Foundations of Drawing Cartoon Characters for

Animation
5h 22m
Updated

8/31/2015
Released

8/31/2015
Learn to draw cartoon characters for classical cel animation, digital animation, comic books, or just for
fun. In this course, Dermot O' Connor reviews the basics of character drawing and the principals that
underlie effective characters: silhouette, exaggeration, squash and stretch, asymmetry, texture, line
weight, and more. Then he focuses on drawing individual body partseyes, mouths, hands, and hair
as well as different types of animals, creatures, and objects. Finally, watch Dermot take a drawing from
start to finish, creating a memorable character ready for handoff to animators.
Follow along with your favorite illustration program, your Wacom tablet, or paper and pen.
Topics include:

Drawing gesture and attitude drawings

Creating thumbnail drawings
Understanding line of action, negative space, exaggeration, and more
Drawing eyes and mouths
Drawing feet and hands
Drawing animals
Going from rough sketch to full-color drawing

Welcome - 56s
- Hi, I'm Dermot O'Connor, and welcome to Foundations of Drawing Cartoon Characters for
Animation. This course is an overview of the basic principles that you need to start drawing cartoon
characters. You don't need to know any computer programs to follow this course, you can follow along
with paper and pencil. Alternatively, if you have a Cintiq, or a Wacom or a tablet, you can draw on
those. First, we're going to go over the basic rules of thumb, the simple principles and guidelines that
underlay all good cartoon characters. Then, we're going to talk about the best way to draw body parts
like the eyes, the mouth, hair, hands, even clothing, and natural effects like water, fire and smoke.
Finally, we'll take a look at how to bring all these principles and techniques together to create a
finished, memorable character that we can draw. Now let's get started with the Foundations of Drawing
Cartoon Characters for Animation.

Understanding the exercise handout: Print it out!

- So that you know how I made this course, I drew it on paper and pencil. I took my sketch book up to
my favorite coffeeshop and I planted myself down on my favorite seat for two, three hours every day
and I just drew. A nice cup of coffee, relaxed, drew. And I recommend when you draw, when you
follow this course, you'd maybe try something similar. Get some paper and pencil, even if you do
follow along with the computer. So let me walk you through some of these pages. So these are from the
handout and I really recommend that the first thing that you do, if you want to do this course, is to print
these out.
They are basically a book and they'll be your own personal copy of this course. The beauty of having
them in this format is that you can see at a glance the content of the course and how important the
reference illustrations are. So we will go through this material in the course but having it all right in
front of you on paper is vital. So, I'm just gonna show you some more of these slides so that you have
an idea for the amount of material that I just dumped out of my head on to the paper, and then I've took
it all into Photoshop, beautified it, cleaned it up, darkened the lines, so this is really going to look
gorgeous.
And if you do print it out, try to print it out nice and big too. So, I've tried to squeeze out everything I
could remember over the last 25 to 28 years of my time in animation, that's been quite a time, so
principles of design, how to draw animals, how to draw pretty much every body or product I could
think of, strange creatures, and then, even taking the final step of the course to covering how to clean
up these characters, how to apply color to them, and how to create model sheets that are fit for a
production course or a production environment.
So that's the course that you have in front of you. These preview pages I've shown you are just a few,
the sheer volume of work, I think you have an idea, if we see this folder. So this is how many pages
there are in the course, it's a book. This is free to all members so print it out, have fun with it, and let's
get started.

1. Basics Overview - 23m

Body types, proportions, and construction
- Let's get started by taking a look at the basic character types that you'll encounter a lot in animation,
and these are general types that occur over and over again. So, for example, the little guy on the left
holding his hand up, you'll recognize that basic body type as Mickey Mouse, or Donald Duck, Bugs
Bunny, Daffy Duck, Roger Rabbit even have basically those proportions. And to the right of him the
baby, and notice that the head's more or less the same size, but proportionally the body's tiny. A huge
head and a tiny body.
These are the basic animation tricks that have been used to designate different kinds of age or
personality. And to the right of the baby, the heavy set or overweight character. To the right of him, we
have the long, lanky chap, and Goofy would be a good instance of this character. Although, you could
also use this body type to make a villain. Somebody very long and spidery, like Ebenezer Scrooge. To
the right of him we have the muscle man, and again, the proportions are what generate the muscular
character. He has a tiny head in proportion to the rest of his body.
A huge jaw in proportion to his skull, for example. Tiny waist in proportion to very, very broad
shoulders. And to the right of him, the typical more general male character, but again, the same
attributes as muscle man but less extreme. So, now we still have broad shoulders, narrow hips. Notice
how his knees are splayed out, and that's another signifier of masculinity or a male character. And to
the right we have the female, the generic female character. And again, a narrow waist, rather two wider
shoulders, and broader hips.
So, these basic recipes can be varied quite a bit, but these tend to recur a lot. But don't feel like you
have to slavishly follow these precise proportions. We can vary these enormously as you'll see later. To
illustrate that point, let's take one of these types, the long, lanky guy, and see what you can do with
those basic body proportions. So, we have a zany bird, a kind of a dopey looking dog, a very friendly
robot, and an alien, and I'm not quite sure if he's friendly or not.
So, as you can see the scope for variety is pretty enormous. There's no reason why the body has to be
those precise figures. The relative proportions are approximate, and so, don't be afraid of playing with
this or experimenting with it and perhaps coming up with something that's completely unique to you.
Before we go any further, always remember that we're not in the business here of drawing lines on a
flat surface, even though really we are. What we're trying to do is to trick the viewer into thinking that
they're looking at something real.
And look on the ball on the left, it's actually not a ball, it's a sphere. And you can imagine because of
the way we've treated it, that it's a dimensional object, it's not flat. And the object on the right looks like
basically a flat circle. So, we will come to this principle over and over again during this course. So, this

