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Last night I dreamt about TVP (yes, I do that. Stop laughing!) and how to improve my "pencil" tool. This morning I tweaked it, especially with using the pressure profiles, and now have a pencil which is much smoother than before.

I tested it to further develop my characters, and came up with this small head turn. I like the "living" outlines" a lot. The colouring of the hair can be improved, I'm sure, but for the moment I like the "feathery" quality. The problem with hair is that either it's designed like a helmet or blanket, completely opaque, or that the artist gets lost in many streaks of hair which tend to get mixed up in inbetweening. My version uses only a few strokes over a nearly transparent colour, just enough to indicate hair and volume.

http://www.enigmation.de/looseline.html

The animation works for me. (Although I am no fan of such polish character design and to be exact of the eyes which could have more expression)
Due to this rather powerful head turn it could be a good idea to add some dynamic to the hair.

Yes, a bit of follow-through would be good. But not too much, I have developed a dislike for a certain style of animation where nearly everything dangles and whips in every movement.

The eyes ... that's another task. I want to keep the eyes as simple as possible, yet be able to express something. I don't want to have realistic eyes, nor Anime eyes, nor big cartoony eyes ... so what's left? I'm still working on it.

Recently I saw "The Rescuers" again where the artists used a nice trick to have mice with big black eyes, yet indicated the look of a more human eye with white around the pupil. And the otherwise completely unnecessary short "Pups of Liberty" had black eyeswith just so much indication of a lid that it worked quite well (see http://www.pupsofliberty.com/thestory.html).

Markus, can you tell a little more about the character. Is this one part of a larger project (??) or just to examine a turn ?

It's part of my research for "the long film" you already know about ... I'm still struggling to find a suitable style for the characters. This could be one of several 20+year old women. It looks very generic right now, next step would be to invent some variations with more personality, and of different age.

In average production this differentiation is mostly done by props and colours: add a ponytail or braces or glasses and you're done, or use completely different species right from the start. I like to keep that simple solution to background characters only, if possible.

I find it extremely difficult to develop a character with a distinct personality when I don't have a voice track -- unless the character would be a mute person. I am in that situation myself right now and it's frustrating me, to say the least.

BTW, I don't think pondering over every strand of hair in search of character definition is useful. I think of it this way: when I want to asses the character of a person in real life, I train my eye on the person's body language more than anything else. I believe that an animator/designer should start animating from the very first sketch; I never found it useful to start inventing a personality the way a house or car would be designed: the top view, side view, frontal and back views.

When you start that way you are stuck with a dead object (or a puppet at the best). I have learned to design in motion -- one of my favorites is to start with the character sitting in a chair and then getting up and making a turn... or wherever my fancy leads me after the person stands up... When I'm not instantly delighted with the result, I start over again, making some changes to the person's general body language, which inevitably leads to the discovery of useful characteristics, such as strands of hair.

I have a certain image of my characters in my mind, this includes certain movements and, most importantly, voices. I can act out most of it, and, if necessary, speak a dummy voice track. The difficult part always is to get that vision onto screen ...

Maybe that's because you consider the vision in your mind as a completed product and now you want to trace it with your pencil on paper. The vision is only the very grain of a thought and the real beginning starts with the drawing. It's all about perception, not techniques.

Paul Fierlinger wrote:Maybe that's because you consider the vision in your mind as a completed product and now you want to trace it with your pencil on paper. The vision is only the very grain of a thought and the real beginning starts with the drawing. It's all about perception, not techniques.

I agree.
I would even go as far to say that if the final product matches almost exactly to what you had in your vision, something in the process is wrong (or you have the likes of Asperger's syndrome)

Hi Markus,

I like the hairs. Yes, they need a little bit more movement, but the coloring in combination with the lines is nice. For me it is difficult to judge the character because I would need to see the context where it acts. Unfortunately I haven't seen the character as a women, for me it was a man until I've read your post. I think it depends on the big nose, but I am not sure.

Have some nice dreams tonight ...