Working Too Small
Everyone knows by now that CGI character animation has the power to be way more refined in motion than hand-drawn work may ever be. The restrict of hand-drawn subtlety is well outlined: it’s principally right down to the width of a pencil line. That is why in our hand-drawn medium, we search for different methods to differentiate our craft than by competing with CGI on this space the place they’re clearly the champs.
That mentioned, we nonetheless want to specific some subtlety and gradual motion in our work, generally getting right down to that pencil-line thickness between drawings so as to put throughout our concepts in animation.
Why, then, would anybody work at a smaller scale than they should? The larger your picture, the extra refined you could be. A personality drawn 9 inches excessive could be rather more refined than a personality drawn solely 4 1/2 inches excessive, as a result of the width of that pencil line stays the identical. Proper?
But scaling my characters smaller on the web page than they should be is a mistake I’ve repeatedly dedicated in my very own work. I simply caught myself doing it once more, scuffling with miniature palms and fingers and different particulars till I noticed my mistake.
Animators who do their hand-drawn work paperless, drawing digitally with a stylus straight into the pc, do probably not have this drawback as a result of they will zoom their view out and in at will. It’s to these of us who nonetheless animate on paper that I’m speaking to right here.
Within the days of filmed animation, the animator was often pressured to work on the scale dictated by the motion throughout the structure. A personality might need to run off into the space till it was fairly small on the paper, shedding element and integrity, going off-model alongside the best way. There have been examples at Disney the place tiny onscreen characters had been animated giant, then diminished to the proper relative dimension with photostats earlier than inking, however that was costly to do and uncommon.
But when, like me, you do a hybrid form of animation, working first on paper after which scanning the drawings into ToonBoom, TV Paint, or different such software program, you’ll be able to benefit from the software program’s scaling functionality in reverse. For instance, you probably have a scenario the place your area to {photograph} is 11 inches broad, and your character in that scene is 2 inches excessive, you’ll be able to animate that character on paper at 6 or 8 inches excessive after which, after scanning, deliver that layer right down to the proper scale relative to the background.
One limitation to it is a character who have to be animated exhibiting her complete top; in that case you wouldn’t need to scale it up a lot that it will crop off any of the limbs.
The purpose is to all the time take into consideration this when approaching a scene. May you be drawing bigger? In the event you may, then in all probability it’s best to.
