Thursday, January 5, 2012

The Rise of Fall 2011: Figure Drawing for Animators

Hey, I said I was going to make a series of these, and I sure as hell ain't skimpin' out on my word! Today's special: Figure Drawing for Animators 3.


This was my third semester taking a figure drawing class tailored specifically to animators' interests, and the first to be heavily focused on digital media. My past two Figure Drawing for Animators classes were all strictly traditional charcoal-on-newsprint affairs, but with a new professor comes a new set of rules and media to work with. I did pretty much all of my drawing in that class in Corel Painter 11, a program which definitely took some getting used to, but not so much that it impeded my progress throughout the semester.


What I really found odd was the multi-layered disconnect that happened with drawing from life on a tablet. It's difficult to articulate exactly why it felt so weird, but I guess it was just the whole... new-ness of the experience. We focused a lot more on drawing clothed figures this semester than we have in the past, but we did still have out fair share of nude models to work from.


This entry is kind of short because I've always felt that gestural figure drawing has been one of my biggest weaknesses as an animator. Getting the whole figure down on paper (or digital canvas) turns out to be a rare occurrence when I'm faced with drawing from shorter poses, and the whole act of figure drawing has a bad tendency to easily frustrate me. I know I'm not terrible at it (I wouldn't have passed the classes if I were!), but I definitely feel it's an area that I could improve a whole lot on.


Luckily, my bad luck with gestural drawing doesn't seem to have a direct effect on my ability to animate, so maybe I'm not a lost cause after all!

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