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Saturday, April 01, 2006

Gesture class notes 07 - "Get it down quick"

In the gesture class we do drawigs at the rate of two minutes per pose for the first hour then five minutes for the second hour. That's quick! We dont have time to fiddle around with details. This timing was done by Walt Stanchield when he taught at Disney's. I believe this concept is an amazing learning tool becuase it allows for many mistakes to be made but through those mistakes we're learning from each one.

Imagine doing only one drawing for two hours, and only learning from just one pose. For us in animation, learning how to pose our characters with the best acting and clarity is all too important and doing a ton of drawings allows us to excercise our brain with a ton of poses. It's also a great fun challenge! When I say "get it down quick" Im talking about the over all shape and rhythm of the pose. Especially when you're out sketching people or animals, they won't sit still for too long. Unless you're drawing a sleeping animal, but we've seen enough of those.

Here are some pieces from one of my students in my gesture class. His name is Ennio Torresan{enniotorresan.com}. He is very prolific and it was a joy to watch him draw these. If a student is struggling, which we all have at some point, I like to encourage a continuous line drawing. This means doing the drawing with out picking up the pen off the paper as much as you can. It's something different and allows us to break out of the funk. The other thing about it is it trains your eye to concentrate on the whole pose and not just an arm, then a leg, then the face. Working disjointed like that doesn't allow for the over all gesture to be captured as a whole. I like to tell everyone to get the whole gesture down quickly and then come back around with details later. either way Ennio heard me and took it a step further and drew with a water color pen on big paper you can actually see some ink dripping on one of the drawings.



5 comments:

John S. said...

Damn these are great! I gotta start drawing like this again!

MikeS said...

I am going to have to try this! Fantastic sketches!

Perry Linton Joseph Osuna said...

Great work!!

Jeff said...

¡Sr. D-Dawg, estoy alegre usted estoy enseñando el gráfico de la vida porque usted está transfiriendo el amor de Stanchfield! ¡Ahora consiga su tope hasta CalArts y enseñe a niños qué gráfico VERDADERO de la vida está todo!

torahmann said...

I remember doing this at CalArts! I also need to get back into doing this technique again. It does work. I have found that using this technique in drawing buildings can be benificial as well, although not for the observer so much as for the artist.