Drawing Skills you NEED for animation

how tight does your drawing skills have to be in order to get into the animation industry or to learn other animation disciplines like 2d animation storyboarding visual development character design these are disciplines that require decent drawing skills drawing is a lifetime study and we're always going to evolve with our drawing skills throughout our years but if i were to summarize things you do not need to be a master of drawing but you might want to have a good understanding of drawing in general so i'll talk about those [Music] hey guys it's nicole toa and today i'd like to talk about drawing skills that you might want to have before you start pursuing animation or so it seems the most common question i get is taniko taniko how good do i have to be at drawing before i get into animation and of course even industry professionals who are artists always preach about having good or decent draftsmanship before you get into animation or before you learn animation and yeah most four-year programs when it comes to animation courses they do require students to have pretty decent drastic ship or drawing skills because most of these animation courses are quite fast paced and animation is a completely different skill set than just drawing alone but you need decent drawing skills to at least keep up so yeah i think the advice of having good drastic is sort of loosely thrown around and it's kind of hard to resonate with because i feel like that alone is kind of vague and i feel like i need to do a separate video on how i think about drastic ship in general the first thing you have to realize is that there's a lot of different genres in animation ranging from early childhood to adult from crude drawings to highly detailed anatomy so each production is probably going to require some different skill sets or different knowledge in terms of drawing or anything related to the production someone who's worked on action adventure might have different skill sets than someone who has worked in comedic cartoons the thing about animation is that it utilizes characters to sort of tell their stories so i'm thinking of the mindset of drawing skills that you might want to have so you're able to deal with characters and deal with storytelling in general and i feel like these basic drawing skills are ones that are pretty much around in every other discipline and animation from storyboarding to character design to vis-dev and 2d animation the first one i can think of is a good handle in gesture drawing being able to draw the figure loose and quickly but maintaining a sense of clarity you're showing weight you're showing force you're showing tension and if you're good enough you're communicating some emotions you're communicating feelings and you're giving storytelling with these gestures so one thing i would recommend is for you guys to do quick gesture drawing sessions whether it's through life drawing classes figure drawing classes whether you're drawing people from the park or coffee shops or you're copying frames from live action footage something that i've been doing recently in my own studies so here's i would get started on getting better at that and i've made videos on this on my youtube channel do a single pose for 30 seconds between 30 seconds to a minute that way you don't have a lot of time to procrastinate you have to nail the idea of what the pose is actually doing rather than focusing on small details like hair detailed anatomy shading you have to quickly get a point across try and finish the figure as much as you can we're indicating the head the torso the pelvis and its limbs for quick and loose gesture drawing look at people like walt stanfield and glenn philpoo and look at how they're prioritizing most of the feeling and the exaggeration of the poses rather than spending so much time on figuring out every single detail within the anatomy this is useful for the rough pass or the first passive hand-drawn animation or the first pass of storyboarding you're just trying to get an idea across rather than fully finishing it detail by detail you want to be able to get the idea of a pose quickly and clearly as possible things like animation and storyboarding is a fast-paced job and there are times where you have to quickly show an idea first before any work goes into it further like you would show the rough pass first to your directors to see if they have any opinions about the acting same with storyboarding before any of that clean up or tie down happens you sort of have an idea pass or something to work with like a skeleton the same thing goes with character design where you're exploring character poses things like acting things like how the character looks like when they're doing certain poses you want to be able to have decent gesture drawing skills to be able to push those ideas if you're someone that only favors really long time drawings or really just focusing on every single nook and cranny in the detail just do illustration figure invention skills are another drawing skills that you might want to have and this is kind of different from gesture drawing because the gesture drawing is more about capturing the overall feeling the gesture or the action of the pose the action line whereas figure invention is more about knowing how to construct something knowing how to construct the basic human form from scratch on the spot so these are things like having a knowledge of basic anatomy a knowledge on proportions average human proportions are good to start with and in being able to understand some basic mechanics of the human body how it moves why the body does certain things when you perform an action basic anatomy knowledge are things like the skeleton knowing where the ribcage is the pelvis the clavicle and then eventually the muscle groups you don't have to memorize every single part of the muscle but at least understand some of the major shapes of the muscles and how they work or what their functions are look at many different resources because a lot of them have different measurements for the human body and it's good to have a basic understanding of them so you have an idea of how to break down the human body in proportions if you need to for human mechanics i would say like look at videos where there are people doing very physical things and really go through those footage frame by frame to see where the driving force is in those actions now a skill like this is important for you know coming up with a figure quickly when you're animating when you're storyboarding at least you know how to quickly set up a human figure this is also an essential skill for character design where you have to come up with different character designs with different shapes different proportions and you have to build it from the ground up and then learning how to maintain those proportions and then having to draw different angles for character rotations something that is underestimated in the jobs of a character designer so being able to have figure invention skills are crucial in animation having decisive lines and strokes are important when it comes to drawing skills for animation another way of putting this is sort of like having confidence