THUMBS, THUMBS THUMBS: Been so busy, have not had time to paint! So! Late night, in order to get away from the computer, I sketch. What would LePardine look like? She is a tense savage so I was playing with body calligraphy and attitude. Years ago, when I worked at Disney Feature Film as a clean up artist, I would stay late on Fridays to see the pencil tests on the Scene Machine and study the drawings and animation. When I first came into Animation, I was trained as an Illustrator, pushed to give a fine line, a finished illustration; I loved the clean line. After cleaning up rough lines from the animators, I really fell in love with the rough line. So much energy and emotion come from the rough; in a good rough, everything should be there: the attitude, the personality, and of course the action. A bad clean up artist will suck the life out of a drawing, a really good clean up artist will "plus" it out. A black and white animated scene is just gorgeous to look at. With Glen Keane's drawings, he would search for the right line, playing, experimenting and it would be the clean up artist to pick the line that would read the best. Lots of energy in his drawings. With an animator like Sergio Pablos, his lines were so clean, when I would do the clean up on Delbert Doppler, most of the drawings were so perfect, I felt like a 5th wheel~this guy knew exactly what he wanted and left no room for anyone's intepretation. Some of the most amazing figure work I saw was when I studied the animation tests for Tarzan. Incredible exaggeration with anatomy with the figure. And color~color will kill a small percentage of how the character reads as opposed to how the rough black and white drawings reads. I was on the big crew of Milo from the film Atlantis. There was a scene where Milo figures out how to get a floating vehicle to work. In the black and white pencil test, Kita was in the background, having just explained how she had tried everything to get it to work, and the subtle expression on her face when Milo casually got it to work was just amazing. The look of being stunned, just blown away was somewhat covered up with the color. Didn't read as much as the test. Animator Randy Haycock did a superb job of an emotion that was so understated with just the right timed pause, it took my breath away. It all starts with the Thumbnails, do lots of them. It will increase your speed, make you think, give you varieties of drawings for the same concept pose.

Working on a project for my daughter. She has to make 15 animals for a "Web Environment". I told her I would help with the 4 legged deer like animals. Here are sketches of a Yak and a Turkmenian Markhor (a hairy looking goat). I've wired wrapped the frame and will apply with sculpey. I suck at wire frames, so I decided this is my grand opportunity to get better at it! These will be tiny; no more than an inch and a half high. Here, I am having great fun with the shapes. These sketches are drawn with reference.

Lots of freelance in the last week and a half...no time to work on my own things, BUT I can doodle inbetween times. Here's a page of quick sketches of the big cats~my goal here is to capture the "calligraphy" of the body design. With the big cats, there is lots of opportunity for squash and stretch~you can squash the hind quarters and stretch the front areas or vice a versa. You can twist the body in mid air. Big cats are animals with a flexible spine, which makes it fun to come up with many varieties of shapes. Make sure you get a flow in these animals, from the tip of the tail to the length of the body. My tool? Hello Kitty makes the best ball point pens! You can't beat the Japanese, these cheap pens have a fluid ink flow that goes and goes. This was all done without reference.