LIGHTBOX STREAM - MY APPROACH TO ANIMAL CHARACTER DESIGN #lightboxexpo

[Music] hey everybody aaron blaze and welcome to lightbox 2020. we are doing a special while we're doing our regular friday live stream but we're also including lightbox today and we are so excited about it unfortunately you know lightbox is a great event that we went to last year in person obviously this year because of the corona we couldn't do it and be there in person and so bobby chu who's in charge of uh lightbox and kind of the brain this is his whole brainchild um he came up with the idea of doing it online and so here we are this is our first talk we're doing several talks throughout the weekend um so today i am going to be giving you guys a lecture on my approach to doing animal character design so i'm really excited about that i'm really happy you guys are here today is friday september 11th um it's the day that we also remember all the folks that we lost 19 years ago and so let's do something good today let's put some beauty back into the world and honor them by doing that and hopefully you guys are going to learn something so i'm really excited about that um also we've got a whole bunch of really great special discounts and offers and all kind of got i got cat hair on my mouth i was petting the cat earlier um we've got all kinds of great uh discounts and special offers and all kinds of stuff um in honor of lightbox uh over on our website and so if you want to go over and get some special deals and discounts then go to dot creatureartteacher.com slash lbx 2020 i know that's a mouthful but just go to creatureartteacher.com lbx2020 and you're going to see all kinds of really cool stuff there nick spent a lot of time putting that page together and it came out pretty darn nice if i do see so myself it ain't quite nice it is great nice you know it's great nice and as usual i've got my son dustin here with me and uh he's gonna yeah he's gonna be helping work uh work through this whole thing and uh so um oh and also i wanna let you guys know that um we have prints available we got the print slide for that there we go we've got some really cool discount prints available for you guys if you want to go check that out uh over at the same place over at creatureart teacher.com lbx 2020. early so we got that and also i'm so excited so dustin and i have been working on this for the last four months and we have created the biggest course yet four years more than four months i know well the whole corona thing right but uh we've been working on this for quite a while and i think it's going to be around 35 hours of content probably but we uh it's my birds of prey course um we've we've been getting uh reply uh requests for this course for probably the last i don't know at least two or three years at least and uh and so i finally got around to making it and we kind of bit off more than we could chew i realized really quickly as we started making it that doing a whole course on birds of prey was probably too big because within birds of parade you've got eagles you've got hawks you've got falcons you've got acipiters you've got owls you've got vultures you know you've got all kinds of stuff kites um and so we tried to get as many of the you know representatives of each one of those as i could and so it turned into a really big course but i'm really happy with it we had a great time making it and it's finally available for pre-order so go on over and check that out and now what's the what is it it's just uh yeah it's just just go over to creatureart teacher.com it's going to be on the front page i couldn't remember if there was a if we had a backslash but uh anyway so that's that's that but without further ado i want to go ahead and jump in and uh talk to you guys about my approach to doing animal character design we don't have to switch it over oh i didn't know if you were switching it over but um as many of you i just wanted to for for those of you that are new coming in that don't know me my name is aaron blaze and i worked with walt disney feature animation for 21 years starting in 19 well actually for about 22 years because i interned as well starting in 1988 and uh and i left in 2010 so i was lucky enough to be around kind of during the the whole new renaissance time and uh you know we created beauty and the beast and aladdin the lion king pocahontas mulan you know all the good stuff from the 90s and i had to i had the wonderful opportunity to work on all those films and um as an animator as a supervising animator and also as a director and so over the years i have i've always been interested in animals as many of you know if not all of you know that i'm very much in love with drawing animals any kind of animal i just came out with the drawing birds of prey and for those of you that don't know i've also got lots of other how to draw animal courses on my website including horses bears big cats wolves coyotes foxes all kinds of stuff but anyway over the years i've had the opportunity to create some characters for disney as well so uh that are animal characters such as nala young nala from the lion king i was able to create her actually if you've got can you hear me the maquette dusting there we go gentlemen yes so there she is there's young mella on our little maquette and uh i was able to create her i created raja for aladdin and um and so over the years i've been able to kind of not come up with a formula because it's not a formula it's actually quite simple but i have a method of designing characters that are animals and so and it really just comes down to understanding your research doing your research understanding your anatomy and then being able to caricature that anatomy so it really does come down to filling your brain with knowledge first and then then applying design uh principles and that sort of thing so i'm going to talk about that today but anyway i want to back up from that so over the years i uh was able to you know back in the old days we didn't have just character designers all the time uh a lot of the times the the supervising animators when we were doing hand-drawn animation were responsible for designing the characters that they were going to animate as well and so and that's what we did so we would get together uh let's say on aladdin or on the lion king and each supervising animator would be designing for a few months leading up to actual production on the on the show their characters and then we would get together and have meetings and discuss them well back then back during aladdin and uh and the lion king there was no internet there was no video conferencing or anything like that and we were split up into two different studios we had a studio in florida where i was there was also the main headquarters the studio in los angeles and so we would often just fly i would spend weeks and weeks in california uh with my uh counterparts over there and we my colleagues and we would uh you know design our characters and so i'm gonna take you through some of these drawings that we did that i did while we were there and so that is about it i think and then we'll just go ahead and jump in i actually got a personal question uh about so you worked so you worked in the two separate studios for like single projects and things like that yes yeah how would you guys trans transfer uh footage over over to each other you guys just ship them and like wait a couple of days so that's that's a good question dustin so yeah so there's no internet you couldn't you couldn't send digital files there's no such thing as digital files back then and so uh so like if i if i was designing if i was doing some initial designs and i wasn't in california uh i would do and you'll see some of these sheets that i did and i'd number the drawings do um i don't know let's say 10 15 drawings and and they'd all have to be numbered and i would xerox them and then i would set up a fedex package and i'd send all the xeroxes to los angeles and i have to wait till the next day and then i would have a meeting on the phone with the directors and they would talk about number one or number three number three looks good but it has too big of a nose or number five is good and i'd have the drawings on my end corresponding and i could make adjustments and that's how we did that's how we did our meetings and then later on when we did the animation we would actually shoot our animation and put them on three quarter inch tape video tape a vhs is half inch tape we had bigger higher resolution tapes and we put all let's say i did a rough animation of a shot i shoot it i put it on tape then we'd pack it up in fedex send it out to california and then i'd have a meeting set up the next day where i could go over it with uh with the directors and if i had notes they'd have to go back reanimate reshoot it repackage it send it back out that's how we did it and it was uh it was amazing we got anything done there was there like a schedule of like when when the deadline is to get it all into yeah i want to ship it so we would try to get everything out on thursdays on thursday because approvals were on fridays so we tried to get everything out on thursday and uh and get it out to california the california colleagues they had the luxury of being able to work right up until friday right but we had to get everything out on thursday everything was shifted a day for us and then we'd get it out there and we'd have our meetings with the directors and hopefully you'd get your shot approved because then you'd hit quota and you could go on and do the next shot and back then was the shipping shipping price part of the budget oh yeah yeah oh yeah and we had i mean by the time we hit lion king we had video conferencing it was a very special thing not many people places had it and it was super expensive like crazy crazy expensive i'm sure it made things a whole lot easier oh yeah so um on the next oh how is it working with tab murphy i loved working with tab murphy uh um tab and i are actually close friends we haven't talked to each other in a long time but he and i we're just we're we're cut from the same cloth we're uh kindred spirits we really are he just loves the outdoors as much as i do and animals and so uh when we got together to write brother bear he wrote the first the first draft of the screenplay we just really had a great time like i said we really hit it off i would go out to california to meet with him and he lived in toluca lake and we would just get together at his place and kick back and and just write all day come up with well we wouldn't write but at that point we would kick around the story ideas and build the story and then he would go away and write what we came up with so working with tab murphy who was the original writer for a brother bear was absolutely wonderful it was just a fantastic experience i love the guy and we finally found each other on facebook and i've been he's he's always in montana or wyoming or banff up in the canadian rockies or whatever and i'm always jealous of you know the last time i saw him he was uh rafting down the uh the snake river in in uh in uh wyoming okay but lucky all right so i'm going to uh i'm going to lose your questions because i'm going to jump over to keynote and i want to just give a probably about a 20 minute lecture uh and so i'm gonna lose the ability to see your questions because keynote takes over every one of my monitors and i haven't figured out how to not have it do that so i'm just gonna do this really quick and then uh and then once we get through this initial presentation then i thought we could sit down and i could do some drawing with you and talk about you know the things i think about i've got some uh some photographs from my last trip