is your first introduction to it, but it becomes important very quickly. Here you can see how we
construct our characters out of a library of these basic three dimensional shapes. A cylinder, a bean
shape, a sphere, and a cube.
And on the top right you can see how we've taken the cube or the box and squished it and then twisted
it around, to give you a feel that these are quite dimensional and extremely flexible objects you can
play with. And on the bottom half of the page are our first introduction to how you begin to assemble a
character out of this basic library of forms. And finally before we go to the next step, just a reminder
that these characters have an anatomy, a basic relationship between each body part to each other body
part. So, I like to use the head as a loose way of establishing the height and the proportions of the
character.
So, the chap on the left is four and a half heads tall, and you can see his body is two heads tall, his legs
are one and a half heads tall. The one on the right is four heads tall. And I don't recommend you go
measuring your characters with rulers. I've had clients who do that. It's not a good approach because
these chaps are going to squash and stretch and be seen in different dimensions. But this is a loose
guideline for you to make sure that you don't get completely off model. So, now what I want to do is
show you how I would just draw one of these more or less from scratch so let's begin.
My process would be to have an idea about the top of the body and where I'm going to begin and end.
So, let's say he's going to be standing roughly around here. Top of the body around there. And I'm
going to have him standing in more or less a little curved pose. So, let's say we're going to give him
five heads tall, so roughly that's one, two, three, four, approximately. Again, I'm not getting out a ruler.
And I'm going to just eyeball in the ball area for the head. And I'm going to keep this guy fairly simple,
so let's just pick the everyman type character, the simplest, I think, of the ones to begin with.
And I'm giving him a ball for his head, a bean shape for his torso, and let's have the foot as a
continuous cylindrical shape to the ground, and let's see if we can just put another bean shape for the
foot here. And similar process on this one. I'm going to tilt it off just to one side just to give a little bit
of an angle or a twist. And let's see if we can have a hand on a hip or something interesting. Now, let's
imagine this arm as a cylinder.
And you can imagine they're bolted on to the body around there. And another cylinder here. And I'm
going to put a little bend on it. It doesn't have to be a perfect tube or anything. And I'm not going to
worry about. any great details on the hand. It's far too early to worry about that. So, let's just put
another bean shape there. And I'm going to have him do a little ta-da. So, at this point for a long,
straight held out hand, I think one long tube might suffice. And then another little mitten for the hand.
We'll deal with hands in far more detail later on, but something like that is fine.
And the neck will be another little cylindrical shape in there. So, that gives you an idea as to the first
step of setting down the character. And now to do things like get inner details like the eye line, same
process, we want to align on the sphere for the eye line. And if he's going to be looking up in this
direction, for example, then we'll draw the central line here. And don't forget these wrap around these
forms, so you can imagine them going all the way through. Imagine that the head is made of glass and

you can see all the way through it.

For many years I would actually draw a little bit through to the other side just to remind myself in case
I forgot that this was supposedly a three dimensional object. And same thing for the torso, we can begin
to put, like, the middle line here. If you want to designate a line for the waist, this would be a good time
to do it. And for a more muscular character, let's say you want to do a more square shaped character,
the process is much the same. I would use a box rather than a bean. You can still have a cylindrical
shape designating the neck.
There's no reason why the head has to be drawn as a ball. You could use a more boxy shape for that.
And I can still go back to cylinder for the upper arm if I want that. Sphere here that might suggest the
shoulder socket. And I just keep applying these shapes as I need. So, this might seem a little formulaic.
And I know when I began doing drawing in this style, this is the classic animation technique, I thought
maybe this is a little limited. Actually, it's very liberating because it gives you a basis and a structure
that you can then use to figure out if this drawing is going to work for you or not. And certainly at this
stage it looks very crude, very primitive almost. The sophistication will come later on when you learn
how to apply proper lines over these basic shapes to create nice looking designs. So, let's take a look at
a more finished version of one these drawings to see what it looks like. So, I spent a little more time,
not a lot more time, just enough to give you an idea about what you can really do with this technique.
And as you can see, I sculpted the arms a little bit just to show that it doesn't have to be quite so
brutally geometrical, but as you can see from the red chest area, the blue midsection, and the green
waist area, there's fundamentally very, very simple shapes beneath this apparently complicated design.
And that's how we use these tools, this simple library of basic shapes, simple shapes, to create drawings
and designs that look like they're not simple, that convince the viewer that they're looking at something
very, very complex.

Gesture and attitude drawings

- Gesture drawings are sketches that are done very quickly with the primary aim of conveying the
emotional or the intellectual activity of the character; are they happy, sad angry. And then below that
with the action what are they doing? So here we have an example of some gesture drawings. And as
you can see they're very scratchy, done very quickly. I didn't dwell on any of the inner details. You're
not going to see any hair on these characters or anything that isn't your mean to getting inside their
head. And some of them, more successful than others.
I mean you can say this one's ok, it conveys anger. But this one much better, look at this guy down
here. That's a really strong pose, it like we took this one here and just went way further with it. So the
whole point of doing these quick gesture drawings is that you get this big library of poses that you can
then draw on. So if I give you a scene to animate, that involves the character frustrated or overjoyed
with happiness. You can sketch out a whole bunch of ideas, before you begin to animate anything. And
you can do them quickly.
So let's see how. So to begin with I like to use this character to do just generic poses, as we're doing
here. I take the dough boy and we're going to draw him in this level of roughness. So as you can see it's
so rough and sketchy and quick you really don't have time to get to precious or worried about oh is this
exactly the right size. You shouldn't really be concerned with that level of accuracy at this point. The
whole point about this part of the exercise is to be fast and loose and free. And this illustrates my
general approach not always but a lot of the time to do a gesture drawing.
I like to start with a line of action that describes the curve of the body from the top of the head to the
feet. And then I'll block in the body or the head, depending on which I think is the most important. And
then I will finally add in secondary legs not supporting the weight but just to balance it. And then the
arms, in this case the arms are secondary cause they're not actually no weight-bearing, so their position
is dependent on the rest of the body. But as you can see this arm here is more significant than this one,
which is just hiding in the background.
So let's take a quick look at some of these gesture drawings. So as you can see close up they each make
pretty good transitions from one into the other. And they do convey a lot of what's going on. Not so
much this one, I don't know what this guy is thinking. I haven't succeeded in this pose in getting inside
his head. But at least we can see that he's walking in a slightly laid back manner. As you say earlier,
that's a very strong pose of rage. Here's another one. Here's one that's clearly thinking and puzzled. So
with that let me show you how I would go about doing a gesture drawing.
And I'll show you how quickly they can be done. So for this gesture drawing what I want is a big
theatrical ta-da pose. So let's set our range of motion, so the top of the head there the feet be roughly
about there. And he'll be obviously arched back a little bit. So heads going to be about one quarter of
the total body height. Don't have to measure this with a rule or anything. Just keep it nice and loose.
The legs will be about there. You have the general idea about the position of all this, so that will be

good enough. And that will be the main energy of this action will be going up this line here.
And let's do the background leg. As you can see I'm drawing fast and fluid I'm barely taking the pen off
the page. So let's make sure that we continue this line so we have a nice dynamic pose. And what you're
not seeing me doing is you're not seeing me doing lots of little scratchy lines. I'm working fast and
quick. And let's push that arm back in the depth into the background so we get a bit of dimension to it.
And put in a eye line if you want. Maybe a little hint of a neck.
And I think we're pretty good. So that's about it. So that's the level of speed that you should be aspiring
to reach when you do your gesture drawings. Now if you want to take a gesture drawing and really tie
it down and show the full attitude of the character. Let's see some examples of that. So what I have
done here is I've taken some previously done gesture drawings and I've just made a beauty pass over
them to tie them down. We call these attitude drawings or attitude poses. And these are drawings where
you get a good sense for the emotion of the character and like I said before their thinking process.
So just to give you a feel of this slightly more detailed version of a gesture drawing. As you can see as
we look at each of these get some very nice sense of the characters interior life. And this is the whole
point of this craft, it's to trick the viewer into thinking that they're looking are something that's actually
alive and that's not just lines on the screen. And as you can see this chap has fallen madly in love. So
that's the process of a gesture drawing all the way through to the finished attitude pose.

