Life Drawing in Animation: Movement

Finding a model to do multiple poses that establish a directional movement, then that's almost the same as using footage of that as reference. In fact, that can even benefit you if you are animating a character in a particular art style, by drawing the shapes of whichever art style the character is drawn in. You normally have to observe a real person acting out the scene you're making to gain enough reference to pull it off. It might not even be a basic walk-cycle, but more complex actions that may involve interacting with other objects/people. This would require knowledge concerning real-life people performing said actions. Having enough life-drawing experience will enable you to draw the basic shapes of the required movements when looking at reference and getting the shapes down in your character's actions.

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.

Life Drawing in Animation - Character Design

Life drawing plays a huge part in character design, because without practicing anatomy you won't have a proper grasp on human anatomy, and therefore will not be able to create an anatomically correct character. You would also need it to develop your own art style, so that you can stylise/simplify the character. Mike Matessi's book Force: Character Design from Life Drawing basically says this. If you can establish force with a character then that will help define it. Do the shapes you draw allow the character to move in the way you would allow it too? Does the character look enough like a human to add appeal? Is their age defined well enough, or their gender, or even their personality? These are all principles to consider when incorporating life-drawing to character design.

Life Drawing

I recently did some life drawings, each group with their own theme and/or guidelines, which I've always somehow neglected over the years, because I never really saw the importance of it until recently. First, I had to draw at least 12-18 poses, per person, that establish movement through a space, and I had to spend 10 seconds per pose. This felt like it was my pace because I'm sort of used to that nice, loose style and method of drawing, and this was literally just drawing lines and shapes that establish the flow, direction, pace, and body language of the moving individual. I then had to draw the same thing, only instead I was drawing shapes to establish squashing and stretching in an open space, and having drawn squashes and stretches since starting animation, this was fairly simple, and also good practice. Next, I had to draw four poses, for five minutes each, that established the figure pushing and pulling on an object. I feel like I need to work on the pushing drawings a bit more, and some of my pulling drawings were fine apart from a slight screw-up on the anatomy. Lastly, I had to draw four more drawings, this time focusing more on the shape, anatomy, and weight of a model. I'd have to spend 20-30 minutes on each drawing, not having to focus too much on detail but still getting the overall figure correct. I did fairly well at that, having used different types of media for each drawing, it let me think creatively to establish the figure's colour, and depending on the body language of the model, I would use media to establish mood.