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Hello there,

I'm relatively new to Traditional-hand-drawn animation. I guess you could say I'm only really learning how to draw now too. Although this question may be regarding my own "art capabilities", some of your technique and knowledge may be of help to me.
In short my question lies on this - when I draw a character in TVPaint, I will start sketching new poses and work out different scenes I hope to animate. Within an hour of drawing inbetweens he has completely changed structure! Now I know this is clearly my own fault for lack of drawing technique, but could anybody give me some helpful tips on learning to draw repeatedly? I know that zooming in as far as the software lets me is definitely not the way to learn!

(My history)
I've been using flash for a good 3 years now - and although I don't believe what I have learned or accomplished there is any help to this journey of mine, I know that you all will have something to offer me.
I've also been watching online tutorials for human anatomy, lighting, drawing etc... some by our very own Mark Chong, to name one. I'm working hard learning to draw... and I know that combining the fluidity of hand-drawn, traditional animation will expand my understanding of art principles.

I have only begun using TVPaint since the 24th of January... I'm 17 by the way. Any tips are really appreciated.

Thanks,
Darius

Darius, to stay on model is a matter of practice; lots and lots of practice. There are no workarounds, plugins or tricks. Actually Disney did have a trick. All his characters are made with circles and ovals, which are just two circles anyway. That kept everyone in his studio on model and anyone else who starts with circles in his basement can't escape the Disney Studio model. Please don't use that crutch -- all the textbooks teach it because it is an easy method which leads to sameness. So if you eliminate that trick there are no other ones left but daily practice.

Thank you for the fast reply, Paul. I will not grow accustomed to drawing circle-based characters - that is not my reason for animating. I do understand it takes time to develop the technique and ability for persistent fluid animation. I have a lot to work on.

Thank you again

And here's another point to ponder: It doesn't always matter if you don't stay strictly on model -- a dynamic style of animation drawn with attractive and interesting flourish can get away with lots of imperfections.

Thanks, Paul. Your wisdom is appreciated.

Sure. I can bark too.

Contrary to Paul's advice I use circles all the time, not as strictly as in a Disney character construction, but as an indicator of size and mass.

It's a bit more complex and depends on wether you work pose-to-pose or straight through (to use the old Disney terms). Straight through I have the same problem as you: my character gets smaller and smaller over time. Happens to everyone, every pupil at school starts a line with big letters and ends with small ones. Practice helps, but it's no shame to use other means. At school the pupils have lines in their books. In TVP I can draw lines myself, on a separate layer, to remind me of my character's height. In the studio we used to do 1 drawing with the character standing (or sitting or whatever was the main pose of the scene) which we put over our actual drawing from time to time, and by flipping we could check for size consistency.

In pose-to-pose you would do this all the time, because it's a more constructed way to animate anyways. You'd start with animating the main masses, like body and head, all through the scene, then adding the limbs, and so on.

In TVP you can use even more tricks. One I use quite often is to copy a character or a part of it in blue as a custom brush and paste it into my recent drawing, maybe rotating it if necessary. Then I'd draw the actual pose over it in black. Most time I apply a cycle of "erase blue" and "make drawing blue" repeatedly, like erasing on paper and refining the drawing with each turn.

What you should not do is to just copy some head and paste it on several drawings. I've tried it several times because theoretically it should work for certain movements where the head's angle doesn't change or just rotates around Z. But the result was always ugly, even when I traced over it in each frame. It seems the human eye can spot a perfect copy immediately within an otherwise fully animated character, it doesn't blend in and distracts the viewer. I think this is one reason why in Disney films the characters move their heads all the time, if only ever-so-slightly, just to avoid this effect.

All this of course depends on your overall style of animation, so if you do limited animation, you'll have a perfectly still head for several frames, and if you do cutout style, the copying of body parts would be part of the style.

Thank you for the in-depth reply, slowtiger. I will read up on both those terms... and yes, exactly as you put -- my characters head will grow narrower and smaller each passing frame!
My dream is to have the full ability to create loose-sketchy (but very fluid -- like water) animations such as this:

http://www.cohl.fr/video/video.php?prom ... ideo=guiol" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


practice, practice, practice!
Wish me the best gentleman.

That's an excellent little film and a good example of a style where staying on model becomes less important. It's a style I'd think of as a little too showy, except that it fits the end of the story, so it's perfect in this case. Tracing templates will always lead to more mechanical drawings and boring, tedious inbetweening which can take all the fun out of drawing. There's another good gage of where one is going; inbetweening shouldn't have to be boring, most of the time.

I too love that aspect -- Its almost scribbles with character. There is no need to introduce this man -- he is just there... doing as one usually does. Its a very comical tale of one man going through hell to stalk a voluptuous woman. Its non-spoken humor like that that always gets me.