Thumbnails
- Now it's time to look at thumbnails. Thumbnailing is the art of planning out your scene on a sheet of
paper, so you can see all the different key poses at one time. If you're working in a different style of
animation, like 3D, CGI, Flash, or any other style you really can't get away from this. Not thumbnailing
is I think unthinkable and I'm going to show you why. So let's say I want to animate a scene where the
character stands on the ground and does something simple, they scrunch down and jump up into the air
with a big wahoo gesture.
We can just start drawing it, animating it, but the problem is where do you even begin? So I like to
begin with thumbnails. And the first thing we'll do is just on a sheet of paper, notepad, doesn't matter
what, draw your ground plane. And then I'm going to very quickly just sketch in our starting position.
And let's say he's looking up in this direction. You will notice I am not being precious about these
drawings, these drawings are really just here as rough guides for the poses and the timing.
The bare skeleton of the scene. This is going to be our first frame, call it one. Now at the next frame,
well, we can also actually start with the end frame, which will be somewhere over here. And I know
I'm going to have about six or seven poses, so I don't mind doing this right now. I can also go straight
ahead if I want, but let's just do it this way. If you're unsure how many keys you're going to have then
you might not want to tie down an end pose over here. So let's say he's going to end up in this position
and he's going to end up looking over here.
So the next pose will be an anticipation, he's going to go from this pose into an antic. So he's down like
this. Okay, that's the second one. Now I think from here to here maybe half a second, and if we're on 24
frames a second or 30 it will be something like frame number 13. I'm going to write that and circle it to
show it to key. Next frame was the push off, so this is this leg here that I'm drawing. And let's say this
will be a fast jump, so let's make that frame 17. If you want you can even add in little time charts.
So if you think the halfway point on this will happen on frame seven let's say you could do that. If you
want to slow out it's a nice way saying, okay, I want to ease out or slow out of that frame and maybe
ease into this one. That'll be number nine and 11. And if you're on one, you know you can two, three,
four, five, six. It's a traditional animation technique to animate on odd numbers, that's why you'll see
me doing it here. If you were animating on paper traditionally then that's a good habit to have. So that's
essentially how you do it. You can add notes in for things like arches, this will be the anticipation, so
I'll call that the antic.
And he'll be maybe jumping up this way, that's our push drawing. And maybe you want to hold that for
longer, if you wanted to hold that frame you might say hold that for six frames and change your
numbers down here. That is the process of making a thumbnail. Obviously it will take me too long to
do the remaining poses, so here's one I've done earlier. Here you see my completed thumbnail and I've
gone in a little tighter on this, but not so that I spent any huge amount of time on it. I mean, I may have
spent two minutes maybe tightening down each of these drawings, just so I could see a little more

detail on them.
But my first pass through this was very fast. And like I said, what you saw me doing in the previous
section was about as fast as I will do these thumbnails. And if I don't like a series of thumbnails, well,
that was only five minutes, six minutes, maybe 10 at most, I'll just try another one. And the beauty of it
is when you get it working like this it's really gone a long way towards animating the scene for you.
Complicated actions are fantastic in this style for the simple reason that you can see them all right in
front of you. And if you get lost inside a scene you can look at it from here, it's like looking down from
outer space, and you can see the whole thing in front of you in one sheet of paper.
So let's look at a more complex action. And in this case you can see that we have a character going
from the standing position, which you can see here. This ghosted image here is the anticipation, which
I've drawn directly over him, so it might look a little confusing, but essentially I just didn't want to
draw another pose floating over here. And then he goes down into this anticipation scene, again,
leading with the elbow. And then we work him into these series of contact positions. And these are the
walk cycle positions. Now this course doesn't cover animation as such, but still I want you to see how
you will apply these drawing methods into the animation pipeline.
And here you can see we have his leading right foot, which is on the next frame trailing, and now the
left foot is leading, and so forth, until we get into the end position where he comes into a full stop and
he's ready to open the door, or whatever it is he's about to do over here. You might find that this is a
little bit confusing to look at. Fortunately there's a great technique that I use, which is to color code the
left and the right leg, especially on thumbnail sketches like this, so that you don't accidentally turn,
animate, or draw, or thumbnail your right leg into your left leg, you can waste a lot of time doing that.
So let me show you what that looks like. So here I've taken the liberty of making the right leg blue and
the left leg red. And as you can see it makes the action a little easier to follow. So just focus for
example on the blue, or the right leg, and then let your eye move from pose to pose. And as you follow
the screen I think you'll be able to see, oh my god, that blue leg almost begins to move. And the same
thing with the red one. You can see that leading leg here, if you follow through your brain suddenly can
process it.
Let me go back to the proceeding image. What I've done here is to take this section of the thumbnail
and I've expanded it and gone in in much greater detail, because I really wanted to look at it and to
tighten it down a little bit further. And sometimes you might find, and again, let me go back in the
previous one, that this is getting too busy here. Look at this position on this leg here. There's really no
room to put any more drawings, because they're just too tight on top of one another. And so what we've
done is broken them out. And here is that pose. And I've added one, two, three between it.
So enables you to control this little down movement and also these horizontal lines, that's because I do
a lot of my thumbnailing on lined notepaper. It is fantastic to draw your thumbnails on lined notepaper
because you can really control your volumes, you can see that the head is two line widths tall and it's
not 100%, but it gets me pretty close. If you travel from skull to skull this one's getting a little smaller,
but no big deal. And my body as well.

You can see it enables me to stop the volumes from becoming completely inconsistent from one to the
another. So that's how I do thumbnails and it's my personal method. Different people have different
styles, so don't feel like this doesn't work for you, you can't invent your own. The important thing is
that you do thumbnails and you'll find that it takes a lot of the effort out of the back end of the
animation process and puts it at the front end of process where it's a lot more fun.

