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0 pointsegypturnash12y ago0 comments

I'm recommending not just the Preston Blair book (which is a classic in the field), but a specific series of exercises by master animator John K that use it for visual reference.

These lessons are aimed at getting someone up and running with a solid knowledge of constructing a figure in three dimensions as quickly as possible. You can quite easily stack anatomy on top of this foundation and draw in more complicated styles than "1940s cartoon character"; it's useful to learn construction with those kinds of characters because they're basically little but their construction.

I do not by any means discount the value of anatomy lessons and text, life drawing, sitting out in public doing quick observational sketches, frame-by-frame analysis of video, going to the zoo to draw, or any of the other myriad activities that make up part of a serious art education. I did that, and so did everyone else I knew during my time in animation, no matter how stylized most of their final work was.

But I think these lessons are a great hand up over the huge gap between "I can copy what I see onto paper OK" and "I can draw any damn thing I please in any pose I like, with no reference beyond a few design drawings".

(tangential edit: I'm surprised to find another cartoonist here on HN and curious to see your work, but your website doesn't mention that at all, and Google turns up nothing. Any links? My website[1] is full of my stuff.)

[1]:http://egypt.urnash.com

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gk112y ago

Ah yes, so far I've kept my consulting and cartooning work apart, so the link isn't obvious. You can see my work here: http://www.gagcartoons.com/cartoons/?artist=grigoriy-kogan (Warning: Long page. Lazy loading jQuery is coming soon.)

They're magazine cartoons, published in Harvard Business Review, WSJ, Reader's Digest, Barron's, and other places. Some day very soon I will blog about this side business and its progress.

chipsy12y ago

As an amateur doodler, I agree. I've done the "work through books of anatomy" thing, but at the end of it I still had deformed figures which mixed detailed, textbook-correct anatomy with gross problems in proportioning and alignment - e.g. my upper torso would look okay by itself, but it would float a bit disconnected from the hips as soon as I tried to assume a more difficult pose. I had to use references for all poses to avoid this broken look.

My breakthroughs in representation were in large part based on following cartooning material. After that I was able to develop specific construction techniques using primitive shapes in new ways(different shape configurations, mixtures of 2D and 3D conception, inversions that make one shape the framework of another, etc.) that gave the resulting figures a more balanced, focused look. Since then my style has developed primarily around cartooning since it lets me play so fluidly with ideas.