Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Drawing from life, learning something about anatomy, about color, paintingtechniques, and 'the animation survival kit' also fits in there.

True, if you keep an open mind about finding your own Weltanschauung, because even when you study you should understand where you want your studies to lead you. Only then can you selectively pickup a useful lesson from one page of Dick Williams' book and go on to the next book.

When observing God's nature or human nature or the nature of the beast, you get the best of it all when you already have an established Worldview. This takes years; an entire lifetime.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:

This takes years; an entire lifetime.

I don't know. Many great artworks have been made by very young people. Egon Schiele died when he was 27, Raphael 37, Jimi Hendrix 27, and many of the greatest films have been made by relatively young people.
I agree with the rest of what you say. I was discussing lately about what makes somebody a good director. And I think it's the possibility to see not only a shot or picture before the mind's eye, but to be able to see a whole 'made up' world before the mind's eye, and than to be able to put it on film (or something that's coming close, because it will never be exact the same).
And in order to keep the distance between the mind's eye and the artwork as small as possible, one should not be distracted by a lack of technique.
I'm sure that the video's that Lemec posts are very worthy for a lot of people.

I think that whole silhouette thing gets completely misunderstood here.

The way I learned to do things (which isn't necessarily the way I actually do them) is like that:
1. create a character. Draw it many times in different poses to test his movement abilities, draw it together with other characters, draw turnarounds.
2. draw layouts for different scenes, following your storyboard. These layout drawings will contain some poses. These poses must be readable against the background, and they must be readable in the sense that the audience must "get it" on the first sight what your character is doing. This is called "staging" (as you all know).

Only in developing poses the "silhouette" trick makes sense. It's the same as what John K. calls "negative space". It just means "make sure the pose is instantly readable" and is just one step to check wether it is or not. By no means it was meant as "create characters in silhouette first, then apply lines within".

slowtiger wrote:Only in developing poses the "silhouette" trick makes sense. It's the same as what John K. calls "negative space". It just means "make sure the pose is instantly readable" and is just one step to check wether it is or not. By no means it was meant as "create characters in silhouette first, then apply lines within".

Yep! I never meant to imply that you should fill in a silhouette to design a character and I see my statement has been misconstrued as such. There are all kinds of things that go into solid character design, the ability to make readable poses in silhouette is just one aspect. You have to draw and draw and draw for this to become second nature, and be aware of other things like tangents and weak construction or your readability will fall flat.

John K's blog is one of my favorites. He's a huge advocate of old school character design.

haha! Guys, how quickly you are populating/invading Lemec's tutorials thread !

let each one choose the rules he wants to follow (when he feels he needs rules to get better),
rules are crutches, as soon as you feel you don't need them anymore, you naturally clear them of your mind,
personnally, after a (long) digest period, I've rejected merely all rules from anywhere, except one :
"get your client satisfied !" (I mean when it goes on commissioned work)

apart from that, it's up to you, one going to draw nights and days, the other tinkering his bike,
what the difference? if at the end of the day, both can say : "what a nice day today!"

ZigOtto wrote:haha! Guys, how quickly you are populating/invading Lemec's tutorials thread !

l

SORRY LEMEC!!

ZigOtto: It is too easy to say nothing while following a conversation and join only after all have said their piece with:

let each one choose the rules he wants to follow (when he feels he needs rules to get better),
rules are crutches, as soon as you feel you don't need them anymore, you naturally clear them of your mind,
personnally, after a (long) digest period, I've rejected merely all rules from anywhere, except one :
"get your client satisfied !" (I mean when it goes on commissioned work)

apart from that, it's up to you, one going to draw nights and days, the other tinkering his bike,
what the difference? if at the end of the day, both can say : "what a nice day today!"

It is not right to shame participants without taking the risk of participation yourself, because that is also too easy.

BTW, I see no thread drift here... isn't (wasn't?) this conversation about silhouettes, based upon the lesson about silhouettes? I ask "wasn't" because of course to come in and shame the little group of conversationalists, sucks away all the joy of discourse like air out of a room.

I must add I learned a whole lot about the use of silhouettes in this thread. It's this kind of discourse that makes TVPaint Forums feel alive.

I think mostly people should try not to endlessly philosophize about artistry, technique or trying to be an ultimate master of drawing (life, anatomy, etc). It'll consume you eventually, you have to enjoy life too, no matter how passionate you are about animation.

Just Animate with what you've got, and try to make it fun for yourself. In the end , it's just a profession, like the baker bakes his bread. It's not the ultimate lifegoal, you are the creator of cartoons. Ofcourse you should try to make unique work and continually improve yourself, but artists, animators in particular tend to never be satisfied with their work. Look at animators who don't give a crap about perspective, anatomy, and get away with it perfectly because they are good storytellers and original visualists.