Composition and camera angles

- This course deals specifically with drawing animated characters and it isn't really so much about
doing animation or complex field, like storyboarding. But I don't want to send you off into the world of
drawing this stuff without at least giving you at least inkling about some of the issues that you'll
encounter that might invalidate some of the work that you're spending so much time on. So, at the top
I've made two simple sequences of storyboards of the same scene and on the top row it works. We have
our three characters.
The guy on the left is saying something and then we have a simple reaction shot. It's pretty dull anyway
but at least you can see what's going on. The problem is that this is what I would call zero-pose staging
where you have a default pose and this often happens in TV production now with CGI or Flash where
the rig is put onto the stage and we just animate from this basic, very dull pose. And the problem with
that is, well, it's faster but it's not better. And, if you look at the bottom row, what we've done
immediately is we've re-staged it slightly.
Nothing major in that first panel but we've moved each character into more of an attitude pose where
we're seeing some kind of emotional content. Secondly, we've opened the spacing between the three
characters so that now we have the guy on the right leaning on the big fellow and we have also a
diagonal composition. So you can imagine a triangle going from here, to there, to that apex and down
to this side. So this is already -- if you compare the top and the bottom images, it's a much more
interesting angle and, of course, we could even push it further if we wanted to.
But this is just to show you what a small change can make. Now, if you look at the second image on the
bottom row, now we've created something that's far more interesting. And again, we have a very similar
triangular composition from these characters but we're also seeing the back of this guy which focuses
our attention on the reaction of the people that are hearing him and not liking what they're hearing. And
then the final pose we have, again, rather than a zero-pose as we have in the original column and the
original row, we have a snigger. Which is much more difficult to do but it's also much more interesting
to look at.
So what we have here is a case of the principle of faster, better, cheaper. And as most engineers will tell
you, you have to pick two because it's very, very unusual that you get to pick all three of those options.
So it can be faster and better but not cheaper and so forth. So when you start doing your drawings
always take a moment to stop and think, am I drawing the scene from the correct viewpoint? Or maybe
the camera angle is completely wrong. And if the camera angle is wrong, it doesn't matter how
beautiful your drawing is.
All that work is wasted.

2. Understanding Drawing for Animation 1hr

17m
Line of action/reversals
- In this chapter, I'm going to show you heuristics. That's a very fancy word for a simple idea, rules of
thumb, lots and lots of little, very simple ideas that all have to work together so that the drawing looks
good and it isn't let down in some way. And the first of these rules of thumb is at the line of action. And
here I've sketched the line of action in red. You can see it on the left, and basically it's an imaginary line
from the top of the head to the base of the feet. And it shows the overall pose and attitude and the
maximum flex of the character.
And a strong line of action can really help you make a strong pose. And a weak line of action may often
lead to a weak pose. Not always, but it's one of these things that you have to watch out for. So let's take
a look at the next one. So this line of action, as you can see, isn't as dramatic as the previous one. It's
much more vertical, much more subdued. But we've still got a good, strong pose around it. And it's the
load-bearing that goes right down to the base of that foot. If you look at the foot, this one here, you'll
see that you can feel the mass of the body planted right on top of it.
And we do get a nice secondary line really going up this other foot here. And this isn't bearing any
weight, but you do certainly feel a motion up through that arc. And so let me show you some
alternatives that we can do with this. Using the same line of action, we could have the foot in this
position. We could have the foot in this position. So this isn't a robotic tool that says I must put the foot
here because the line of action commands me to. We could even vary the planted foot. We could bend
that leg a little bit it we wanted. There's all kinds of things we can do.
This is just one of those guides that it's a very good idea to have so that your pose has dynamism to it.
So let's move forward. And here's a really dramatic example, an S curve. I like to use S or C shaped
lines and not go too much beyond that because that can get a little fiddly. A good dynamic pose should
be like a blanket flapping. It'll go from a C shape to an S shape and reverse back again. And what you
see here, this procession, oftentimes I will draw the line of action first and then build the entire
character's body around it.
And here we have an example of this process in animation. And what we can see here in the top right
are these two contrasting curves going from one C shape to the opposite, and this is called a reversal.
And when you reverse the line of action, you get a very strong transition from one pose into another.
Let's see what this looks like. So that's our first pose and our second pose. So as you can see, going
from one to the other, you feel that flexibility of the spine. Let's look at another example, and this will
be a classic example where we have an S curve.
The boxer is all crouched up, and then on the second pose he gets hit. And again, notice the reversal

from the S to the opposite C shape. And here's what he looks like in one, the other. And if you were to
animate that and not have any drawings between these two, that would be an extremely powerful
impact. You would really feel that. So now let's do a drawing of our own built around a line of action.
So imagine a character who has had the worst day of his life. He has had a terrible time. So what I want
to do is let's establish where he's going to stand first, so the ground plane will be somewhere around
here.
And we want to draw him reasonably big, so maybe the head will be somewhere up in this area. And I
don't want him to be tilting off too far in this direction, so the line of action should be something like
this. So let's drop in the head. Let's establish the overall body size. And the line of action, you can
imagine it if you want continuing down here. And if he has hair, the hair could droop. If he has
clothing, the clothing will droop. We really want to pantomime the emotional state of the character.
So if he has even something like a hat with a feather in it, I would even droop the feather, for example,
just to really lay it on. So let's draw in the body. The body will be just the, I'll do a simple one here, just
a little peanut shape or a little bean. And then I'll do the leg. Going to make our brush just a little bit
bigger so see it better. And this is fairly fast. I'm not being too precious about this. Even though the line
of action's going here, we don't have to build everything around it. We can have hands that are on a
slightly different curve, but they're still droopy.
They're still telling us sad, bad day. And we might imagine he's walking or in some other position. But
the main line that my brain is following is curving roughly around here. The other thing I want to focus
on when I'm drawing this is just getting into a flow, so I'm starting to loosen up now, you can see. And I
might even just rub out that back hand for a second. I think it's feeling a little cluttery or weird. So let's
just maybe have it on the far side of the body.
And if he has a nose, oh dear, oh, sad. So that's the process that I would use to build up a pose like this.
And let me just drop in that line of action in red so you can really see it. So that's how you would use
this line of action to give you a skeleton or a structure, a form that you can build your character around.