that nick and i took together along with our other friends manny kraskow and some of our other friends we went to africa kenya specifically the masai mara even more specifically back in october and i got a lot of great photos from that trip and i thought it might be fun to use those photos as reference and plus i've got a lot of lion knowledge in my head already and we could do some uh new character design from that i thought it'd be kind of fun but uh uh let me go ahead and hit this all right dustin now we can switch over all right so hopefully it's working yeah well you'll be able to see on your computer so um so this is my approach to doing character design i don't think we need i'm not going to show up in the corner am i i don't need to be in the corner oh you don't need to be in corner yeah i don't know if that makes a difference but i just switched it over okay so my approach to doing animal character design um like i said it really boils down to uh just having knowledge just doing the research and so uh i want to talk about aladdin a little bit and some of the stuff we did there that was the first time that i was given a character i just come off of beauty and the beast and i was working under glenn keane who is the supervising animator of the beast and he was really generous and really gave me some beautiful really meaty shots uh whole sequences in the film that allowed me to really show my stuff to show what i was able to do and i really developed as an animator during that film i was young i was 23 years old 22 23 years old and um and so uh i was eager and i grew immensely as an artist and an animator doing during beauty and the beast and so as a result when i went on to aladdin they thought i was ready to have my own character it was a small role very small as a matter of fact but it was my own character and i was excited and i wanted to make it as great as i could make it and so that's the character of raja i was working with mark hen uh who was the other another florida animator who was probably our our best animator at the studio and marco he's got the big the big roles he had jasmine you know he did a lot of the princesses and so he did jasmine and aladdin and so they they wanted he and i to work together and so he and i quite often and from film to film did we had characters that were together on the film and so in aladdin it was raja and then he had jasmine and uh and there we are there's mark that's sitting at my desk and i've got a beautiful mullet and uh some of you have already heard me talk about this if you've been to my uh persistence of vision lectures then you've uh you've heard me talk about this a little bit so it might be a little bit of a repeat for you but for others this will be new but here we are we're sitting at my desk and i've still got that dustin right now is sitting at this desk that's in the photo isn't that weird that is weird yeah at this time you were about uh oh two years old i think but there i am i've got braces a mullet and a purple tank top and i knew it was photo day so i don't know why i did that but there it is and so there's our characters and so it was really just a great experience and so what i once again i want to stress is the amount of research i wanted to create a tiger one of the great things that i think disney pixar dreamworks uh blue sky i think one of the great things that they do um is that they they take the time well they create characters that are believable they create worlds that immerse you okay especially disney and pixar and the only way you can do that is to really immerse yourself into the study of what those characters are and if you're doing an animal character you really do need to understand that animal i don't care if you're doing spongebob squarepants go out and study sponges i don't care how broad it is that you're going to be you're going to learn things that you can bring to the table that you wouldn't have known otherwise and so in this case especially with the disney film where it's semi-real uh especially in the approach uh with raja and lion king i wanted to draw real tigers and so one day we brought in a tiger cub and there is a 23 year old me and about a hundred pounds ago drawing this little tiger cub and he kept falling asleep in my hand he was so cute and uh and the other funny note on this is that we had a uh our studio was also an attraction we worked in at the florida studio at mgm studios in disney world and so you can see in the background uh people on the other side of the glass we had about 10 000 people a day that would come through and watch us work and so we would just go about our normal day but we always had kind of living wallpaper we had people on the other side of the glass watching us it was uh it was a very bizarre experience but you got used to it but anyway i um i really wanted to understand these tigers and so we brought tigers into the studio like you can see here there's mark ken over on the left and alex cooper schmidt who uh animated the hyenas he also animated stitch he animated coda he animated khan uh so alex in the background there he's got a lot of credits under his belt as well we're good friends he looks so different from back then compared to where he looked well it's 25 years ago you know that's cute almost 30 years ago this is this is like 1991 i think we were doing this so this is 29 years ago yeah you were you were one year old but this photo was taken by and then you're 30 in next week right 30 next week yeah on wednesday so there you go how old this is but anyway um so go ahead by the way you're uh you're on screen because people have been asking to see to see your web your webcam oh okay okay gotcha and so so um so i you know we not only did we bring a tiger into the studio but i also went to tigers we had some big cat uh sanctuaries here in florida and i drove to them and got in the cage with the tigers and not the not the big adults but um there were uh there was one place that had these three cubs they weren't as small as the one that you just saw in this last image here they're about three times the size as that cub and i thought oh man this would be fun i got in and started playing with them and they tore me to shreds i walked out bleeding bitten pants ripped my shirt was ripped everything and they were you know 30 pound cubs so imagine a 400 pound adult what they could do and it's just it's just insane and so i wanted to be able to to get that understanding and get that strength into my characters and so um these are all like little grease pencil china marker drawings that i did of tigers and i just did this is just a drop in the bucket i did hundreds and hundreds of them wanting to understand their movement wanting to understand their anatomy of their musculature all of that because when you understand that once you get it then you can start to caricature and so this is what i started doing here now you get all the knowledge i got all you know i gathered up as much knowledge as i could about how to draw tigers and now you have to apply it to the movie that you're working on well the movie every movie has different art direction and so uh aladdin had a very specific uh uh art direction to it and it was very fluid uh very uh um yeah just very fluid and so i tried very hard to take this the uh the idea of what i had in my head about tigers which are big and angular and bulky and strong and then try to get this fluid design in them and uh and i just really really struggled and these first initial designs i just really the design was actually taking over the anatomy and i was ending up with drawings that just didn't work and i really really struggled with it and these were some early just very quick pen drawings that i was doing i struggled with it until one day and this is the other thing i want you to think about because you can you're always going to get inspiration when you least expect it and so one day i was walking down the street kind of troubled i didn't know what i was going to do with the design i was still struggling with it and there was this car parked on the side of the road and uh and as i walked by i looked at the hood ornament it was a jaguar and uh um oh by the way i wanted i want to mention the that fluid design i was talking about um in the design it was it was designed after a famous caricature artist by the name of al hirschfeld and al hirschfeld had this very fluid design if you look at the genies design in aladdin that's pure al hirschfeld okay and so i was trying to take that that knowledge of tigers and get that into an al hirschfeldian feel and i struggled with it until i was walking down the street and i saw this hood ornament i saw a jaguar and i just looked at the fluidity the grace and everything else but it also felt strong and so i took that as inspiration and i went back to the studio and then i started drawing and right after that it just started pouring out of me because i had this idea if you could look at the drawing at the top up there that feels very much like that that uh jaguar emblem you know and so and after that it just kind of flowed out of me and so i presented my designs to uh john musker and ron clements the directors and uh and it got approved and so that's how we came up with raja but it really did start i wouldn't have been able to do it had i not done that research and study of real tigers okay so like i said i don't care how broad how designy how pushed your designs are going to be if you're doing if you need to design a character whether it's an animal whether it's a different culture you need to do the research the more research you do the more material you have to pull from mentally you want to build that mental library you want to build that that mountain of knowledge in your brain so that it becomes second nature and you have a lot to pull from okay and i've been studying you know the real big cats and animals and that sort of thing for 30 years and i still go back and i you know if i'm studying if i'm designing a character i'll still go back and study even more so let's go ahead quick question from barbara green what do you mean by uh art direction is that a color scheme color scheme and style is that what it is it's all of that so the art direction is um it's all of it it's the color scheme it's the look of it's basically the look of the film so the the in in aladdin the the design the drawing of the film the art direction which is part of it not the color but the drawing of it if you look at the characters everything is very fluid you know everything has a very fluid design to it and then there's also a very specific color palette and there's a you know there's a lot of different things that go into the umbrella of art direction but just imagine it's whatever you see on the film that's the art direction okay so there you go i'm just going to jump to the next one there we go all right go ahead do it i i i have one more personal question um when it came to the image that of the drawing of raja and jasmine together have you usually done that to try to fit your character to absolutely other people's characters is that is that a normal technique among uh among the animators absolutely that's what we would do because you know we had the art direction of the film we knew what the film had to look like and so we would get together but there's let's say there's 10 different supervising animators each with a different character so we're all designing on our own but you want those characters to feel like they all belong in the same movie right right so we would get together and have meetings with each other to show our designs make sure we have the art director and the directors there and we're all talking about whether or not