That said, formula's and techniques are handy, but I notice with myself that I tend to forget them after a while and have to "shake off the rust" like the OP says in his video's. I like to do these tutorials, in order not to become insane or frustrated with drawing.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:It is not right to shame participants ...

Relax! ..."not right" ? where's the Rules ? Sometimes you surprise me with your twisted lecture of my supposed intention, ... I was "shaming" absolutly nobody,
just I thought it was times to go and open a new thread somewhere else to pursue this discussion further,
I thought it was a bit unfair to fill Lemec's tutorial thread during his absence (at Annecy festival actually),
also remember we are in the Content Sharing section here, not the better place for long debats.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:... without taking the risk of participation yourself ...

it was precisely my participation!
I've taken the risk to be unpleasant with some participants, and it worked out "well" only with you ...

Paul Fierlinger wrote:... because that is also too easy.

sometimes you should try to enjoy doing easy things too, like deep breathing,
or looking up at a cloud moving lazily in the sky, our spirits need rest as our body does at times.

ps: use PM if you want to rail at me, please don't spoil this place.

1.No matter who is right or wrong, this thread is not closed it is open. So everybody can drop his opinion.
2. Many did so and if Mark doesn't want to have a feedback I think he would have said that or ask the admin for closing this thread.
3. I didn't know that Mark can't respond because he is at Annecy - for sure most of the participants here didn't know also.
4. However if here are too many postings the admin can shift it to another place and pm the participants kindly.

All in all it is an interesting thread it shows that the forum is alive and btw 90% of the running threads are drifting a little bit, then sometimes coming back to topic and sometimes not - but what's wrong with that ?

please don't spoil this place.

What would spoil this place for me is that one has to feel afraid to add to the discussion because there is some unwritten ruler who brings it down to personal attack. I didn't think we were violating lemec at all and I'm sorry the discussion was brought to a screeching halt.

idragosani wrote:

slowtiger wrote:Only in developing poses the "silhouette" trick makes sense. It's the same as what John K. calls "negative space". It just means "make sure the pose is instantly readable" and is just one step to check wether it is or not. By no means it was meant as "create characters in silhouette first, then apply lines within".

Yep! I never meant to imply that you should fill in a silhouette to design a character and I see my statement has been misconstrued as such.

Correct. The idea of "silhouette value" applied to animation could just was well be called clarity-of-pose , staging , paying attention to negative space , making sure the pose "reads ".


It's not a mechanical principle of blacking-in all your drawings or drawing only a silhouette first , then filling in the interior. It is a means of analyzing
and fixing a pose that may not be reading clearly. I think after a while it becomes intuitive . Animation requires an economy of line and economy of motion. Our drawings need
to read clearly when they are on screen , so the staging needs to be done with the greatest emphasis on communication.

The examples I posted were "Hollywood cartoony" , so maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea, but look past the style : the principle applies no matter what the style of the drawing. It doesn't matter
whether it's Daffy Duck playing Sherlock Holmes (as in the example I posted) or a realistic drawing of Sherlock Holmes or a live actor playing Sherlock Holmes. The staging needs to
be clear. Good actors understand this. Look at how they carry themselves on stage or the way they pay attention to where the camera is placed and they play to it accordingly. The good ones
do it so subtly that the viewer is not aware of it as "posing" . The classic film actors knew their good side and understood how certain camera angles were better for them
than others. (and it wasn't just all about star vanity, about what made them look good . More about what would communicate with the audience . )

hisko wrote:

ZigOtto wrote:haha! Guys, how quickly you are populating/invading Lemec's tutorials thread !

l

SORRY LEMEC!!

Me, too, if the intention of the thread was just to post updates of Mark's drawing tutorials (which are Excellent in my opinion !) . If it's not intended that people respond to the tutorials and respond to the responses then maybe it would be better to move the discussion on Silhouette to it's own thread ?

Goodness... I leave for a week and there's this huge and fascinating debate that has gone on in my absence!

Boomslang wrote:Nice tutorials, thank you.
Would anyone recommend using the silhouette technique for defining keyposes for animation characters?

I think people should use ANY technique available to them when you want to define a key pose for animation, whether it be drawing the silhouette outline, or going over the forms with cross-sectional lines, or just using gesture lines. Checking the silhouettes of your key poses to ensure the overall readability of the action is a very good idea, I think.