Silhouette and negative space

- It's very important to think about your character's silhouette. What does the character look like if you
don't see or perceive any internal detail? Is it possible to understand in general what the character is
doing and thinking purely based on their outline? And the stronger your silhouette, the better. So this
has got a good, strong line of action but it also has a very strong silhouette. So again here, easy to see.
If you just look at the guy on the right, you can see that's a droopy, sad walk and chap on the left,
obviously the same thing.
But even if all we saw was the black area, you have no problem knowing exactly what's going on and
exactly how he feels. The classic baseball pose. And again, even this broad action is completely
readable, and that's largely achieved because we have a good, strong space here that's left open. And if
the arm was cluttered and we fore shortened that bat a bit, it might be very difficult to read that action.
So that keeps it nice and clean. We also have an open space here between the legs. Now this is an
example of a kind of pose that can be very difficult And I freely admit this silhouette on the right here
is very hard to read.
You can sense in general that he's not a happy person, but the craven kind of position on the left, it's
definitely readable, but what this area is, I couldn't tell you from looking at the black. It's a bit of a
puzzle. So if a person is clenching their arms close into their body like this, you may not be able to get
a strong readable silhouette for some of these. But it still behooves you to try to get the strongest one
that you can regardless. Now another issue to watch out for is negative space, and the negative space is
the area that isn't the body, the area that's around the body.
And here's a good example. We have the A describes the open area and the shapes. Just look at the
white space that's around here. And is this an interesting space? Is the area around the body, the space
that isn't drawn, is it interesting? And it's created of course by the body, and that's why we call it a
negative space. It's what it isn't. Your negative space also has to be strong. And we have the B area
here, or the enclosed spaces that occur when you have hands on waist or maybe the leg crosses the
other leg. And you have open space as described by the letter C, and you want to watch these to make
sure that they're not boring.
Now these are designs almost in their own right. And here we have an example of what I consider to be
something to watch out for. It's when your negative space, and that's this white area here, becomes so
tiny that it becomes eye catching. And if you move further away from the screen, you'll really see what
I mean by that. The danger will be that that becomes so small, it becomes just one or two or three
pixels. And at that point, I find it annoying. So the solution to that, there are two. The first solution is
just nudge the offending limb in just a little bit so that that space just disappears completely.
Or pull it out so that the space becomes decent. So this is an interesting space, this little triangle. It's
nice to look at. This isn't, so if you look at these in motion, there's the annoying one, here's the nudged
in, and here's the nudged out. And go back again. So that's the one I would like to fix. And that's

solution one, or if you prefer, solution two. So you have two ways to go with it. As long as you make a
strong statement, not a weak one. And another technique that we use when closing off these areas, and
this really goes back to the good old days of hand-drawn animation, when we would be painting these
on sheets of cel.
Some of these negative spaces will become troublesome, so you make a little X to designate the fact
that these areas are open space. Do not paint that with a color, in other words. This is meant to be
transparent. So if you're working on a drawing or a character that's going to be cleaned up or painted on
the computer, this is still a very useful trick to use. And flagged, these Xs can then be painted out when
the rest of the image has been colored. And here we have an example of a final work where you see all
of the preceding principles being applied.
And as you can see, purely by looking at the chap on the right, he is running in absolute terror,
frightened for his life. And without a single interior detail, you know exactly what's happening. So let's
do one of these and see what's the process. So first thing, let's put the ground plane in. And I want to
have a character who's kneeling down on his front leg and scratching his head. So it sounds like a bit of
a puzzle, so let's break it down so it's not so much of a difficulty. So I want to have the leading foot
planted about here. And we know he's going to be kneeling forward, so we can use this.
This is the primary point that I really can't do much about. We know he's kneeling, so that's going to be
to there. Now the line of action will be something like this. Let's work with single strokes for now. And
I think the head will be somewhere around here. Not too far forward or he'll look really off balance and
out of proportion. That's about right. And I think, let's have the leading arm resting on his knee right
here. And if you've seen these cop shows where the detective is kneeling over the corpse, and what
happened here, this is the kind of scene we're looking at.
Before I do another stroke, let's flip this image horizontally. Now if you're following along on paper
and pencil, just do what I did when I was building this course, hold the paper up to the light so that you
look through it and see it from the other side. What happens when you do this is you get an instant of
being able to see the drawing with a fresh eye. And what happens when you do a drawing for a certain
amount of time, you go blind to it. You get so used to your initial design that you lose the ability to see
it fresh. And when you do this, you get this really amazing instant where you can just see it almost for
the first time.
And then all the mistakes can jump out at you. And I've saved many drawings and myself from
embarrassment by doing this. And it's a long-time trick that we used to do in the old days. You would
turn the paper over on the drawing board, put on your back light, see all your mistakes, correct your
mistakes on the reverse side of the drawing and flip it back over, and then you had your drawing
solved. So add this little trick to your tool kit. So all I'm going to do now is just flesh him out a little bit.
And what you can see now, we have nice enclosed spaces here and here.
And those are strong areas. And we have another open space here that's also very strong. So let's take a
look at this guy purely in silhouette, see what he looks like. So this is extremely quickly. I've just gone
in and inked in the interior of the character. And the important thing to ask yourself when you look at

this is, is this pose readable? Do I know what's going on? And in this case, yes. So although the pose
could be stronger, like I could arch the back a bit more and put a little more drama into it, it works. This
is a functional silhouette, good, strong negative spaces.
And please do keep this in mind when you are doing your drawings so that you don't do drawings that
are too closed in and mysterious. The action should be clear at a distance.

Counterpose/torque
- Our next rule of thumb is the idea of counterpose or torque. So here's a character with none at all. He's
just standing there front on. There's nothing really interesting happening here. This is your classic
model sheet pose where, if you're building your character, this is usually the kind of pose you want. But
if you're doing something that's dynamic in action, you don't want this. So let's see first of all what's
going on under the skin. So here we can see the hips and the waist as I imagine them as two little
cardboard tubes and they're connected by the vertical spine.
So in this example, as I already said, there's nothing interesting going on. They are parallel to one
another. If you could rotate these around in space, you would see they're perfectly aligned on every
axis. And here they are side by side. So if we do a pose that's a little more dynamic than that, then what
we have is the torque or the counterpose. We're beginning to twist these tubes out of alignment, and
here's what they're doing under the skin. And what you'll notice is that each tube is moving, in this case,
in a very different direction and, it's also note, creating a little S curve on the spinal column.
You have this tube facing out in this direction. This tube is facing out in that direction. And this is the
body's way of maintaining balance or equilibrium. Things tend to counterpose each other so that if one
part of the body is out of alignment or shifting its weight, the other part will twist to compensate for
that, and this is how we can walk without falling over. The other principle that this creates a sensation
of movement, even in a static image. If you look at Michelangelo's sculptures, for example, you'll see
in these figures that they've twisted the hips and the shoulders and you get this spiral effect.
It seems like there's motion that's twisting up and around and coiling around the body. Now this
principle is really important in walks and runs, and if you don't apply it to your walks and runs, there's
a very good chance that they'll look very limited and stiff. And here you can see I've colored the left
side of the body red and the right side blue so that it's more easy to read the action. And essentially they
counterpose on every axis so as this part is down, this part is up. If this part is up, this part is down. As
this hip is forward, this shoulder is forward.
And as this hip is forward, the same shoulder is backwards. So they're opposing and countering each
other through the major poses or the contact poses of the walk cycle. Let's see how that looks when we
overlay them. So even with these two poses, you can see how we can create a very dynamic and
believable walk cycle. And here we have a standing pose very similar to the very first standing pose I
showed you but the difference is with this one, we've applied some very subtle counterpose or torque to
the armature, to the skeleton and that's enough to break us out of that dead model sheet pose.
So now let's see how we apply this idea of torque or counterpose to a big action scene. In this case I
want a character who's, say, throwing a ball. So first things first, I want to know where he's standing so
let's get a ground plane. And we'll put his foot somewhere around here so he's planted that on the
ground. And I want him to throw the ball and have his arm somewhere around this point of the screen
and the ball will be leaving his hand around there. So that gives us something like a line of action like

