Figure Drawing for Animators

this video was made possible by my courses over at project C. T more on that at the end of the video when drawing the figure for animation it's super important to capture the energy of a pose sure we all love super clean Line work but in the animation process it's important to start messy and loose and clean up once we've captured the right energy and movement once that's nailed down then we can go back later and tighten up those previously loose sketches and apply our character models to the scene add lighting hair and all the things that make an animation presentable if you're new to animation and especially drawing the figure I want to urge you to keep your drawings loose for the exercises in this video our goal here is to familiarize oursel with drawing people which is an incredibly tough thing to do so with that in mind let's take a look at a few of the ways we can approach drawing the figure there's no singular correct method of drawing people each of these has its own benefits and drawbacks and it's up to you to use them as you see fit the looser methods of drawing the figure are really helpful for capturing energy and using that intuitive part of your brain but they clearly aren't as good at providing structure and perspective drawing loose like this is incredibly important to animation and you'd be surprised how many people tend to skip it or feel as though it's some invalid form of drawing the more constructive approaches to drawing the figure are going to be extremely useful for giving our characters volume and fitting them in a 3D space however they're much less intuitive and they're going to stiffen up our gestures starting with the most basic form of drawing the figure we're going to do a stick figure that involves the line of action and our shoulder and hip tilts the line of action just being a line or two that summarizes the movement of a pose the tilt of the hips and shoulders dictates so much of the character of a pose uh and generally speaking when I see a pose that's not Dynamic it's because a person hasn't captured those tilts people tend to put their weight on one leg in a neutral pose uh so you'll notice here all that weight is shifted onto the right leg which also pushes the hip up on that side now I'm starting to add in the masses of the rib cage and the pelvis uh in a skeletal form of drawing it's really important to be able to track how these masses are moving in different poses and I highly suggest drawing figures this way we'll talk about it in more detail later but you'll notice that the rib cage and pelvis are always going to move in opposition to each other the counterbalancing of these two masses helps maintain the center of gravity and keep the figure upright using these Concepts let's try to draw a few figures um I'm going to use a hybrid of this skeletal model with um a silhouette model of drawing where I'm kind of paying attention to the outer shape but even though I'm incorporating the silhouette I'm not losing sight of that shoulder tilt and the hip tilt as well as the forms of the rib cage and pelvis again feel free to be loose here maybe draw without lifting up your pen or whatever you got to do to just get in the mindset of trying to capture the energy of a pose try to be aware of things like your proportions the angles that the arms and legs are making and anything else that's contributing to the dynamism of the pose just because a figure standing still doesn't mean that there's not a lot happening in that pose I referred to the volumes of the rib cage and pelvis moving in opposition to each other and I want to take a closer look at that for a moment simplifying the rib cage and pelvis just into boxes we can see that when the rib cage angles forward the pelvis is tilted back to counterbalance that movement when the rib cage is angled back we get the opposite situation where the pelvis tilts forward again to counterbalance that movement because breaking people down into boxes is a relatively unintuitive form of drawing I want to pose a slightly simpler model for this I like to imagine the trunk of the body as just a simple rectangle with the top half being the rib cage the bottom half being the abdomen and the pelvis this is kind of The Best of Both Worlds regarding a loose gestural approach and a constructive approach by using curves and allowing myself to bend the form I can capture the gesture in a organic way but it also maintains some of that rigidity and perspective I've got a bunch of videos on perspective so if using and manipulating basic forms is confusing

you go back and watch those before you start doing this um but our goal is to be able to rotate them bend them twist them and uh yeah just you want to be in full control of basic primitive forms and solid drawing I found this to be a much more intuitive form of drawing the figure in perspective because I can use that shoulder line as a Vanishing line whenever I'm animating I'm always using that Center Line of the form to figure out how my characters fit in space and even if I'm being super loose gestural and scribbly I'll often throw a Center Line in there just to figure out how the volume is fitting in space now let's go back and draw over those figures from earlier combining everything we've learned so far rather than separating out the forms of the rib cage and pelvis I'm just combining that into one solid object we can also use cylinders for the arms and legs but if you're struggling with solid drawing just use the shapes for now all right let's give this a go on some more figures uh we're going to just first look at the forms of the rib cage and pelvis separated it out so we can see how those are rotated and tilted in space and now let's draw this in a more intuitive fashion I'm using my line of action to curve that mass of the trunk and that Center Line is helping me visualize the character's body being turned in a 3/4 view in this figure I'm really going to emphasize the angle between the rib cage and pelvis even though it's obscured by the clothing it's important to be aware of it because emphasizing that angle between the rib cage and pelvis will make any pose more Dynamic let's do a couple more figures um now in this first one the camera is below looking up so everything is angled down to the right this is where the construction is going to be super helpful because without it it's going to be hard to map out where things are going to be in space it's also very important to study other artists and see how they incorporate these elements into their drawings I'll be doing a whole video on how the pose sells the personality of a character uh this was from my figure class where we ended up talking about that um all these poses from these Master artists like just completely sells the personality of the character all right that's about it for this video in the next one we're going to talk about proportions of a character and the range of motion if you liked this video and you enjoy the way I teach I'm way more thorough in my classes where I have three hours per session and get to spend a lot of time going through all these Concepts much slower than I did here the figure drawing and animation basics classes are now over um but the recordings of those will be available forever so if you want to pick those up feel free to do that at the link below I'll be doing a second part for the figure drawing class in October um and next year I'll probably do a repeat of each one of these classes so if you'd like to join in live uh just stay tuned for that thank you guys for watching and I hope to see you next time take care everyone