we're hitting the direction the art direction right and then we put our characters together and make sure that they feel right together as well and so there's a lot of work a lot of coordination a lot of communication that goes into that that's the key communication is always key especially in a studio environment like that you want to be communicating constantly you can't work in a vacuum it just doesn't work so lucky for me after i did raja which is a big cat the next movie for me was the lion king and so um once again mark hen who did jasmine was assigned to do young simba in the film and as we all know young simba has a little girlfriend named young nala and so i was able to design young nala and animate her once again it wasn't a huge role but it was a bigger role than raja it was something i was still you know 24 25 still developing as an animator and really excited to to kind of bite into this and uh and take it to the next level and because nala's role was somewhat small in the film i was able to not only do her but i also did a lot of young simba i was worked on on the two of them together i also did some adult simba oh yeah and i did some adult i did seraphina who's not his mother is that from sir yeah seraphina is not his mother like the whole bait the bath scene where they're getting getting licked when i animated that i just animated nala and her mother together i just didn't bother the same page tom bancroft of the if you guys know the bancroft brothers tom bancroft animated simba uh in those shots with me so tom and i actually worked together a lot on a lot of different shots when uh he did mooshu and i did the ancestors and mulan so we're always uh always working together on screen it's kind of fun we've co-starred together on several films on several films yes so um so the lion king so the lion king the same thing oh and here's the desk again dustin there we are so there i am about about 95 pounds ago working on the lion king don't you have that like big princess i do i do it's around here somewhere but um but anyway that's uh that's me working on the lion king and um uh and it's the same thing i was um i was assigned to do nala and the first thing i did was start looking at real lions and cubs and that sort of thing and uh uh here a matter of fact let me see if i can pull these up oh i can't do it right now because we're in presenter mode but i'll do it later um we actually brought uh lions to the studio in a much more formal way than we did with rajya because raja was just such a small role in the movie and it was just me i was animating the characters so they just brought this tiger in for one day for me but uh but with lion king um we actually as a studio uh here in florida we we paired up with the studio in california we're two separate studios making the same film uh but for us we got to hold all the artists together and we went to miami metro zoo for three days we all loaded up buses and went down to miami and spent three days at the metro zoo on the back side of the enclosures this is right after hurricane andrew so the zoo had just been just decimated torn apart and uh so we were kind of helping them get back on the map we're doing some publicity for them uh but anyway long story short we spent a lot of time looking at and drawing animals there and then here we brought in uh lions into the studio and these are my some of my first initial quick sketches of looking at lion cubs and it's one of the first things i notice and same thing with the tiger cub is even you know when you pet a puppy or a kitten they're soft and they're squishy a baby lion is just a solid muscle it's a baby but it's rock hard yep and it was the same thing when we brought the bear cubs in for brother bear it's like you want to play with them and they're just just take it and they're just little but they're little bundles of muscle and so that's what the lions were in so they were they were crazy but uh they were a lot of fun and as you can see even though these are quick sketches i was doing studies i wanted to understand the musculature and the bone structure and all of that uh 1993 here we go so these these were done 27 or 20 yeah 27 years ago and that was around two three years old yeah exactly this guy chewie this is about all he did so he just laid there and just hung out but he was a great model and he was kind of young you could see his mane is kind of scruffy and so he was still really lean and so you could see his bone structure pretty well underneath and so that really helped you know just doing little studies like in the lower right of how the hips and the back legs work and trying to understand that all of that um it was just an immense uh help to you know for when it came time to actually animate um i knew what i needed to do and so these are all really early sketches you know understand here he is you know drinking in the lower that lower drawing that quick sketch and just understanding how those arms and legs work i always so any four-legged animals i never because i have so much i have the comparative anatomy burned into my brain about where their their parts compared to our parts right i never call them front legs i always call them their arms uh so anyway so from that i was able to extrapolate and start creating a cartoon character but within this cartoon character there's a level of reality and so what that helps with is it creates believability that's why those characters when you watch the lion king you're not watching drawings on the screen you're watching in your mind you're engrossed into a great story with what feels like real lines on the screen and that's what we really tried to do and so um you know after drawing pass after drawing pass after drawing pass i was able to whittle this down and uh and get nala to the to where she looked like here this is this is the nullar that ended up on the screen and there's these look like cartoon characters but when you look at them look at the one where she's standing on all fours and she's looking away from us you can see all the research that i did in this you can see where her hips are you can see how her ankles not only do her it's her stance the way her legs are but the way her ankles come together you know that's how a lion stands those ankles come together in that way look at the shoulder blades the way that the one shoulder blade on the right is pushed up higher than the one on the left because in my mind she's got more weight on that shoulder and so these it's these types of of uh little nuances that make it feel like okay that's a lion but you you get to a point where you can put it down quickly and simply enough that it uh it it you strip away all the excess stuff that you don't need and you keep all the all the all the elements that say lion and or lion cub in this case and so then ultimately this was the little character that ended up on the screen right there and uh and i shared this on social media yesterday this is um i just thought this was really funny and i wanted to share it with you guys um and the top shot this is this the the scene that we were talking about earlier where nala is getting her bath that's serafina her mother giving her the bath and i animated the two of them throughout the sequence and then tom bancroft did simba in this shot and then uh and then last october uh nick and i like i was saying earlier we were in kenya and we're on a photographic safari in the masai mara and i photographed this mother giving the cubs a bath and it's just it's it's it's the lion king in real life i just thought it was really cool and uh but i couldn't have done that that animation up in the top had i not done the research and seen you know back then seen lions doing the real deal so i just thought that was kind of cool how you know it just history repeats itself so here we go and when it came to uh tom uh with sim simba and with you with nala how often were you guys sitting down and coordinating between your your guys's designs between the two because they look so similar together yeah well mark mark and i we designed our characters um well actually you can go back to the full screen here yeah mark and i we designed our characters together so mark was uh designing simba i was designing knowledge so often we would sit in a room together and draw and we'd be looking at each other's drawings and uh and mark was the lead mark up you mark has 15 more years of experience than i do and so he was a mentor to me as well and so i would follow his lead he would be designing uh simba and i would i was designing la nala to fit in the same world as simba not the other way around gotcha okay so anyway so that's kind of that's that's our general approach i mean it really does come down to um spending the time you know anytime i talk about character design which by the way um if you're interested in more character design i've got an entire course on character design at my website at creatureartteacher.com um and i talk about you know i get much more in depth into the principles and everything else but one of the the main things that i hit when i am talking about character design before you draw before you do anything as you do your research and it's two kinds of research you do the research into let's say if you're doing an animal like like a lion or a tiger you want to research those animals but then there's also the research of your character in the script understand those characters get to know them before you start to draw them so that you're drawing a personality you're not drawing a thing if that makes sense okay and that's that but i thought in this case we're going to have to we're just going to have to take a leap of faith because we are going to be doing some character designs from scratch and we don't really have a story per se um but we could maybe pull something from a story if we wanted to i guess yes i guess what's an animal story well let's let's go back to the we'll go back to the lions all right i want to pull up uh let me pull up oh look at this guy this is a this is a wild lion that's how close i was i shot this with my telephoto but i was only about 20 feet away from him sitting in the land rover and there's one thing that let me turn off my notifications i keep hearing this there's one thing that you constantly see with the lions and it's hundreds of flies on their faces always yes every the flies are everywhere the flies will drive you nuts for you there they just do um oh yeah let me pull this back up so yeah so s twitch question so now instead of our cousins yep pretty much a few if you know how if you know how prides work they could even be brother and sister but no let's not go there no no actually they are cousins because they're seraphina and there's sarabi yeah so they're cousins and uh martin berger is asking can we download this pres uh the presentation after the stream that would be very cool to be able to study the drawings yes you can you can watch this after the stream we'll have it up on on youtube and everywhere else so you'll definitely be able to check that out so um so lion for instance i know here's i've got let's pull up i got a really great shot of a lion in here this is one of the first lines we saw and he just posed so nice for us there he is look at this guy he's not quite he's not like a dominant adult yet but he was big who's a big dude look at it look at that guy oh just awesome beauty beauty beauty and there's the lioness they were hanging out together i got another question from roy ann discar descartes i think i pronounced that right hopefully i did uh we got thunder coming in so you're gonna hear some rain uh how do you know which features to exaggerate that's exactly right such as nala has having