that and now we can begin to build the rest of the figure around that.
Now remember this is his hand so his shoulders are going to be around here, hips are going to be
around there, and head will be somewhere around here. So let's draw in the shoulders and the right arm
will be throwing the ball. So I'm just going to block in. Nothing more than that, just a glorified mitten.
And the hips I'm actually going to have them more or less rotating the same way though the hips will
be tilting towards us and the shoulder actually just a little bit more.
So they're still twist. They're both facing out in the same direction and they don't have to always be in
opposition to one another. In this case, we have a rotation on the hips and an even bigger one in the
same axis on the shoulders and that's because we're getting this one huge big throwing motion towards
us. This leg here, let's have that trailing back because that's kicked off the ground further away in space
over here. So let's draw in that foot. And his left arm isn't doing anything except counterbalancing, so
let's just give it like a little position there.
And I'll draw an eye line just to have an idea of the tilt of the head but don't go drawing in eyes. That's
a complete waste of your time. The whole point of this level of drawing, this phase of the process, is to
just get the essence of the action in, do a little bit of cleanup. So now that we have that done, let's use
our flip horizontal trick and I'm just going to look at it horizontally. And this gives me an instant of
freshness to see if this is really what I want. And what's throwing me about this is this curvature. He
feels a little too far forward, not a lot, just a little.
So what I want to do is put a slight bend in his knee. That looks much better already. So this flip
horizontal trick is really a great tool and I use it an awful lot. And it really helps you from those points
in the drawing when you just go blind to your own mistakes. So if you have a digital program, you can
set your shortcuts up to do that. Photoshop, GIMP, Kreta, all these different programs have their flip
horizontal tools built in. If you're drawing on paper, do what I did when I was doing this course. I drew
it on paper. I would hold my drawing up in the coffee shop up to the sunlight, and have people think I
was a crazy person, but then I would see the mistakes coming through the reverse side of the paper, and
if you have a mirror, same thing.
So that's how I would do that. Now let's a little red line over this so I can show you what's really
happening with the torque on these hips. So there's our tube. If I was looking down that would be tilting
towards us about this much. And this tube here is coming forward a little more. We're seeing a twist on
the spine. And if I was looking straight down on that, it's just even just a little bit further towards us. So
that's our twist, and that's our down shot on the body.
So again there's no reason why these have to be in opposition to each other. One is moving towards us
and the other is moving even more towards us but that's what's giving this great feeling of energy in
this throwing pose. So remember counterpose torque will be a huge assistance in keeping your
drawings alive.

Exaggeration
- An important principle in animation is the art of exaggeration, and that's taking your existing pose and
pushing it a little further to see what you can get away with. Even if you work in a very realistic style,
it's still important to be able to do this. If you've seen very naturalistic movies, you might notice some
of them look a little creepy, and that's because they've been traced too closely over live action
reference, and they haven't been exaggerated enough by the animator. Exaggeration can be tricky.
Let's see how we do it. Here we have a nice pose. I'm sure a lot of people would say, "That looks really
great." Let's see, if we push this thing a little bit. That's an initial exaggeration pass. What I've done is,
I've taken it from the original pose and forced out the line of action. I'm probably gaining a little bit of
volume on the body. I'm not terribly worried about that at this stage. This is really to show the principal
of just pushing a pose. We can always fix these little things later. From here to here. But here's the
question: can we go any further than that? Let's see if we can.
I've taken my drawing into Photoshop, and if you're following along on paper, you can put a clean sheet
of paper down over your original drawing. Whatever drawing you're using, as long as you can use the
preceeding drawing as a reference image. What I want to do is see if I can push this thing a little bit
further. Let's keep this foot planted here, but I will lift this foot here a little bit off the ground. Now I'll
start loosening up a little bit. Let's see if we can push the line of action.
Pull the head back. Bring that forward a bit. Because I have the underline drawing, I can be a little
cleaner than I have been up until now. We're lifting that foot off the ground via shadow there. Drawn
Harry will be a little taller. Just slightly. Stretching that leg a little bit. I'm going to bring that shoulder
up. This is a good thing to remember.
See what I'm doing with the shoulder? I'm taking this underline shoulder here, and really pushing the
bone out a little bit. I'm going to pull the arm forward, just slightly, so we open this negative space. I'm
not going to be drawing fingers just yet. I want to be able to see this. If you find that the underline layer
is cluttering you a little bit, I'm working in Photoshop, so what I'm going to do is reduce the opacity a
little bit, making it harder to see, rather.
You can see more of our drawing than this other reference drawing. This time, on this hand here, I'm
really going to pull that thing back, all the way. Again, just draw the hand as a glorified mitten. I'm not
going to worry about fingers just yet. The question is, do we tilt the head back this way, or this way? I
think we can get away with something really exaggerated, and keep it squished in.
Now, let's switch off the layer beneath, the reference layer, so we can see this by itself. To me, that
looks like a really exaggerated pose. Let's see the finished version. I'll spend a little more time cleaning
this up, and let's take a look at what that looks like. This was our first pose, and this was our second
pose that I showed you, and the one that I've just completed and cleaned up is this one. As you can see,
I've continued to push the arc of the spine to open up this space. Let's toggle back and forth so we can
see these. First. Second.

Third. They even animate them. You could almost use the three together if you wanted to. They move
together pretty smoothly. You'll also notice I've added in a little bulge here around the bum, and really
pushed the arch of the back. In this case, I've pulled the head forward. The whole body I've even
pushed further forward than in the sketch I did for you. Of course, as you can see, I've added a few
more details on it, so that we can see the overall action, but again, at this point, feel totally free to work
with a very lose gesture line.
We're gaining a little bit of size on the head, but this is a very rough phase of the process, and this is
really about communicating pose, attitude, and silhouette, and all the rules of thumb I've been showing
you. Here's an example of the pose that's gone too far. How far can you push an exaggeration? Well,
you can't push it this far. This kind of pose might work in a very fast animation, if it was a frame
running past your eye at 24 frames a second, but obviously you couldn't do something as extreme as
this. Exaggeration has it's limits, and here is the limit.
Here we have the four poses together, so you can compare. Now we'll take a look at a face. The same
principle applies to facial acting. We'll be getting into this much later on, but I just want to raise it right
now to remind you that this is a universal principle. Here's our angry animator, and here he is a little
angrier. How far can we go? We can go quite far indeed. There are very rough and crude, but basically
to show that the principle of exaggeration has to be remembered at all times.

