Wednesday 19 March 2014

Life Drawing in Animation: Emotion

This is another aspect that's important when animating a character, their poses. A common occurrence in animation, normally when you're drawing extremes, is that your character will have to do many poses, whether it be a squash/stretch pose, an anticipation pose, one that establishes mood through body language, or even more subtle facial/bodily gestures. To pull off a dynamic pose, you would have to know the common principles of anatomy to pull it off.

For example, if you were to draw a happy character pointing triumphantly at the air; it may sound easy because you can already visualise it, but you would have to stop and consider the how it could be pulled off, and that's when you think back to life-drawing. Think about the drawing as a 3-D object, not to mention the angle you're viewing the pose from, and the shape. If it's being viewed, say, from a high angle, and the focus is on the character's left side, then you should think about how to establish that, and fore-shortening would be a solution. The right side of the body would face away from the camera, and right leg would be pointing in that direction, so in order to get a sense of depth, the left side of the body would be drawn bigger than the right side, and the left leg would point towards the camera. Next, the arm pointing up should match general shape of the arm pointing down, and would probably be drawn slightly longer for the sake of exaggeration. If you consider how a real life person would do it, then you should be fine.

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