in your strokes in your lines and this is a skill that has to be practiced again and again time to time look at me i'm a very hairy and sketchy person i mean but seriously so you want to avoid having scratchy lines or hairy lines where you're just constantly making repeated small strokes because there's some sort of like fear element where whatever you're doing could just be simplified in one single stroke or maybe two you want to be more bold so when you make a stroke it's more deliberate it's choice it's being confident in those choice treat it as yolo you'll want to show that you're not indecisive or you're not confident in yourself when you make a stroke you just go with it you don't try to change it you don't try to fix it you make that single stroke you go with it this is useful for things like storyboarding animation to make those shorthands clear to make it readable less is more clarity and eventually clean up where you have to make clean lines when you're cleaning up your character animation for coloring for ink and paint but it's something that i tend to have to practice again and again it's like having pinpoint accuracy to your lines so if i were to practice this you know try practicing just making one side of a drawing just a single line just do one single stroke for a line try not to be super sketchy or try not to be super scratchy with your line work you make one single stroke and then move on to the next line and see how that goes it's one of those things where you really have to force yourself to be aware that you have scratchy habits when you're drawing like i did or i still do but you want to make your line strokes a bit more deliberate so you don't procrastinate too much on your choices when you're doing your strokes you can do them quickly and boldly or you can take your time and take it slow you can also play with line widths line thickness and see what kind of effects it can give to your drawings solid construction skills so this is basically the fundamentals when it comes to technical drawing skills or academic drawing skills knowing how to break down complex figures or subjects down into simpler shapes and primitives and knowing how to draw a solid form knowing how to make your drawings look like they have form they're in 3d and knowing how to construct them so if you look at the human skeleton for example it's very complex and there's a lot of different shapes you want to have the skills to be able to break down a complex figure like the skeleton and learning how to substitute those with simpler shapes that are easy to recreate and reconstruct so that when you do clean it up or add some more details at least you have the foundation or placeholder for that andrew loomis michael hampton bridgeman they're good at using basic primitives like spheres cubes cylinders and how to utilize that for something as complex as the human anatomy and learning how to stack them together so they have form they're in perspective they feel like they're made out of building blocks so i would recommend looking at those examples if you wanted to practice getting better at this i would say take your drawings really slow so after you do your rough drawing pass you do another pass where you're figuring out the attitudes and the overall appeal of the drawings and then you do another pass where you're just drawing building blocks making sure you're breaking down all your drawings into basic primitives so everything works technically everything fits and stacks up technically well in order to improve your technical draftsmanship you have to take your time break your subjects down into simpler shapes and just draw through them as if these objects were see-through think of shapes like cubes spheres cylinders things that feel solid and are easy to redraw and slightly modify them so there's a bit more asymmetry with them and they closely relate to shapes that resemble your subject this skill is useful for pretty much every drawing department for animation for animation 2d animation i mean it's for things like tie down and solid drawings for things like storyboarding you want to have cleaner drawings for the final version of your storyboards if you have to put it in an animatic for an executive screening for example for character design it's learning how to take those character designs and breaking them down into simpler shapes so other artists animators story artists can recreate those characters easily oh and also if you're animated you'll have to know how to animate the character while maintaining consistency in terms of form proportions and the overall construction of the character a basic understanding of perspective skills so what i mean is learning how to utilize vanishing points horizon lines one vanishing point two vanishing points learning how to draw solid objects and then making them match to vanishing points this skill is very important for things like layout or storyboarding or even visual development learn how to draw cubes and ellipses in perspective learn how to break that down into perspective if perspective from scratch is kind of hard for you to grasp this is what i would recommend take a photo like a cityscape or a hallway and then just draw on top of it trace where the line direction is going trace the corners trace every line that you see the basic lines of the walls i mean the angles and see if you can find a vanishing point from those lines and see if you can also find wherever the vanishing points meet that will be your horizon line and now that you've reversed engineered that go back and try and create something new using perspective lines draw the horizon line figure out your vanishing points whether it's one point or two point and then try making a scene using those and once you have a grasp of perspective the basic perspective stuff then you can shorthand and eyeball it for very rough passes so you can kind of get an idea down and then you can go back and fix it up with tie down skills while utilizing technical perspective skills lighting shadow basic shading skills so things like adding cast shadows adding the crest of a shadow learning how to deal with values learning how to do soft shading learning how to indicate heart shading how to deal with convincing lighting on solid figures so back when i was at sheridan college the first semester is just dealing with lines only no shading just lines just dealing with line weights because with good foundation whether it's lines and construction that can actually add to your shading so anything with shading is usually taught during the second semester when i was there when it comes to learning lighting and shading really just basic stuff like not exactly too rich in detail of the shading i would say just focus on just a few tones maybe like limit yourself to three tones first white gray and black and then see how you can utilize those values and how to showcase believable lighting with those values only i think it's good to have a basic understanding of it just so that it's there in your library personally when it comes to 2d animation i personally don't think that you need it but then there are some productions where you kind of need to implement some lighting information on your