Squash and stretch: Understanding volume

- When you animate a character, when you draw the character, even if you're drawing a storyboard
panel, it doesn't have to be moving, there's going to be times when you want this guy to squash and
stretch or deform in various ways. When you do that, you have to be very careful that you maintain the
volumes, that the mass of the character isn't gaining or losing weight, or volume, as we call it in
animation. Let's take a look at these. I'm going to show you what these look like when we go through
them in animation mode. Here's the first drawing, so let's go through and see what this looks like.
As you can see, it's a pretty simple action. I'm going to go back through it again, in reverse now. So,
that's our first. Squashed into the anticipation. That feels like a pretty good transition. He might be
gaining a little bit of volume, but so much of it is hidden behind the head. This is the kind of thing that's
quite, I think, cheat-able. On the next drawing, here's where I have a problem. I think on this one, on
this stretch, he's losing a little bit. And if we go from the squash to the push to the gather at the top, it
does really feel like he's losing a bit of weight there, and that shouldn't be happening.
It might be an illusion, because of the extent of the stretch, but really we're talking about perception,
here. So it's very important that we pat him out a little bit. Let's keep going. Might be losing a little
volume on that one as well. Not much. I would also flag that for closer inspection. I think he's solid
here. That seems consistent with what we had. Again, the head covers so much of that red area, that
even if there is a slight volume gain, I don't see how anybody would notice it. There are no inbetweens
between these key frames.
Were there a lot of inbetweens added, then these volume shifts might start to become really noticeable.
Let's go and fix this guy, this troublemaker. Normally if I were animating this on paper, if I had a stack
of paper in front of me, I would do this correction on this particular drawing, not on a single sheet of
paper with seven drawings on it. But I think it will be clearer to demonstrate it here, exactly what we're
doing. I'm going to go into this drawing here and give him just a little bit of extra volume.
Also, this has the advantage of giving him a little more structure as well. I think we were losing a little
bit of this bulge of the lower pear shape, or this bean shape, whatever you want to call it. I think
something as small as that, believe it or not, I think that will be enough. And, likewise, on this one here,
I'd like to pull out his spine just a little bit. You could also even change that line so he would change
that pose, but I think we'll go with what's here. That may be enough.
Let's smudge that red, so it looks a little cleaner. Ok. It's looking better already. I still think this guy
looks a little thin, so I will continue with him, and just add a little bit of a belly on him. I don't like how
it's hitting that knee and all these lines are congealing together, and that looks unsightly, so the solution
to that would be to change the knee, just pull it out a little bit. Something like that. I would still target
that, and tighten that up a little bit. I'm not happy with it. But that's just a very quick demonstration for
how we can watch volumes, control them, and prevent your character from looking like he's magically
losing weight or gaining weight.

Let's look at some more examples of this. Here we have the same principle, and as you can see, I've just
pushed it way beyond what we saw on the previous jump scene. This would be ideal for something like
a Looney Tunes, Warner Brothers, classic 1940's Tom and Jerry, where the character has stars coming
out of their head when they get whacked, or whatever. Here is a more typical, standard animation look,
and the same principle can be applied to the face. In this case, we have a broad dialogue scene. We're
going from a closed mouth to a wide open mouth, and taking great care that we're not gaining or losing
volume on that stretch.
Here we have them side by side. And the final example of squash and stretch would be on the bone of
the skull. Because the skull is bone, it's a much harder material than the fleshy mass of the jaw, so it
doesn't deform as easily. It takes far greater force for your skull, in animation, anyway, to change its
shape. I would actually never even draw an image like this. I would leave this out and draw the frame
after the impact. But this it to illustrate the point that if you want to squash the bony mass of the skull,
it's really good if you have a much stronger kinetic impact to justify that.
Otherwise your character might look a little bit wobbly, like some of the stuff you saw from the 1920's,
when everything was flopping around, and didn't seem to have any physical reality to it at all. So, that's
the principle of squash and stretch and volume, and how it pertains to controlling your drawing.

Straight vs. curves and parallels

- One of the principles we take for granted today in animation design and cartoon design is the
principle of straights against curves, and when they began to animate in the 20s, because their skills
were so weak, there was a tendency to avoid pointy edges, so they made everything rubber hose,
everything was round. And this is a very cute and endearing style but it can be very difficult to get nice
designs out of it, so animators, as their skills grew, they became more bolder by adding straight lines,
and their designs became stronger so let's take a look at some of these.
Here's a slightly more modern style and as you can see, we have a very different way now of drawing
something like an arm, and the principal change is the application of straights against curves, and here
we see curved lines at the upper side of the arm and much more straight lines, and when I say straight, I
don't mean ruler straight, I mean much more relatively straight lines than what you see on top, and
these will often correspond to the anatomy, the bone structure and muscle structure beneath.
In general but not always, I would tend to put a straight line closer to where the bone is. If you hold out
your arm, for example, and push your fingers against the underside of your arm, you'll feel it contacting
bone much more quickly than if you contact the top where most of your muscles are, so this one,
therefore, tend to correspond with bone structure and this will tend to correspond with the softer, fattier
or more muscular areas. Of course, there are times when a muscular area can be taut, in which case, it'll
be straight, but this is my general default setting unless something else changes.
And you'll even see like a straight line here. I'm going to just put some marks over it to correspond with
this bony cheekbone, and then the back of the neck is bonier so we have a straighter line there, and the
beauty of this is, notice the arrows, these signify that the variations that you will find, therefore, in the
internal space of the design going from wider to thinner, back to slightly larger again to thinner again,
and this also applies right down to the fingers. You see straights and curvy lines.
If I was to draw a finger up closer, for example, we'll see curves on the inside where it's squishy and
straights on the outside where it's not squishy. That's the principle. And here see the library of basic
combinations. We have straights against straights. Next to that, curves working parallel with curves,
this is your classic rubber hose-type leg. We have a curve against straight, we have a concave curve
against a straight, and we have two curves against each other and on the bottom right, we have offset
them slightly so you get a very branchy-looking shape.
I must stress that this isn't a case of right or wrong. All of these combinations are appropriate in
different circumstances, so don't feel that I can't use this because it's straight against straight or it's
parallel. There are times I like to use parallel lines if I'm especially on something stylized or graphic, it
can be very useful, or something mechanical, very useful. So the important thing to remember is to use
these combinations where they're appropriate. And once again, here's another case where we have
straights against curves, and here we have the underside which I'm imagining will be pulled taut.
We have all of his muscles on top. We have a nice contrast here between straight against curve. The