a big eyes and ears how do you translate that into making her look youthful well that's exactly what it is you know there are certain things that let me go let's okay the question is specifically how do you make it look youthful well there's certain there's certain things that are universal across the board whether it's a baby lion a baby bunny or a baby human that that translate to being young and this is a this is actually in my character design course let me show you this this is really interesting i've always thought it was interesting let's say we've got a normally a human if you do this so the radius of the circle you double that radius and you've got basically a head right there and that's basically an adult proportion now if you split that in half there's your eye line your eyes are usually one eye width apart and one eye width from the sides so there's there's your eyes i'm going to draw this very quick there's our nose right here underside of the nose like so let's cut so that's in half let's cut this in half there's our mouth line lips and chin so that and then here you can get we can get uh cheekbones the ears are usually between the eyes and the nose okay so that's very quickly um and then we can have more angle for a male on the jaw a little more rounded for female but in general these are these are adult proportions okay now youthful proportions are this let's draw that head again now with the radius coming down like that rather than doubling that radius you might have the chin down here right about here and a little chunkier more rounded now let's drop that eye line down here it's not halfway down it's down low like so and let's make those eyes a little bigger like so now that little you put a little nose in here and then a little mouth now all of a sudden we all we did was change proportions but now all of a sudden we've got a baby right that's all we've done and so it's the same thing with uh with um animals now we can do i can do this or i can do this let's change it up and go hey let's do this so it's kind of the same thing but that being said so with a with a lion you know you've got adult lion proportions but then we can do young lion proportions once again that that circle and those little cheeks coming off like so and in this case they've got a little snout big eyes like that and a little snout here they pull those cheeks out even more and then you have kind of bigger ears like so that's a caricature there's our little nala like so i've been drawing her in a while a little rusty a little rusty a little rusty so let me jump back to let me go back to our photos so look at look at the the proportion on the adult lions here's the adults right here you can see the proportion see how high the eye line is this the size of that muzzle the ear proportion now let's go back to one of the younger cubs look at this young well yeah this guy right here look at the size of the ears look how small the muzzle is a slightly bigger cranium in proportion these are all baby proportions and this isn't this is a this is a cub about the site the age of simba in the movie maybe a touch holder but there you go see if i've got some other ones in here manuel ramir ramirez uh asks how do i uh design a character whose personality is the total opposite of mine very often too much of myself goes into my characters well you have to really um you can still project yourself you can still if you you can be inspired by other character uh uh you can be i'm sorry i just saw a note from nick i got sidetracked you can be inspired by other other characters that have you've seen before there's people we know in our lives that might fit that character he doesn't you yes yes you definitely want to put yourself into it but you know we're not all evil darth vader's for instance but you can write darth vader you know there's times where you can feel the emotion that he's feeling and so you you just you have to project yourself into it i am your father yes so once again let's go to a lion so i'm gonna i want to draw what what you know a real lion is somewhat so lines tend to let me move it over here i'm going to go very quickly so real line they tend to i'm going to draw along the back we tend to walk with their head slightly down like so the head comes here and then comes down like that you have a break in the forehead that's one of the things that makes a cat a cat you know if you look at um this might be a repeat for some of you but if you look at this angle and then draw a forehead and draw this and the muzzle you know that's a cat if we draw this on top of the head forehead and then make these two lines parallel see how these two lines right here are different different directions but if you make these two lines parallel in the muzzle and what do you got you've got a dog so there's a dog and there's a cat that's basically the difference you just change the proportions even on a you know a dog that's got a short nose like a bulldog or something like that still a dog because these lines are parallel like that all right let me show you uh hit me the uh the wolf skull this one so once again these are things you discover these are things you discover by doing your research go to the full screen um so if you weren't able to see this if you're able to see the dog fully fully out here's the top of the the top plane of the head and then the top plane of that snout they're parallel you can see that this is a wolf skull all right okay now here's a big big boy there's a lion skull this is a lion right here here's the top plane of that head right there and then what happens look at that direction it comes down they're not parallel that comes down like that every cat is like that even your house cat so there's a let me have that leopard right there no to the right right there yeah the leopard is even more so so here's a leopard skull quite a bit smaller than that line huh but he comes out here's another example hand me the coyote right in the middle yep so now we're back to a canid canids are dogs now we're back to the canid here the smaller version of that wolf there's the the plane of the head and then the plane of the it's slightly down on this one but you can see it's basically the same okay so that's one little thing that you'll notice and it's just a basic thing but it's it's interesting how universal it is across the board from species to species youtube question i noticed that animal characters from animation often have a triangular like shape around the eyes is that the eye cavity is that to keep the eyes turned to the front not necessarily a triangular cap a shape but there is definitely a shape um let me show you what uh let me finish this and then i'll go into that because i am going to get into um uh i want to get into the eyes and expressions and how we bring a little bit of we anthropomorphise our characters there's certain elements that even if we're drawing realistic uh animals there are certain elements that we bring in that um that are distinctly human and it's the way we read emotion so here we got this cat coming in like this let's now here's another bit as i'm drawing remember i was talking about okay they're i'm talking about the the front arms the arms well here is the the front left arm of a lion walking along singing a song like so okay here's the forearm all those muscles that kind of wrap over the the uh there we go i'm just gonna wrap over towards the wrist we have the same muscles same muscle same kind of rhythm to the arm and then up here you've got triceps biceps are way on the inside so you don't really see it but you do have the deltoid right here the shoulder blade is in here shoulders right there just like we have triceps triceps is the back of the arm the muscles in the back of the arm have the same thing here so you'll learn right away that we all have the same parts we're just proportioned differently okay awesomeness came in right at the perfect time good explanation of the skull structure between dogs and cats yes thank you so here here's this muscle right here that comes from underneath the armpit and goes all the way up into the back and wraps into the back right here and goes into the fascia all this is all the fascia all this muscle right here this is your latissimus dorsi so that's all that muscle right here the latissimus the lats you know the muscles under the arms those are the muscles that you use in order to do pull-ups when you see a swimmers or big bodybuilders that's the muscle that when you see them turned around they're in the shape of a v those big those big muscles well they're very developed uh humans can develop them very well uh you'll see them developed on apes a lot you'll also see them developed a lot on big cats now why is that let's think let's talk about muscles and this is once again this all goes into research and once you start to understand the stuff that you're researching it's going to make its way into your designs especially real world scientific this kind of stuff it really does help so thinking about musculature thinking about the the latissimus dorsi why does a cat have or in wolves no actually not wolves they don't have it but cats do the developed latissimus dorsi well what happens if you have muscle right here and you can see the direction see the direction that i drew those striations in the muscle muscle contracts along those striations they pull in that's what all the muscle does is contract and relax and so if i want to pick something up um go to uh full screen if i want to do a curl if i want to do like dumbbells and curl or if i want to pick something up what has to contract in order to do that well it's my bicep muscle the bicep muscle has to contract in order to the tendon connects here and here and it pulls it up like so okay so it's the same thing with any muscle in the body if i want to close my hand then my muscles in my forehead a forearm and my hand contract in order to pull it in so those are my flexors and then if i want to open my hand in order to bring that that way these muscles have to contract up top here so these are my extensors what's happening i'm extending my fingers these are my extensors and my flexors okay so that's what's happening on the arm so now let's go to the latissimus what does a cat do when cats are are predators right and lions especially what do they do they're going to jump onto the back of a of a zebra and they're going to grab on and they're going to they're going to hold on right they're pulling in tight and so this muscle is what's enabling me to pull it back muscles and my latissimus muscle that's the that's the muscle that enables me to give someone a bear hug or enables me to pull up like this and so you're going to see them very very developed on a cat like that and are you also working them also when you're slowly bringing it bringing the dumbbell back down yeah you're relaxing you're slowly relaxing bringing it down and that's contracting the back yes that's it yep so here over there so there's that that shoulder blade in there and a lot of muscles connected in there and then our trapezius muscle comes in and connects into the shoulder blade here the neck muscle jarrod on twitter says learning so much my son five wants to be a wildlife artist and he's enamored as well thanks for the great demo and talk you are welcome so here i want to draw through and i'm bringing this back now a cat one of the things i've learned is once again we have all the same parts but they're proportioned differently so a cat they've got a hand except move that thumb up a little bit okay and shorten your fingers like this and so if we're looking on this side it's that dew claw we know you've heard of the dewclaw on a dog and on a cat well