The Art and Feel of Making it Real Gesture Drawing for the Animation and Entertainment Industry [Special Limited Edition] -V1.pdf

Gesture Drawing

for Animation

Walt Stanchfield

Edited by

Leo Brodie

Walt Stanchfield

This compilation is not copyrighted or protected in any way by the editor of the compilation (Leo

Brodie). It is based on a series of un-copyrighted class notes written by animation instructor Walt

Stanchfield during the period roughly from 1970 to 1990. Since then, these class handouts have

been widely copied and shared amongst animation students and members of the animation

industry with Mr. Stanchfield's blessing and encouragement; in that spirit, the handouts are now

available freely on the Internet. Some of the illustrations in this book represent preliminary

drawings of cartoon characters that are the properties of their respective copyright holder(s) and

are therefore protected by copyright. These illustrations were part of the original handouts and

are included here for educational purposes to illustrate specific principles of animation technique.

No endorsement of this book by the copyright holder(s) is implied, nor do the views expressed in

this book necessary reflect those of the copyright holders(s). I hope that covers it.

Gesture Drawing for Animation

iii

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Go for the Truth .........................................................................................2

Observe, Observe, Observe..........................................................................................2

Lead to the Emotion.....................................................................................................4

Give Them the Experience...........................................................................................5

The Driving Force behind the Action ..........................................................................5

Gesture .........................................................................................................................9

The Essence ...............................................................................................................10

Go For The Truth!......................................................................................................13

Chapter 2: The Animator's Sketchbook ....................................................................13

Everywhere You Go ..................................................................................................17

Composition ...............................................................................................................17

Ron Husband's Sketchbook .......................................................................................21

Note Taking and Sketching........................................................................................27

Good Habits ...............................................................................................................32

Chapter 3: A Visual Vocabulary for Drawing ..........................................................31

Lines, Lines, Lines.....................................................................................................31

A Simple Approach to Drawing ................................................................................31

A Simple Approach to Drawing ................................................................................32

Finding the Abstract...................................................................................................32

The Solid-Flexible Model ..........................................................................................32

Figure Sketching for Animation ................................................................................32

The Pipe Model..........................................................................................................33

Seeing in Three Dimensions ......................................................................................34

The Rules of Perspective ...........................................................................................34

Direction ....................................................................................................................36

Problems of Drawing in Line.....................................................................................36

Simplifying Heads .....................................................................................................37

Caricatured Head Shapes ...........................................................................................37

The Head in Gesture ..................................................................................................38

A Simple Approach to Costumes and Drapery..........................................................38

Chapter 4: The First Impression ................................................................................71

Short-pose Sketching .................................................................................................71

Superficial Appearance vs. Creative Portrayal ..........................................................71

A New Phrase: “Body Syntax” ..................................................................................72

The "Explosive" Gesture............................................................................................72

Feel, As Well As See, the Gesture.............................................................................76

Draw Verbs, Not Nouns.............................................................................................77

Draw with a Purpose..................................................................................................77

Dividing the Body into Units .....................................................................................78

"Knowing" or Searching ............................................................................................79

Simplicity for the Sake of Clarity ..............................................................................79

Chapter 5: Elements of the Pose .................................................................................85

Angles and Tension....................................................................................................88

Applying Angles and Tension in Our Drawings........................................................92

Walt Stanchfield

Tennis and Angles......................................................................................................98

Straight against Curve: Squash and Stretch in the Pose ..........................................101

Applying Perspective ...............................................................................................103

The Sensation of Space ............................................................................................105

Recreating the First Impression ...............................................................................109

Putting the Elements of a Pose Together .................................................................112

Habits to Avoid ........................................................................................................118

It Ain’t Easy .............................................................................................................121

Chapter 6: Pushing the Gesture ...............................................................................119

Drawing Gesture from the Model ............................................................................120

Stick to the Theme ...................................................................................................120

Subtlety ....................................................................................................................123

