From the course: Motion Graphic Design: Animation

Creating solid and convincing drawings

From the course: Motion Graphic Design: Animation

Creating solid and convincing drawings

- [Instructor] We're gonna look at the first principle of animation, how to do solid drawing, drawing that looks like it's a solid real object. By making things look properly three dimensional, and giving them weight, you will make your objects and characters more believable. I've got Head_turn.psd open, and if you've got access to the exercise files, you can open that file, too. Now, you'll notice here that I've got the brush tool selected, not the pencil tool. If I'm sketching in Photoshop, I usually choose the brush tool, and I've chosen one of the dry media brushes, KYLE Ultimate Pencil Hard, is my chosen brush of choice. Now, one of the classic things that everyone has difficulty drawing is a head, or a face, and generally what people will do is we'll draw the rough outline of a face, so if we just draw a rough head here, and then you draw the eyes, so we'll draw an eye there and an eye there, and then the nose, and then a mouth. And it tends to look very flat, so in order to give your drawings depth, what we're gonna do is undo those last few steps and before we start drawing the features, first of all, draw the shape of the head, but then you might want to just make it look a bit more three dimensional before you start drawing the features because that will help you position them correctly to make your head look as if it's looking up or down or to the side, and really, if you're gonna be creating animation, you're gonna want the head to turn at some point, so you want to make sure you can draw your character convincingly from all angles, and the same applies to objects, of course. So if we want this character to be looking up, what we're gonna do is draw a profile, so we're drawing a circle or an ellipse, where we'd imagine that shape to be cut. So if you imagine slicing this in half, that's what that slice would look like. Okay, now we could draw in the other side as well. We could create the back side as well, but really just the front is okay for this. Then I'm gonna draw another one up here. Now, the reason I'm drawing lots of these is they're gonna form different guides. The one at the top is gonna give me a guide for the hairline, this one here is gonna give me a guide for the eyebrows, and you can also look online, there's lots of websites that will tell you the correct distance between eyes, nose, and mouth. I'll put the nose in here. I'm kind of used to it, so I'm just drawing it freehand. Okay, and we're thinking about perspective as well, so it's slightly wider at the front, getting slightly narrower at the side here, and you can keep adapting your drawing as you're doing this, and then we'll put one in for the mouth. Mouth will be about here, okay, and then what we'll do is we'll also put one in for the neck so this is where the neck would join to the body, so we can start to draw our neck, so I'm gonna draw a cylinder for the neck. You could even start drawing the shoulders so you would imagine you're looking through the body here, so those would be the shoulders, and then, what we're gonna do is start marking in features. Now, one of the things that's quite easy is ears usually start at the eyebrow, and they come down to the kind of nose level, so we could draw that ear in there. Now, it would have been really difficult to know that an ear should go there, if we'd just drawn a circle, but by putting these guides in, we can clearly see where the ear needs to go. That's not quite in perspective, but we'll leave it there for now, so that'll do for the ear. Then, what we're gonna do is put the eyes in, so I'm gonna start just by drawing rough shapes for the eyes so we'll just draw some circles to begin with. Like I said, it's a good idea just to sketch things in to begin with, so we'll put the hairline in. Now, depending on what kind of hair your character's gonna have, you might have kind of spiky hair, something like that. And again, I'm just doing it really rough to begin with. Might have a bit of hair showing around here, and as soon as I put the hair in, I can see that actually, my eyes aren't quite right. What you need to do is just draw some circles this way as well, okay, so we're gonna draw a section there and that gives us an idea of where the nose will go, so let's put in the nose, okay, so I can start to draw the nose angle there, so we're looking up at the nose. To draw a nose, I usually do a triangle, like that, to begin with, and now it's much easier to see where the eyes will go, so the eyebrows should go around about here, so we'll have one eyebrow there, one eyebrow there, and now we can draw the eyes underneath that, so there we have that eye, and then we'll have this eye on this side. Okay, and then we'll draw the mouth, so let's do the top of the mouth, top lip, and then the actual mouth, and then we can do the bottom lip, and then we'll have the chin. Now, the chin could be sticking out a little bit. You might want to have a big strong chin there, and then, it goes up to the bottom of the ear there, and you'll see that we're starting to flesh our our character now. We might maybe join that to the neck, have this coming down. So drawing isn't a case of just drawing something for the first time and it's perfect. Quite often, you'll, it will look terrible to begin with and you'll have to just keep making changes til it starts to look how you want it to look. Let's have a little bit of the lip coming down there, then we can start to put details in on the nose like the nostrils, prove that a little bit, maybe draw some more of the hair, and then you can start to erase lines that you don't want. Now, I've got a white background here so instead of using the eraser tool, what I like to do is just use the brush tool with white. That way, I can get a more sketchy look to the eraser as well, so I'm kind of erasing out some of these lines that are gonna complicate it, and that helps me start to see the shape of my character a little bit more. So it's kind of like a sculpture process, really. You add bits, you remove bits, until it starts to look how you want it to look, but you'll see already it's given me a good idea of how to make it look as if this character is looking up. Okay, so, I'll move a bit of those eyes. Then I go back to my pencil tool, so just switch back to black, make my brush a bit smaller, and then I'd start to kind of perfect it a little bit more and put in facial features now. Might put detail into the ear. Okay, so you get the idea. Not the best sketch in the world. It's always a bit difficult when people are watching, and I know you're watching. (laughing) So what I'm gonna do is just delete that frame, and we'll have a look at some of the other frames that I've drawn here. So this is another character, this is him looking forwards, looking down, looking up, and across, and then back down again, and I've actually converted these to frames so that we get a little cycle and you can see that it looks as if that head is moving around, and you're thinking about perspective and also depth when you do that. Now, if we jump to After Effects, you'll notice I've got that same file here in After Effects, and I've created a sequence of images from it, and to be able to play that in sequence in After Effects, I've pre-composed that, and I've added time remapping. Now, with time remapping, I can decide to keep it still for a second, then have his head turn round a couple of times, and then it goes back to the still image again. Now, if you're not confident with drawing, don't worry. You can always use 3D software to create a 3D object, and here I've got my little seagull that I've done in 3D, and the nice thing about doing it in true 3D is that in order to see it from different directions, all I need to do is turn the object or adjust the camera, so if you can't draw, just use 3D applications to create your objects from different views.

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