do claws your thumb and then here's the other fingers down here okay so there we go so here's the cat walking there and here from right here there's our pelvis this is another thing too that you're going to learn this is this area there's the skull that's rigid here's the vertebrae in the neck you can move your neck so that's flexible the vertebrae in the top part of the back between the shoulder blades those vertebrae are fused so that's rigid then all of a sudden you get just below that down to the top of the pelvis this area right here and that becomes flexible right there then you get to the pelvis rigid and then what do you have after that the tail flexible so you have this alternating rigid flexible rigid flexible rigid flexible um uh setup that go through the body now why is that important well because when it comes to posing your animated character you want to put them in a pose that's believable and if you understand the rigid and flexible areas of a cat let's say we're animating a tiger or a lion then you're going to be able to put it into a more realistic believable pose research is what comes in and helps so here the femur connects about there we come into the knee and here's a little bit that i learned from glenn keane i was having trouble uh drawing let me shoot this up a little bit i was having trouble getting the rhythm right on a dog's leg and he gave me this lesson it's not always true but as an artist it really helps think of uh think of a leg like this we got these two parts and then we got a foot okay there's our back leg so we've got a thigh we got the calf we've got the ankle right here we got the the metatarsals here then we got the foot all right if you think about this the femur and then the metatarsals right here if you keep them parallel your leg will always look right and what i what do i mean by that well here we're about it's kind of squatting but what if we want to stretch that leg well let's draw the femur here we'll draw the calf here's the knee now i want to keep this line parallel with the metatarsals right there so now if i draw on the outside we got the knee this is like that so you can draw that leg but what if we want to go there's the femur calf now let's draw that parallel keep it parallel with this line like that so now here's the leg coming down to the knee you've got the muscle on top so it's going to stretch there comes in you're going to have a little bunching of the skin in here and then here that comes in you got a bunching of the skin on here and then the foot see there so you can see if you go from one two three you can see that how that stretches by keeping this line and this line parallel all right so that's just another i'm gonna it's as i draw lines these are all little bit little tidbits of of information that i've learned over the years that make their way you know these are things we talked about when we were animating our characters and so um i learned this i was having this that's how i remember i was having trouble you never know where it's gonna manifest itself i was having trouble getting the rhythm right when i was drawing the beast drawing his legs and specifically it was in the uh there's something there that wasn't there before that whole song i animated that song and so he's squatting and he's wobbling and you know he's doing a lot of stuff and when i was animating i was struggling with i couldn't quite figure it out and so glenn sat me down and he gave me this little lesson right here about back legs and as soon as i learned that light bulbs went off you know like bulb light bulb lots of light bulbs went off and then i was able to animate that sequence okay so it's those and then but then you know later on when it came to drawing for the lion king i had that information as part of my my library and my brain and so i was able to translate that into cats as well okay so anyway there's that um so i'm going to finish this out right here real quick so anyway this is a real lion and then you know here's a this is a uh feet on her she as she's walking her foot is passing through like so there's the foot on the back side coming through now it can be a female like this or we could beef him up a little beef it up a little bit and then you can kind of throw a mane on the rain comes down along the belly a little fur on the on the elbows and basically here's your real line like so okay now all that knowledge we've got all that now how do we apply it how do we do it on time we got an oh we got about another half another half hour yeah that's a that's a good enough amount of time to uh start designing so now let's say we have we want to do a character that's uh let's do like a mufasa type character he's he's a he's a strong leader he's a fair leader he's a regal i don't want to do mufasa but that type of character but let's say you know mufasa was um let's do something that's a bit more designy so let's say it's an angular kind of design well what would we do how about like the physique of mufasa but scar mixed in there what's that how about like it makes a scar move faster together like the muscular structure of mufasa but like the scheme and the and this oh maybe yeah okay let's say let's say he's a uh he's a battle worn a battle worn uh lion battle warren he's like a viking but a lion and uh oh hit that subscribe but smash that bell from nick oh for youtube yeah so let's start with the body so the one thing i'd like to do i want him to be proud so what am i going to do i'm going to i want to find that gesture so the first thing i'm going to do is find that and uh for the bones being parallel is that true for other animals as well well first of all it's not true across the board even with the dogs and cats and everything you're gonna i look at my own dog and they don't stay parallel but when i do draw it that way it looks right and so that's that's how i keep it looking right um but yeah i mean that's that's pretty much across the board so here i want to go a bit more angular and i want him i want like this tough if you have only hard angles it's going to get boring because everything just you want to balance that's another thing with good design all this is going to be in my it's in my uh my um character design course but you want balance so for for a lot of uh hard angles there's a certain amount of smoothness that i want to have in there to count the counteracting and actually right off the bat that that silhouette is giving off like a very greek vibe exactly so i just scribbled something out really quick but i don't want see this to me feels really parallel and i don't like parallel parallel to me is boring parallel parallel so what if i do this here i've got this hard angle if i go like that now i've got something that feels kind of cool and i still want that body to be longer so now we're just i i always end up drawing bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and i draw right off the page will the lightbox event over the weekend uh um be streamed on facebook too uh for us it will be so here i want to i like having that that mouth come out like this now i want a nice strong jaw so here we have the mount the corners of the mouth come up but if we were to draw through the fur you know right here if you look at this you know the jaw comes way back here way back you know when a line opens its mouth you can see the corner of the mouth would be right about where the teeth are but where it actually hinges is way back here see that so you can get my head in there and crunch so that being said i want to make sure that i'm thinking about from an anatomy standpoint where that jaw is back here getting hinged so if i do want to open his mouth let's say like this it opens like this with the mouth way down here so that the jaw comes back like that like so seriously though if you like what you see please hit the subscribe button and ding the bell also if you hit like the like and share this helps us a lot as well nick is reminding me i get i get that's one of the reasons nick's there because i get into these drawings and i forget to say some of the other stuff that i need to say um but also oh did you learn most of the animal anatomy and art school before going uh to doing your own research no i i learned some in uh in art school i learned stuff when i was in high school i learned stuff when i was in middle school i've always been interested in animals but um it's an ongoing process and uh i'm still learning still learning so here i'm trying to come up with a nice angular thing here now one of the other things is this dark where are we uh right here let me go back to our lions you know those dark right here look at that look at that dark with the dark lips that's such a lion adult lion trait yeah adult male lion trait so i try to get that in there even just as a graphic icon as part of the design before i get anything else also you know you've got profile these cheekbones and you you do have this hollow right here in the cheeks and so i keep all of that even though i'm creating something that's designy i want to keep an under structure that's believable and i know that if the jawline's here there's a ton of muscle that comes up i mean look at this look at this ridge right here a cranial ridge right there that's where all that jaw muscle attaches so they can bite you better bite you better so so often my my designs start out like this it just scribbles i'm trying to find rhythm i'm trying to find something that's pleasing and i'm like i'm trying to draw right through the drawing i'm trying to sculpt it as steve young comments about a worn design so rocky balboa as a lion yes that's a great one that's pretty accurate believe it or not bigger than that so here let's give him some big big strong legs but now look at all of a sudden now his back end is getting come down here big strong pessimist that was like see how he's growing dustin draw an anime too um i used to growing up but not anymore nowadays i just do photography so here i'm drawing some nice big thick and right now i'm just drawing a silhouette thick pause let me pull this back even more we can go even bigger now here i can bring the main up like that that's kind of cool i was just going to give him this flat thing going like slicked back there's something about this that feels really good feels great it feels great nice how in the world were you already working at disney when you were only 23 i was out i got hired out of college so the elbow is down right around where the bottom of the belly would be so that provides us the ability to put big triceps shoulder blades all that in here and then all of this is going to be fur now i can create another thing too is i've got all this area of busyness underneath the body so i want to create some nice quiet line work coming through here like so don't be afraid in these first initial stages to get in there and whoops to get in there and whoops and then get in there and whoops just get in there whoops to just start just draw just just draw it what am i doing oh i'm grabbing to just whoopsie daisy whoops well i don't want the airbrush to eraser it's all right to just go whoopsie whoops whoopsie whoops on the wrong thing i made a bit of a boo-boo there laddie so right here there's our i'm going to draw our pelvis right there there's a break there and i want this leg to come back now the knee is going to be right about there actually i'll bring it down more right about in here nice white line worky he's great nice and now that notice how i've pushed the the the length of the ankle i've pushed it shorter or i've shortened it for effect i love watching you draw and learning from you i've only recently started practicing art again and i've already improved so much