Sunday, April 11, 2010

Posing, Sketching, Planning

by Rad Sechrist
I came by Rad Sechrist's "How to" blog via 2nd year Michelle's blog as she posted about working on the storyboarding assignment. I'd recommend students have a look through Rad's (and Michelle's) blogs for some excellent animation cogitation and tips. Thanks Michelle.

Rad on sketching for storyboard artists

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I got a lot of inspiration when I viewed the Rad Sechrist posts on Alonso's Monotreme Dreams Blog. I borrowed The two volumes of "Drawn to Life" the collected Master classes in drawing for animators by Walt Stanchfield. 3rd year Cassie introduced them to me last year. I will buy these two volumes! It's enlightening and Walt's wonderful writing makes me think differently about my scrappy sketchbooks. I don't have great finished drawings in my sketchbooks and I don't like people seeing them because they won't get that the mess is me thinking on paper. I feel better after delving into these two volumes because it, as you know, focuses on capturing the essence of poses as a whole, modifying what you capture to get better, more extreme animation poses, creating opposing angles within a figure to balance and give it weight....and so much much more. And such wonderful life philosophies! Reading this approach to drawing for animation, has now altered the conception I have of drawing as a language, depicting the story Beat? within a pose. I feel like I own my drawing now and it's not yet another competition in a pretty competitive
world. I really love seeing fabulous finished drawings but it will be always a mistake to compare yourself negatively to someone else. Better to love what they do and learn from their strengths but still own what you do, thinking positively and critically about how to make your drawing nail the essence of key pose.
I think the life and sense in Walt's writings encourage you to really think about what your intentions are and really educates you on what it is to develop great drawing skills for animation. There's none of this good drawer, bad drawer, rather it's all "how can I improve my drawing so that it will really express the character's mood, feeling, situation. I really love the post below, such beautiful animation by the Calarts student. So inspiring, with such warmth and life and humour! Such wonderful thought and drawings. I think at this point in my education I'm really feeling the generosity, warmth, rich humanity of this artform and all the people that love it, animation. I'm really starting to feel I'm meeting animation as a generous-hearted Other/entity, like all great creative artforms are.