Week 2: Life Drawing for Animation

Integral to the study of animation is the discipline of life drawing. And we learnt this week during the first of our five life drawing sessions that life drawing shouldn't be confined to the life model, but applies to 'life' as it exists around us. Marie Clare-Foa, life drawing tutor at Central Saint Martins, encouraged us to not only draw what was happening around us as much as we could, but also delve further and ask ourselves what the history is behind the person/object, who might they have woken up with? What is their view on life? Adding that these don't necessarily need to be correct, but help us to create new characters and inspire original stories.

During our first lesson we viewed the model in the context of a skeleton and were encouraged to draw in the underlying bone structure where we could. Through various exercises we learnt to consider the figure as a 3 dimensional whole, learnt to avoid describing the body with just an outline, but instead look at the whole figure to capture tone and silhouette. As well as this, we were encouraged to consider the surrounding environment, mostly because a big part of character animation is the environment that the character is placed. As Marie noted, a tiger in a jungle would act differently to one in your kitchen. Finally emphasis was placed on the importance of gesture, being key to the storytelling pose and character formation.

I've included a few drawings that I completed during the class. The first two were 10 minute drawings of the same pose at from different view points. The last drawing captures a hand in a slow progressive movement.