Last time we had a look at how a character’s body type, personality, emotions and background-story influence posing and how to deal with weight and balance. This week you’ll learn a few guidelines to make your poses clear, readable and more appealing.
In order to improve, you have to practice. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. At this point no one is a stranger to this age-old advice. If you’re like me, though, sometimes you need a gentle kick in the pants to get moving and actually DO the practicing. That’s where 642 Things to Draw comes to the rescue.
Quickest way to improvement? Practice. It’s a simple bit of advice that rings with absolute truth. Articles, tips, mentors, and study will never get you as far as rolling up your sleeves and getting down to work, be it animation or any other skill. Today we’ve compiled a list of exercises, like animation push-ups, that will get your art skills buff and toned.
In my last eye article I stated that I was open for any questions about eyes in animation. And I got questions – a lot of them… Our reader Mahesh alone posted a ton of them and every single one would be worth an article. Now I’ll try to answer them, but I have to admit that I am probably not experienced enough to respond as confidently as I would like to for all of the questions. So I invite all of you to join the discussion and comment if you have any ideas or advice! Let’s get to it.
Eyes are the windows to the soul. There is nothing that can so drastically improve or destroy your animation than how well you direct your character’s eyes. Carefully animated eyes can really sell the impression that these lines or computer generated pixel have a living soul. On the other hand-side rushed imprecise work can destroy the believability of in other respects decent animation.
This article is about making the pupils of your characters properly looking at something or someone and avoiding mistakes that can happen when you align the eyes.
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The second half of our “Feet in Animation” series by Joshua Taback, including a downloadable PDF of the entire art tutorial at the bottom! Hot off the presses!
Directly following the wildly popular Hands 101 (through 103) series by Joshua Taback, today we take a look at those mysterious “hands of the legs” the feet! Special thanks to Kev Craven for setting up this series with Josh.
If you’ve studied or done animation for any length of time you’ve no doubt come across some absolutely fantastic storyboards out there. Single images that tell the story at hand with elegant brilliance yet wonderful simplicity. To create such pre-production masterpieces it takes a lot of skill and a huge amount of hard work and practice, of course, but there IS something you can do right now to make sure your storyboards really pop visually.
The journey into drawing the human hand continues with this third installment, discussing an issue brought up by reader ‘Catplanet’ from the comments of the previous article. Today we tackle fingernails and their use at defining the planes of the fingers. Plus a few quick tips to differentiate male hands from female’s!
After seeing a lot of responses and some questions, Joshua Taback returns with more tips for drawing hands! Check out these tricks with even more details on curved fingers, drawing from odd angles, and how to give round shapes definitive sides.
