawing experience whereas there are students who don't really have any animation experience at all and their draftsmanship skill is still considered pretty early but here's the thing anyone can benefit from this practice experience or inexperience the experienced animators and artists can utilize whatever tools that they've learned in the past while at the same time they can use it as a way to experiment and to break out of comfort zones and the beginning students can use it as an opportunity to learn more about motion mechanics learn how to observe from things taken from real life while at the same time learning how to break down the human figure one thing that i noticed with most of my students is that they tend to put the full silhouette of their figure or their character in the shot but sometimes you don't need to show the full character sometimes when a character is doing a spinning kick for example maybe their head is obstructed or hidden away by their torso or by their legs and i wanted some of my students to observe that when they looked at live action footage now with that said do i think life drawing is useless absolutely not i think there's a lot of value that can come from life drawing to me life drawing feels a lot more concentrated so if you just wanted to focus on measuring proportion analyzing things like anatomy and structure and things like that i think there's a lot of value to life drawing still to me studying from live action frame by frame is just animated life drawing to me it's just a different focus but now using time and motion as a factor and i definitely think animators and non-animators like other artists should try and practice so if you're someone that wants to sort of like learn more naturalistic looking animation while wanting to improve your drastic skills whether it's figure drawing whether it's gesture drawing i highly recommend you something like this anyways that's all bye interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you'll find the complete introduction to 2d animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store 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Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 141,619

Keywords: Toniko Pantoja, Youtube, Animation, Tutorial, Advice, Lesson, Vlog, Adobe, Photoshop, Animate, Flash, After Effetcts, Premiere, Video, Film, Drawing, Tips, Gestures, live, action, footage

Id: -Y6Kkrlvzgs

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021