Pushing the Gesture .................................................................................................124

Gesture to Portray an Action or a Mood ..................................................................124

Action Analysis: Hands & Feet ...............................................................................125

Learn to Cheat..........................................................................................................125

Lazy Lines................................................................................................................125

Double Vision ..........................................................................................................125

Caricature.................................................................................................................125

Chapter 7: Principles of Animation .........................................................................153

Drawing Principles...................................................................................................153

28 Principles of Animation ......................................................................................154

Drawing Calories .....................................................................................................154

The Pose Is an Extreme............................................................................................154

Animating Squash and Stretch.................................................................................154

The Opposing Force.................................................................................................154

Connecting Actions..................................................................................................157

Inbetweening............................................................................................................158

Chapter 8: A Sense of Story ......................................................................................171

A Sense of Story ......................................................................................................171

Talk To Your Audience - Through Drawing ...........................................................179

A Thinking Person's Art ..........................................................................................182

Acting and Drawing .................................................................................................187

The Emotional Gesture ............................................................................................187

Common Vs Uncommon Gestures ..........................................................................188

Body Language ........................................................................................................189

Chapter 9: Final Words .............................................................................................191

Creative Energy .......................................................................................................191

Osmosis....................................................................................................................192

A Bit of Introspection ..............................................................................................194

Mental and Physical Preparation .............................................................................195

The Metaphysical Side.............................................................................................196

Habits .......................................................................................................................197

Final Words on Essence...........................................................................................199

Gesture Drawing for Animation

Foreword by the Editor

Walt Stanchfield was an animator who taught life drawing classes for animators with a

special emphasis on gesture drawing. For each weekly class session, he wrote informal

handouts to emphasize the theme of the current class session, to comment on work done

in the previous class, or discuss whatever topic struck his fancy. Over a period of years,

these notes were lovingly shared, studied, and treasured by animators and animation

students everywhere.

Mr. Stanchfield personally gave copies of his collection to interested students, and was

happy to seem them distributed. According to many people who were lucky enough to

study under him, he wanted to publish them as a book, but the studio where he worked

was not interested.

The goal of this project is to imagine the book that Walt Stanchfield might have written.

This project is a compilation of the first 60 handouts that are shared on the

www.animationmeat.com website (as that site has numbered them). Walt Stanchfield did

not present his topics in any particular order, which suited the ongoing nature of the

classes. Walt's handouts are like individual frames of animation—some are extremes,

some are inbetweens, some are even cleanups. As I was reading the notes and trying to

absorb as much as I could, I thought I might understand them better if it were all laid out

in sequence, with basic topics followed by more complex ideas. I wanted to see his ideas

grouped by subject so I could compare the ideas. In other words, I wanted the topics to be

arranged like a normal book. So I've re-arranged bits and pieces from the handouts into

cohesive chapters, while taking the liberty to eliminate redundancy and make minor edits

just as a book editor would.

In deciding how to organize the material, I imagined how Walt himself would have put it

together if he'd written it. Where would he have started? Knowing that the readers of the

book would not be the lucky members of his classes, what concepts would have

illustrated before moving on to more advanced topics? I tried to follow the principles

Walt himself outlines in these notes: clarity, attention to the "essence," emotion, and

using the minimum number of words (lines) to get the point across.

Another reason I wanted to see this material as a book is that there is no other book that

covers the same information. There are many excellent volumes on animation, but they

generally assume that the reader can already draw animatable characters with strong

poses without explaining how to get to that stage. All the books on generic figure and life

drawing, even those that emphasize gesture, encourage capturing the model's appearance

and gesture without explaining how to internalize the gesture so as to push it to extremes

or apply it to a different figure. Personally, I think this compilation—if it were a book—

would take its place among the top volumes on animation.

There is an informal, lively charm to the original handouts that gives the reader a sense of

'being there.' You may want to check them out to get a feel for how this information was

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