Now when I practise drawing silhouettes ONLY, leaving out cross-sectional lines, and NOT drawing gesture lines, it's a rigorous mental training to force myself to imagine something with a bare minimum of information. If you understand the structure of a pattern well enough, your mind can reconstruct a great deal of it. For instance, if you were to look at the face of a person, but obscure the left half with a hand, you would still be able to imagine what the entire face would look like. Drawing subjects with fewer and fewer guidelines is a way for me to train my ability to reconstruct information that is hidden; and in the case of a blank sheet of paper, EVERYTHING is hidden. I have to rely completely on memory. If I can fully understand the structure of my subject as a collection of easily reconstructed objects (such as basic geometric primitives) my task is greatly simplified. This is why I developed exercises to first train myself to draw the silhouettes of individual cubes, and then the silhouettes of compound objects.

At first it is difficult to imagine a visual image of even simple a object like a cube, but with enough hard work, it is possible to imagine complex arrangements without even laying down a single line. It's like being able to perform mathematical operations in your head without needing to write down all the steps on paper (like when dealing with algebra). If you can imagine compound objects, then you can reduce the number of steps necessary to draw the same subject, instead drawing larger fused objects rather than many individual geometric primitives. It becomes possible to draw using longer and longer unbroken lines because you can think ahead and know where to guide the pencil before you have to stop and figure out where the next compound object should go.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:None of this makes any sense to me. How is drawing a silhouette such a hard thing to do when it leaves out all the intricacies that makes a drawing come to life.

It's difficult to draw ONLY a silhouette without all the guidelines. The silhouette is a condensed answer without many of the steps required to get there. Furthermore, drawings are not alive. They are ink on paper or pixels on a screen, and flat, too. They don't move, either. However, by looking at a changing sequence of images, we THINK they are moving. The perception of movement and depth and perspective and life and emotion are all an EFFECT which is perceived by the viewer.

By deciding what we want our audience to feel, we may select from any number of mastered techniques to manipulate them into feeling what we want them to feel. Humans, no matter how different or unique or individual they may feel often react predictably to the same stimulus. We all jump out of the way of a speeding car (and those that choose to be an exception aren't going to be with us much longer). We all feel the same feelings of sorrow when someone dear to us passes away. We all feel ecstatic when our dreams are fulfilled. We are even more alike in the ways that our attention may be drawn towards singular bright sources of light in a darkened environment, or in our reactions to patterns of colour, so much so that it has become something of a manipulative science.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:By God people; wake up and just draw what you feel and what you see and stop this endless quest for the golden rule, the magic formula, the guru on the mountain. If you can't feel the drawing inside of yourselves then you simply don't have it -- it's not there.

I haven't found the golden rule either, but my endless quest for it has introduced me to many excellent insights and rules of thumb. The more I study, the more I realize that many separate rules share the same objectives, and perhaps in this lifetime I might not find a single golden rule, but a few excellent rules that are always useful in every situation. As for magic formulas, many of the ones I've encountered were useful only in certain situations because they didn't take into account other factors. However, formulas, like rules of thumb are to be designed and modified depending on the situation you encounter. You have to be able to adapt and make them up as you go along. You can use magic formulas, but you'll also have to be something of a wizard to be able to make new ones.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:My suggestion is to read some good books about the human spirit and get inspired by the wonders of the world and become awe inspired by nature. Study natural sciences and leave the science fiction books in the trash bin and if they aren't there yet, put them there. By dwelling on the mechanics of life your soul becomes atrophied and is in hibernation.

My suggestion is to draw WHATEVER inspires you! Drawing science fiction is better than drawing nothing at all! But do get a hold of David Attenborough's DVDs whenever you get a chance. There are some pretty amazing things going on on this planet that belong in a science fiction novel, especially under the sea! And learn about physics and chemistry and architecture and engineering because if you really want to create whole new worlds, you will have to become an inventor!

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible. - Albert Einstein

If you truly want to sway your audience into believing the things you create are real, you have to be many steps ahead of them! They're smarter than you are, not the other way around! You need to know how your creations work better than your audience, as so goes the saying:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

Paul Fierlinger wrote:Don't copy anything. Copying is like a contagious disease; once you start you need intervention to get yourself out of its spell.

Don't copy. Analyse! There's a huge difference. To copy means to draw the lines exactly as they appear to you like a mindless xerox machine. However, if you can study the forms and understand their position in space relative to your viewpoint, and understand where they sit relative to one another, and understand their dimensions relative to one another, you will have the means necessary to reconstruct the same situation from any angle! The puissance of your drawing is completely dependent on the depth of understanding you have of your subject.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:Draw a simple line across the screen and look into yourself. Does it make you feel something? Does drawing a different kind of line make your feelings about what you are doing change? Work on these lines gently and relax.