characters for the ink and paint department to sort of reference when it comes to storyboarding lighting and tone can add so much to a mood it can describe the scenario of the scene the atmosphere of the scene what time of the day the scene takes place where most of the focal points are for character design it helps describe the actual form of the character and how it should react to light and this skill is essential when it comes to visual development since that's basically like painting and knowing your colors and that's a whole other skill set layout and compositional skills knowing how to compose your drawings your pieces so that it's easier to look at it's clear to look at and it actually adds to your drawings so knowing how to use effective camera effective layout effective visual design that can actually emphasize some story element in your work using things like shape abstractly so maybe a character could do a pose that has really strong bold shapes or using the scenario of a scene and finding shapes that can you know you can make it work to your advantage like maybe push an audience's eye direction or use it to compose the framing of your shots for animation it's more about the shape language of the character animation because animation is also about design visual design and how the drawings look when they're animated rather than just having things moved there's also a sense of graphic design when it comes to establishing your poses the same thing with character design it's more about shape language that defined the character design for storyboarding and visual development and layout it's about how to use those shapes to sort of like strengthen the storytelling aspects of a piece or an illustration or a shot since animation is a medium that mostly deals with storytelling and visuals and art having strong composition helps add to that storytelling aspect using layout and compositional skills to strengthen an emotion is is actually a perk when it comes to animation look at paintings look at frames from movies and study them and why a certain shot was selected for a certain moment in the movie is it to establish the overall shot or is it to strengthen an emotion these are questions that you always have to ask yourself when you're looking or studying at other pieces the last one that i'll talk about is the one that's the most underestimated the one that's just walked over with this is something that people tend to forget every time they're looking for shortcuts and secret techniques when they're drawing or recreating something this is something that is missed out when people are trying to find systems to drawings whether it's utilizing certain shapes like the triangles whether it's using a certain shorthand or a shortcut to drawing and this is a skill that will allow you to replicate any other drawing style that you want and this skill is called observation so we're going to talk about observational skills good observation skills especially for animation or drawing means that you can see something you're pointing it out you're breaking it down really quickly and you know how to recreate it because you have some good observation skills that can capture things immediately understand why something like that is the way it is and then knowing how to replicate it and like i said a skill like this is useful for adapting to any different visual styles so there are animators who can draw in a cartoony style a realistic style an anime style and it could just be one single artist doing all of that the same thing goes with storyboarding you have to be able to adapt to different storyboarding styles storytelling sensibilities these are things that you need to adapt to but you can't just do that without observation so when it comes to drawing and observation skills a practice that i would recommend and this is one of the videos that i made earlier in my youtube channel is practice by doing blind contour sketching and it's a practice where you're drawing your subject a real life subject or a subject that you're looking at without looking at your drawing or your paper and this forces you to look at your subject without falling back into your usual drawing habits that you fall back to like techniques and systems that you might have learned this will train your high to end coordination whatever you're looking at your arm and hand responds to it and of course when you look back at your drawing it's a mess but the appeal to these works is that you're utilizing drawing choices that you would never consider making and it's learning how to avoid drawing bias so for animation imagine you're getting different character model sheets and they're all different styles you know how to replicate that style and draw in it same with storyboarding same with visual development by doing things like blind contour drawing you've also subconsciously added things to your mental and art library if you're trying to get a job in the animation industry or learn animation industry related jobs that require drawing i feel like these are the basic drawing skills that you might want to have before you get into animation work or drawing skills you might want to consider when learning these disciplines but remember each discipline has its own skill sets that you might want to learn or have like animation for example it adds acting mechanics mechanics and principles of animation and these are all much bigger worlds than just drawing alone same with storyboarding there is the storytelling aspect there's shot choices composition filmmaking cutting editing same with character design or prop design exploring different shapes experimenting with different approaches researching actual stuff so this stuff actually works in the animated world and for visual development or concept art you have to learn things like painting color theory a more advanced knowledge on values how to make materials look more convincing like i've said many times the act of learning how to draw is a lifetime and endless experience and we're always going to learn something new when we're learning how to draw some new subjects or learning how to adapt a different sensibility of drawing i mean the whole talk about drawing can go really deep i just wanted to make a video of what i felt were the most important drawing skills that you might want to have if you want to go into work for animation or just learning how to animate but here's the thing you can do those things side by side so you can learn how to animate while learn how to draw at the same time and sometimes those two worlds can help each other some people say that to have successful animation you have to have good drawing skills and you know people can make arguments about that but there's also a lot of elements where learning how to animate first can also add to your drawings abilities because maybe you're thinking about more animation friendly ways and drawing that you've learned from animating so yeah that's basically it so 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 through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 66,744

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

Id: Mm66LOQgz-o

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021