thank you you are welcome so let's bring him over here we go now we can draw that look at that we get this nice gesture right through them like so and there's this you know the skin between the thigh and the belly that stretches and and goes right into the knee that's really nice when you come to draw it because it gives you this ability to straighten this right out into the into the body so look at this mess we got but we've got something that i think feels pretty good i'm gonna push that eye up that always tends to look a little more regal when you do that let's make him squint like clint like clint yeah squit like clint clint eastwood i'm giving him a little bit of a you know that cartilage the cartilage that goes from the nasal opening tends to push out a little bit i'm pushing it out a little extra just to give him a little bit of a look kind of this roman kind of look my daughter is genui genuinely mad because she's doing virtual lessons right now and can't draw lines with me so now now you know we've spent the time kind of working this out now i can go in and go okay let's take it to the next level let's start tying it down a little bit i still i'm going to be kind of free with it but i'm going to get a little more tied down warren on youtube says so what was it like when walt disney came to see you in college your bastard it felt pretty fantastic it was fantastic hey so here i'm gonna just tie it down just a little bit picture now oh disney walked up to me said would you like a job there pally [Laughter] can't you like your job so i want to give a bigger just a slightly bigger nostril how do you know if stretching proportions is going too far yeah i quite often i don't go far enough i had i've taught myself i don't have the time to do it here but i've taught myself to push actually beyond what i think the uh beyond what it should be you can always come back there we go right here i'm gonna want it to fit there like that there's that there's the muzzle coming a bit late to the stream how come we're getting it today today's friday today's friday today's friday but we do streams on friday there's the forehead that feeds into fur there and i know if we let's look at the fur on a real lion there's a lot of different patterns but there are similarities from lion to lion you can see that every lion has this you can't see the ears see how there's there's a bunch of fur and it tends to be a little bit more orange in front of the ears right here you get this like these side burns right here and then you've got the fur of the neck so that's what i want to do here i want to get this and that's what i was indicating right here are these sideburns by the way um the live streams over the weekend are are both those at one 1pm as well i've got one with uh manny carascao that's going to be at um noon eastern time for me it'll be nine nine am for those on the west coast there's the ear there and then uh this comes up here and then i'm going to be doing another one at starting at 4 30 this is all on sunday but the the one on saturday tomorrow will be at one o'clock uh eastern time on saturday will be at 4 30 eastern so saturday will be one and then sunday's with manny and then the second one do one at noon to 1 30 or to one o'clock and one noon to 1 30. uh oh no it's new for them anyway yes youtube question what did you have in your animation portfolio to show disney to get hired well i didn't know animation to see this is a different time i i was trained as an illustrator and disney was looking to see if they could train non-animation artists how to animate so i just put together a portfolio of figure drawings human figure and animal drawings and i was judged on that and from that they decided that they would give me a chance and so i went in and i had a six-week internship with disney where i trained under glenn keane he took me under his wing and taught me for six weeks how to enemy and then at the end of that six weeks i was hired so here now as i go through i'm stylizing it you can see i'm going through kind of quickly but i'm drawing real parts i know i have the knowledge of the wrist the bones of the wrist the way the foot comes down those the the bones of the hand that come down through here what is an indication that there's a problem in uh in the art direction if there's a problem with the art direction well um indicate what would indicate that if there's a bad art director well i mean you i haven't really done a film where i had bad art direction so you you work on the art direction until it's working right now there's times where the art direction is difficult you know when we were doing uh mulan the art direction the character design on on mulan the characters were actually very flat and so it was hard to turn them in space we had to figure out how we were going to do that so there's our feet right there so i've drawn his front leg somewhat thick but wait here i'm not liking this i kind of want this nice big mane to come down there we go now i hit something that i feel is good oh man that's right that's good see you make adjustments along the way now i got this nice big look at this big area of chest and fur and hair and that's contrasted by these thin the thin lower part thin hips strong legs and that kind of mimics you know if we if we drew a cartoon human you could have a guy like so that's looking off to the right hello he's looking off over here and if we wanted to do you could do like a big big muscular guy like so it kind of reminds me of um what was that what was the uh that was always the bad guy in popeye's pluto pluto that's it yeah so really big and then you got his hands on his hips and then you can contrast it with oops let me shrink them up and i'm always drawing too big so yeah big see big shapes right here like this down to so you know trying drawing real graphic you want to have like graphic shapes working off of each other contrast similarity when things are even that's the that's the kiss of death for a design so you want your your designs to have unevenness to them you know there's a contrast between the upper body and the lower body you know if i if i draw his head you know a a character that looks like this you know maybe his eyes are here and his nose is here and let's see he's got a big chin that to me is more interesting than if i drew this and made him more even more like what a real person would look like her smaller chin eyes in the middle of the head what would you recommend as the best course to buy from your website that covers uh caricaturing and exaggerating animals i feel like i can draw animals realistically quite well but as soon as i try to exaggerate or cartoonify them i fail well i go through a little bit of that in my in my animal courses um but also my character design course i hit that so here i'm smoothing this out so there you know we basically got down to what a body that i think works pretty well okay uh this week i'm doing four streams for lightbox so check it out it's gonna be at creatureartteacher.com lbx2020 for the schedule just want to remind you guys of that so there we are so there's you know we did really quickly in about 20 minutes uh 25 minutes or so and also notice when it you know when i draw a line up from the knee it goes right to the break in that where that pelvis is okay that's another thing i learned these are different things you'll learn along the way i'm trying to keep that flow through the body this character should be voiced by joe swanson from family guy whoever calls it he's the one that's in the wheelchair hey look at me i'm a lion all right so there's our lion now there's a this is a general body proportion that we've got and we can definitely if i wanted to we could go okay now that we got kind of an idea in our head see this is where once i start getting something that i like then you can start let's do some gestures let's see uppercut oh yeah for cartoony animals um uh uh paula guava says uh if you want to learn how to draw cartoon animals i recommend drawing cartoon animals with tim hodge yeah i bought the course and it's really amazing so there you go for for caricaturing and cartooning just get the tim hodge course so here i'm having you know you can have this big head coming in like so here maybe i'll bring the foot up here the other one back did everybody ask the uh freelance question nope is it possible to get uh freelance work as a character designer absolutely i did i've done tons of freelance work as a character designer so here once in a while see here i'm doing this a gesture there see based on this guy what'd you say dustin i was saying don't you still do some some freelancing characters not so much anymore now the the business our educational business has really taken over that's true so there now once you get a design in your head then you can start doing these fun little gestures look at that get something really fluid put his male parts in there maybe not mine on pretty so now if i want to tie that down see i tried it whenever i'm drawing uh my characters i start with a gesture like this so that i can then go in oops and then go in and start tying it down see there i can still do it keep it quick at first see there so i'll go in and i'll do lots and lots of drawings like this and what i'll do is i'll discover as i do this i'm going to discover what works and what doesn't see he's got his pawn hyena so so i'll try to do as many body drawings and attitudes as i can first and then once i get kind of a handle on that look how quickly i'm going i'm trying really hard first of all i'm enabled to do this through the research first you do it enough it's become second second nature free mode activated and then and then once i start getting a handle on that then i'll go in and start doing expressions youtube question do you have a course on how to draw the same character and movement and different views i can't do a model sheet if my life depended on it i do i do cover model sheets in my character design course yes but once again you can do it if you spend enough time drawing that character eventually that character will become real and you'll be able to see it from any angle in your head okay but you need to you need to to spend enough time with it that's the key there we go so now maybe let's draw hey deadlift is here take that left says the one on the upper left is so regal it does look very regal so now let's do some expressions so i liked i liked having that i liked having that kind of knot part in the nose now i was talking about how i would talk about a brown now in humans we've become very used to seeing the brow and how that relates to expression and so i tend to put a brow on my animal characters because it helps with attitude already i've even drawn the eyes in but you can see in this drawing you can you can already kind of see the attitude that's expression especially on especially on see just drawing through and i'll do i'll do hundreds of drawings like this as i'm designing characters there's a big mane way out there big man is there any expressions you could find particularly difficult to draw uh yeah i mean there uh i try to feel the expression as i'm drawing i don't i don't use mirrors or anything like that like some people think we do as animators most animators i know don't use mirrors that's just kind of uh some do some some don't most all the animators i know they feel it glenn keane when i worked with glenn he never used a mirror he just always tell me feel the expression where did snow bear start this way yes absolutely actually snowbear started let me show you let's go back to my keynote and snowbear here's some bear stuff um it started out with me drawing real real polar bears this is stuff i was doing