Lines do not have a style. They might look long or short, straight or curved, fat or skinny, tapered or wobbly or broken or angular or may possess any number of visual attributes, but remember - they should be used to have an EFFECT on your audience. You have to decide on HOW you want your audience to feel and choose the right line for the job. Lines are information. Their appearance and placement relative to other lines can tell your audience the distance, dimensions and orientation of the object they describe. The way they work isn't random, but they follow the rules of geometry under the influence of perspective distortion when projected onto a planar surface. It sounds like a lot of science, but don't forget Arthur C. Clarke's words!

Paul Fierlinger wrote:Putting a silhouette down is like laying a turd on the sidewalk. You can stare at a turd and think you see a little fat man in it but you are just guessing, you feel nothing except the relief from passing a bowl movement.

The outcome of ANY subject you draw is directly related to the effort you put into STUDYING it. If you only put in a turd's amount of effort into trying to understand your subject, the depictions of your subjects will all be like passing bowel movements. However, with the right analytical mindset and careful observation, studying can actually become as enjoyable as moving your bowels. Many of my most excellent discoveries and subjects for TMDT episodes as well as various studies and sketches are all done while sitting on the throne. When you live all alone like me, there's nobody else to bang on the door and interrupt my quality time. *ahem* but getting back on subject, when you understand the basics of drawing and you have a well developed approach to the execution of a painting, simple but appealing sketches can be done with as much effort as breaking wind!

Paul Fierlinger wrote:As I said, I don't get it. A silhouette has its purpose in telling a story but I see no purpose for it as a design construction. It sounds like voodoo art to me; draw a character with lines, fill it with black, step back and say: I still see my character in it! I am getting somewhere! This is marvelous! O.K. so are shadows. Now what?

The silhouette is the first thing I draw when I paint. I have trained myself so that I can sense the dimensions of a form merely by looking at a silhouette. Immediately afterwards I can begin to progress to a direct lighting/shadow process straight over-top of the silhouette. Silhouettes are a WONDERFUL tool for coming up with ideas, so long as your mind is properly trained to recognize forms from the shape of a silhouette! TVPaint's Freehand Filled Shape tool is the best I have ever used for this technique. I was able to do these in about 5 minutes. As effortless as pinching a loaf! Teaching myself to first understand how to decipher the silhouette of geometric primitives, and then decipher the silhouettes of compound objects was NOT easy, and took several hours of exercise before I finally "got it". It took even longer for me to get over my own pride and DO THE EXERCISE. These things always seem like anyone can do them and that learning them is pointless until you actually try it yourself!

Paul Fierlinger wrote:When observing God's nature or human nature or the nature of the beast, you get the best of it all when you already have an established Worldview. This takes years; an entire lifetime.

So... MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL!!!! Meet Claire Wendling, an illustrator who's only 41 and probably still has many many years left in her. She's been drawing like this for decades. Don't be daunted. Any task can take a lifetime if you keep going about it the WRONG WAY! You need to learn how to learn! That's the real secret. It takes more than just hard work and practice. You have to know exactly what you want (and most people DON't know exactly what they want!) and finding what you want is the hardest task of all! When you finally do find out what you want, you still have to find a way to achieve what you want. If it is something that lives and breathes on our planet, you first have to understand how to draw the individual things that make up this thing. Then you have to know how these components are arranged, and how they work. Set your sights low. Start with the skeleton. Understand where all the joints are first, the relative lengths of bones, understand how this marvellous biological machine moves, sits, walks, jumps. Then understand the placement of the muscles, how they affect the bones, in what way they move them. As time goes on, you may find similarities between creatures. It can be done in this lifetime, and maybe it may only take a few years. What you must not do, however, is be discouraged, or quit! If things don't turn out the way you wanted, question what you want! Question your methods to get there!

There are many incredible artists out there, many of them in their 20s or in their teens! If you don't believe it, you've been living in a well for too long, far away from the ocean!

hisko wrote:

ZigOtto wrote:haha! Guys, how quickly you are populating/invading Lemec's tutorials thread !

l

SORRY LEMEC!!

Are you kidding? I was worried that nobody was watching this thread at all! I'm so glad that there's finally some avid discussion here!

You need to learn how to learn! That's the real secret.

Ah the conversation continues.

I would only change this idea to "You need to learn how YOU learn." The learning process can differ widely. Going through the process of making my first film I keep bumping into my learning edge which I enjoy.

Some people go through many exercises to develop their skills before they do a film. I did this in learning to draw for about 3 years, but I used my own project characters for the exercises so I'd know what my questions really are. I've used lots of different methods to become intimate with drawing movement: rotoscoping, models, reference, memory...it all has been very useful.

I was warned that I would get burned out with my idea if I used my film characters but this but really has proven to be great for me and seems to pull me through periods of discouragement because I am drawn by the story I want to tell (ha ha instead of the the story I want to tell being drawn by me.