in procreate i was sketching on my ipad and procreate and just i was sitting at night uh i couldn't go to the arctic to draw real bears so i would uh download uh um documentaries on polar bears i'm i'm kind of against just pulling down photographs off of google i want to see the animals moving i want to see them in different dimensions if i can't see them in person then i'll watch video that's my preferred mode of study and so i went through and i did a lot of drawings like this of real polar bears i already had you know i'd already directed uh brother bear so i already had a lot of bare knowledge in my head but then then i went and i wanted to do something uh just a little bit more realistic and so i did this bear walking and i really focused on getting the musculature getting the head bob back and forth just wanting to understand that bear more and more once i understood the bear from a realistic standpoint through doing this then i started designing and it's and then like i was saying earlier i i'd start to whittle down and simplify but still hold on to the things that say bear or to say you know uh a polar bear more specifically and that's what i was doing here and so uh as a matter of fact here look at this so um here is a bear but this is a grizzly bear look at the size of this skull and a grizzly bear has that big head on top and a forehead right here and then there's snout snout and a snout yeah now here is a polar bear here's a difference bigger big head on top it is bigger but look at the forehead it's pretty much non-existent it's just kind of a slope that goes into the so their head is much smoother on top that's very much a polar bear trait and so you can see that i kind of that's what i put into the designs look at the profile there second from the right you know how how there's really not much of a forehead at all well that's just off of you know learning from that skull and watching the videos of what makes a polar bear a polar bear and then from there you know that i started to just storyboard him and his world and just get a sense of of who he is i then went in and thumb thumbnailed out some ideas for of him uh building the snowman or snow bear i should say and through doing that it forces me to draw him in positions and angles that maybe i hadn't done before but i'm still keeping that animal uh the anatomy knowledge that that i've just learned and then here he is in his world and so i can take all of that and now i start to apply it to the story and we've got something that that plays right you know and so then i would also do here's a little section here where he's looking at the stars just little little test pieces of animation now that would do little character drawings here he is running in some of you guys have probably seen this but this is you know trying to come up with attitude and you can see his design kind of changed i ended up giving him more forehead and i'd probably go back and adjust that when i do the real film so i can get them back on model but anyway so that's that's where that ended up uh do you ever draw anthropomorphic animals if so how much do you differ from the standard animal approach yes i do draw anthropomorphic that's a that's a good idea let's say we wanted to do a lion now that's more human let's say we have a world of lines like like robin hood so we might have a lion like robin hood that's a bit more designy like so but here what i would do i would still keep my knowledge of real world lions and just apply it to a much more anthropomorphic character so let's say we have this not doing very well with it but we have this anthropomorphic lion much more designy and he's standing now i would think of a human but now i'm going to give him a longer maybe a longer torso i still want it to feel lion like do it vibe he's getting right now sher khan oh yeah bravo bravo but here i'm and i'm drawing the same types of rhythms you know even even like tigger tigger's a really cartoon character but there's real tiger in there there's that i know the shoulders are pushed forward there see so here i can take a real a hand and a cat and kind of blend the two together because i know the dew claws here and i know that they've just got shortened versions of our own fingers look at that so now we've got a cat hand that's a bit more pushed and so that's you know one of the great scenes in in in the lion king that andreas deja who animated scar um was when he had the mouse and the mouse was running around in his hand and that paw was so cat-like but so human at the same time so just understanding that anatomy you can come in and create something really quickly that's got you know a bit more cartoonist to it that's what they did so well in zootopia right maybe he has a little bit of a mane hey guys how's it going did you give him a mullet the line was a mullet main jab in the front party in the back so there you go and once again i want to remind you if you're just come in um we've got a lot more stuff over at creatureartteacher.com got our our prints there and all kinds of stuff my course on how to draw birds of prey has just come out for a pre-order so we got that here i'm going to bring that brow over a little bit more see look at there so once again this is a much more cartoony lion than the other one right but actually i'm going to do this i want to get a little bit more flow maybe pull it back this way and give it more on this side because it's on his back oh no maybe yeah maybe not i'll just pull it out here there we go that starts to feel good so now we've got if we look at the basic shape it all kind of flows in see there got this nice flow to it so it's all about finding taking that knowledge once again i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap this up here i'm actually about 10 minutes over taking that knowledge and adjusting it to the needs that you have for whatever it is that you're you're designing for in this case we're designing lions two different art directions right here in about 30 minutes we did so once again let me so this might be something like uh what was it what's the dreamworks one from the zoo when they break away from the zoo madagascar ben stiller just to move and move it yeah look how designy that was but that was pure lion ben stiller's character bit off subject but how was the situation with the covent there that is off subject completely just like it is around the rest of the world we were streaming live lightbox and not intending it exactly so don't feel like you have to ask every question dustin by the way uh nick says that uh we are we're until three o'clock oh we're on till three oh okay good i couldn't remember i thought we were an hour and a half today so we're good yeah so we got so we've got another 20 minutes so here and i find the more designy characters are kind of fun because i get to play with shape a little bit more so look at this guy just let that but still i'm still thinking about a cheekbone in here you know that jaw comes back like so don't think about that underneath here's the brow maybe i'll bring that that mean up just a little bit more that way i won't have a tangent with that ear sticking up there maybe give them a little snarl and it says this uh kind of feels like king john yeah that was the original idea i'm giving him a bigger mane king john didn't really have a mane at all pulling that shoulder in well but king john was the um the king of the very end right what was it oh i can't remember the i think it was uh it was king george that was a mummy yeah was that the one you were thinking of there draw those paws in like so you can get into any kind of little position you want uh who's your favorite robin hood character uh probably robin hood that was milk call just so good i always like love the little john yeah the bear i like him too the rooster is great the narrator oh yeah also the the sheriff youtube question do you study everything about the bear like under structure or do you just study the bare necessities i just threw up a little bit yeah when it comes to robinhood probably one of my favorites of voice hector's wife from back then is uh the sheriff oh yeah he also is um was it napoleon and arrested cats wait a minute i'm the leader i'm the one that says when we go there that was prince john and king richard prince john that's what it was not king john prince john thank you thank you for correcting us on the stuff that we should know right but here i'm going i'm pushing straight against curves and straight against curve another little design element oh that's awesome christina rossignon says just pre-order birds of prey huzzah what's up ready to convert what i learned to make pokemon there you go looking forward to seeing what you create i had a definite matthew mcconaughey twin to twink to it looking to see what you could look like all right all right looking forward to it all right so there you go once again trying to find that fluidity and then maybe we go i know i have to do hundreds of versions of a design before choosing one but when i find something that works fine at the second drawing then i have no more ideas and it feels awkward to keep keep looking like i'm trying stuff just for the sake of trying is this feeling normal yes it's just you falling in love with your first sketch draw over and force yourself force yourself to try something different different proportions but once again when you understand who the character is if you take the time to do that too then that a lot whoops i don't wanna i don't want to mess up that silhouette then that will also help which i'm sure you're doing i'm not kind of don't want to be condescending but it's it's it's definitely one of those things where the more you do it the the better you'll get at it hi guys so here's one where i'm like like i said i'm uh someone asked how far is it you know how far do you go before it's pushed too far and here i'm i'm pushing it as far as i possibly can right there hi guys i hope you are well i am really learning a lot today so thank you uh when designing an animal character but as a human personality like the characters in zootopia and robin hood do you just concentrate on the animal anatomy or do you need to combine it with the knowledge of human anatomy you do you have to combine it but that's that's where that's where it comes down to comparative anatomy we all have the same parts as a lion has the same parts as we i have the same parts of as a lion or in the case of zootopia i have the same parts as a water buffalo or a giraffe and it's understanding how those parts relate to each other in order to hit the posing that becomes believable for anthropomorphic characters okay so like in this picture right here this lion um you know here because the way he's standing he has arms right but if i'm but these are front paws you know i'm taking everything that's a lion and i'm kind of converting it to a human the way a human would stand but as a lion okay with lion proportions and i'm able to do that because i understand the way they translate what part is which okay did disney let you and the other animators keep their original animation after the film was released in theaters no that was all it's all disney property i was uh at the end of every movie they did allow us to have two scenes two rough shots that we animated as long as they weren't like major shots in the film that they would use later for promotion um then we were able to do that so i've got several shots from the lion king and beauty and the beast and that sort of thing that i've got in my closet over here so there we go so we've got about 10 minutes and uh man i hate this one as i as i'm looking at it now but that's the thing you do like i'd push this jaw way out pull this down here you draw and it's all about adjustment so you make adjustments so now see look at this look at the original there look how rough that looked but then i went in and i added some stuff to it there's that now let's knock this back see if we can do this knock this back a little bit so we're going from having done this real lion uh where was it this one there it is look at the gesture there that guy this these all feel really kind of realistic now don't they compared to how far we pushed it and we thought it was this this is the thing that's one of the things i want you to learn is as we look at this this felt pushed to me 30 minutes ago but now after doing this guy now the other lion looks real and that's the thing your perception to the person that was asking earlier about after you do two or three designs you don't know what to do you just got gotta force yourself to keep drawing because you will discover as you look back on what you did your your your ideas will grow and morph so i'm just going to tie this one down a little bit more i like doing those big oh nostrils it's ladies night it's friday man it's friday the banter is awesomely entertaining as always but what but what no singing i just started singing it's getting a little cool in the game one of the founding members of cool in the game passed away the other day so i've had cool in the game in my brain that's the band of one of the bands of my childhood did they do any songs i know oh yes it's ladies night oh that was them yeah [Music] yes all right so now i want to get in wow look at that blew it right up i want to get in here and now when i go i'm going to go a little more detailed and i like drawing the pupil the pupil just gives it a little more character it needs more cowbell you gotta give a little more cowbell cowbell just a little bit right there actually clark says recently got my very first on-screen tablet and it's been fantastic awesome so here's another thing i want to point out i'm doing unevenness throughout the body proportions the big head going down through the body but also in the face i try to push unevenness notice how i've got a big area of detail a small area of detail with the eyes everything's really kind of compressed together in this area where i want i want everything to draw the eye in but then you get to the snout and the cheeks and i open it up to less detail out here meanwhile but to the rest of the body take a little notch out of his ear he's a fighter he's a fighter he's a fighter he he's wicked smack smack so here this would be kind of my final what i would consider my final tie down i was doing some designs for a studio which do you feel um is more natural to draw on a cintiq or an ipad uh cintiq is a little bit more for me i like drawing big and i'm so used to drawing big on my cintiq when i go to an ipad i feel like i'm drawing on a postage stamp posted stamp yeah i have a question got any advice for drawing feline eyes yes cats all look like they have mascara on and getting that dark around the eyes is very important i'm going to try something here real quick what if we pulled that mane out a little bit so what's the next big project snow bear i got to get snow bear done now that we got the birds of prey course done we're going to jump over and get some work going on snow bear yeah see i like i like surrounding that face right here and uh yeah that feels better we got a nice surrounding the face with the mane feels better to me so you just make little adjustments adjustments i just said adjustments adjustments as you go you've got to set up some adjustments make sure it's not in a lift oh don't oh i was going to say it's going to be a skull so there we go so once again oops oh feline eyes so you know a cat has an eye like so which is around a round eye but they have a lid upper lid just like we do corner of the eye lower lid or into the eye now some cats you know like you know have more of a slit than other cats now that eyelid is going to cast a shadow across the eye but we've got dark dark dick you can't date around the eye it comes down to this duct area they have eyelashes too a lot of cats and then here we're going to erase this out now that you understand what's under there this is all kind of like an overhang to provide shade for the eyes it usually comes back like so and then there's like this teardrop mark above the eye and this guy would be up here if you look at real lions let me show you a real lion see that little teardrop let me go back to the face more of a portrait there see that teardrop mark right above the eye a lot of cats have that so that's that's key so we've got these big dark mascara looking markings let me go back like this see there and see how you that it overhangs the eye see how much it overhang look at the eyelashes on the other side see those eyelashes sticking out yeah so here i'm actually not even overlapping it enough not even doing it enough so this week i'm doing three more streams tomorrow i'm going to be doing four-legged locomotion in animation then sunday we got two more we're going to be talking about uh with manny karascow and expedition art we're going to get together and talk about wildlife and yellowstone and some of our experiences there and then i'm going to be going in and talking about photographic textures in character uh doing character designs so there's that there's that teardrop coming off and if you want you could go hey let's uh let's reflect the little sky it came for aaron's heart but was unprepared for dustin's amazing accent and singing makes me laugh you're very welcome there lassie a little reflection right here okay i have a question maybe here we get a little bit of reflection in the the darkness of the eye right there and then here it's going to get really kind of hot ready for another question yep uh once you have nailed down the approved character how difficult is it to maintain the look of the character in different poses by then uh so there's our eye right there um by by the time you got your character design um finished uh it's not hard at all because you've drawn that character a hundred times inside now and then as we go as we're creating the movies um every scene that we do that has maybe prominent portrays that character in a prominent way well xerox those poses or print them out in this case because we're not doing it on paper anymore um and then we put those up and we save them as reference and so by the end of the movie you've got a whole bunch of designs or drawings of that character we use them as reference for other animators that might be animating that character and you know that character inside and out by that point i always say you know when when i finish a movie i've drawn that character just enough at the end of the movie that i'm ready to animate the movie but it's always too late in a movie what if one character has extremely exaggerated features and another more close to reality that might translate to them that would be an example for those well let's see exactly that would be an example of bad art art direction for me and who decides how to exaggerate a group of characters features should be in uh to be unified for a movie that's the director and the art director but you don't see you don't see something that's realistic and then something that's super cartoony unless it's that's a story point for the design otherwise it's just bad design one of the few i think that pulls it off is spider-verse because each of the spikes yeah but they're meant to be they literally are meant to be three different art directed worlds exactly or four or five or whatever it was exactly and they were able to merge them all together so seamlessly yeah but that was the that was the whole point of it was that they looked nothing away right but i think that's the kind the kind of point that they're going to ask of like trying to mix different features together like different designs together for a single move in that kind of style we're done so there you go there's our there's our pushed uh lion going from well let's just turn it off let's back up so here's our here's a real lion right here right there he is and taking uh this information you know this would be my research and understanding the character from a writing standpoint who the character is in the movie i would then go in and start designing and in these first few i'm where i am here we are and there there's that first one that we did which felt really kind of designed and this is i mean compared to a real lion this is somewhat of a you know this is something that would sit in the lion king world i think maybe maybe this is even a little too real we'd have to take another pass of pushing it back a little bit you know but you go from this which felt designy at the time like i said and then when i get that get to that point then i started playing with gestures and trying to come up with uh different poses and really explore those proportions and have fun with it but then we jumped ahead and we went okay well let's push it even more and we ended up with something like this but it all stems from understanding the real world character first right do that research i don't care like i said i don't care if you're animating if you do the research you're going to bring stuff to the table that you never thought of before and and it'll be believable it'll be you're blending real world with the fantasy and you're creating something that can sit on its own and you can immerse your audience into it so it's really cool so once again i want to remind you guys go on over to creatureartteacher.com lbx lbx yeah oh yeah there's lbx yeah uh 2020 and uh um you'll have our our entire schedule there and uh and a whole bunch of deals uh all the really cool deals that we're giving you including the posters as well we've got some great posters that uh some good images that i'm pretty happy with i've been wanting to share with people so uh do you have those those uh yeah the slides i had the print slide yeah that one okay so the prints yeah we got that and uh so go on over check that out and then finally today is our first day that we have our how to draw birds of prey course uh where you can order it in pre-order we're going to be getting it out in the next couple of weeks but you can get it in pre-order now for 50 off it'll save you a bunch of money a bunch of money saves you 30 bucks that's right a bunch of money and uh so anyway i hope you guys learned something today i really enjoy kind of uh taking my experiences of the last 30 years and and boiling them down and sharing them with you guys and hopefully you can take some information away from that and run with it and take it to the next generation that's always been my my goal so i hope you enjoyed it uh i'll see you guys again tomorrow and so uh have a great night have a fun friday stay safe put some beauty back into the world and i will see you tomorrow at 1pm eastern hey guys thank you guys so much for watching glad you guys enjoyed this stream and if any of you guys are interested in wildlife photography you can check out my instagram at dustin underscore blaze if you haven't checked that out already and also a creature art teacher i got my photo reference packs out out there for some river otters alligators and a couple of florida birds so and so forth you go over there and see those and i will see you guys over this weekend and further into this lightbox event and until then cowboy bebop ron own right home

Channel: The Art of Aaron Blaise

Views: 39,157

Rating: 4.9824142 out of 5

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Id: TPViSgcXnVE

Length: 126min 21sec (7581 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020