knee joint will be bony, and I would think, straighter. We have all the nice fleshy muscle and all that
juicy stuff on the back of the leg, the front of the leg, the shin bone, that should be straight. I can't see
that being rounded. So, the important thing to remember here is that we're not using these straights
against curves as I've seen them used sometimes as mannerisms where people just start throwing down
things, but they're putting them in a place where they really don't belong based on the object that
they're drawing.
It can be bit of a mannerism, a style, affectation. I like to use them where I think the object justifies
placing them, and so therefore, the spine is here. I think we'll probably have a spinier-looking line
there, a straighter line, and if I get it wrong sometimes, well, it's a wrong guess, it's a wrong decision
but it's not an arbitrary one that I just made because I thought, "Oh, I think I'll just "bolt down a straight
line in that point "because it looks cool." So do try to think about the anatomical structure that's
underpinning your card or design.
Hands are a beautiful example of how you can use curves against curves, not just straights against
curves, but two curved lines countering one another and here on the fingers, for example, we have the
inner line of the finger doing this and the outer line of the finger doing that counteracting curve, and
you could even put a little straight in there if you want to signify that the knuckle joint, and then
another straight on the fingernail area, and then another curve there. So as you can see, we're already
getting that ancient and venerable classic look that you saw in the old Disney cartoons like Jungle Book
and 101 Dalmatians, and a lot of the Don Bluth movies, the early ones.
They had this very strong visual style and a lot of people wonder, "How'd they do that?" A lot of it was
an understanding of the anatomy beneath the lines that they were making. Here's another quick
example and this time I've color-coded all of the straights as red, and all the curves as blue, and so it's
this contrast and I want to be crazy with this one. I thought, "How far can I push it?" and he certainly
looks kind of stylized, so you can always go in if you want it more straight lines, for example, or
"straight-er", you might add a few more for variety and it's this transition of curves from one to the
other that can really create some interesting shapes.
Curves against curves, we saw them earlier used in fingers. They're also fantastic for natural objects
like branches. Some kind of natural forms like water where you're dealing entirely with curved areas,
and in this case, I'm imagining this as a water form, but a tree branch is ideal. It's a curve and then we
offset the curve so we would try to avoid drawing them like this, for example, unless there was a
specific need. It's really nice if you can offset these joints a little bit and that creates an amazingly
varied shape and now we have this inner space that's going from fat to thin and back to fat again, and
then you can simply vary these shapes, one against the other to get a very illustrator-like look.
I'm just very quickly sketching that just to give you an idea of the negative shape. As you can see, we're
already getting some very interesting visuals from a very simple application of curve against curve.
Now how this applies to character design. These are just simply three examples from a continuum of
approaches going from curved designs to straight designs to a combination of both. Look at the guy on
the left and you'll see almost no straight lines, and his teeth are fairly straight but for the most part, all
of the lines constructing that character are curves, and this can create kind of a bubbly effect.

He seems to be a little blobby. And, don't get more wrong, there are times when you want that, when
you might want somebody that's very round, doesn't have a lot of hard edges sticking out of them. The
guy in the middle, he looks like something that we saw animated in Eastern Europe during the 1980s.
There's a lot of very super-stylized animation that came out of the studios there, and it's a style and it
has the look to it, and this is, obviously, I've made a particularly austere example where I didn't use any
curves at all, and on the right, there's a combination of both of these, and you'll see in here, for
example, a straight line here, curve for the butt area, I've got a straighter line here, curve on the outside,
and you can go through the entire thing and see everything I've shown you before, straights against
curves, and a "straight-er" line here at the back, and a slightly curvier one there, and this gives you the
classic animation look.
So, where you design your character along the spectrum is entirely up to you. Don't feel like, "I have to
use "this particular style," or "It doesn't look good." Different aspects of curvy design and straight
design may be appropriate for the project that you're working on so be flexible with how far you take
them. So very quickly I'm just going to show you some examples of each of these, so we have our
curved line, and if I was making one from scratch, you could, obviously, draw your other curve beneath
that.
It gets a little teardrop-y but you can get some really beautiful shapes by crossing these over in slightly
different patterns. Let me do another one of them. I'll just fatten that line a little bit so you can see this
better. And now look at this shape area that's been created. It's very interesting, it's going from thick to
thin, and so you can continue this process in all kinds of ways. You're creating curves all over the place
but the internal shape is not parallel.
The internal shape is varying from thick to thin. It's a very nice look. So you can use this to create rope
and hair volumes and any kind of flowing object. Steam, use your imagination, go wild. You can apply
this principle of these tapering curves, and if you're limited to straights, let's imagine that you're
drawing a straight arm. Again, my advice would be, if possible, if it's appropriate, there's no reason
why you have to have parallel lines between them all. You can make interesting shapes by varying the
width of the internal spaces, so here, we have...
it's dangerously curved there, I'm trying to use two straights for this guy. Right here, we're just sticking
to straight lines, but again, we have thicker here, thinner there, even thicker wrist, we could've gone
thinner again. We can vary that. Even the fingers are getting fatter at the top. So again, as you can see,
it gives you a very different feel from the roundy bits. It's a different look and you can incorporate this
to different degrees. And so I'll just draw some quick hands. Quickest way when I draw a hand, I really
don't even worry very much about straights or curves. I'll just put in the basic form, and then, if I want
to add definition, then I'll go in and add the different curve lines on top of that where I think they're
needed, and again, notice how I'm just drawing the basic outline for the hand.
I'm not going to involved in any great detail in there. So if I want to make variations on that, again, I'll
just draw down that basic lines first, box with a hand, and let's say I want to do, say, a bodybuilder with
some steroidal muscle mass or some astonishingly different anatomy, then I'm still building this over
my original structure beneath, but as you can see, I'm creating a very different design using the same

tools, so these two arms do not look like they're attached to the same person, and you can keep going
with this, applying whatever system of curves and straights that you think is appropriate.
Something a little more feminine, elegant. So that is the universe the world of straight lines and curved
lines, and how you can use these strokes to create completely different characters and looks.

Breaks on curves
- This technique is a really subtle one, very powerful, especially if you're character is one of those very
roundy, curvy ones. And then you have the problem of how do I make this thing look interesting? So
what I've done is I've made two pretty crude, nothing fancy here, but two very simple rough pencil
strokes. And what we want to do now is take a look at how we might make these strokes a little more
interesting. So the main technique that we use to do this is called putting a break on that curve. And let
me show you before, after. Before, after.
And what I've done is right here at this point and this point, very subtly made a slight break, just an
alteration on that trajectory of the arc so that it slightly changes. And here's the difference. You can see
the original on the right side in red and then where I've inserted the break. That's it, that's a break on the
curve. And now let's go on to see some practical applications of this technique. So here we have a
classic round face and very few truly straight lines on this.
I see one here for example, but other than that, pretty much most of these strokes are, and here's
another straight one and one there. But the big ones, the really huge ones that you notice, they're all
curves. But yet he doesn't feel totally like a blob, and the reason being for that is that we have breaks.
We have one here, of course we have a pretty noticeable one there. Even subtle ones on the eyebrow
here, and you'll notice this one, of course. And if you look carefully, you'll probably find another couple
of points where these arcs do not move on a completely perfect curve.
And here's another one. And it's this technique that allows you to suggest that this object isn't just a big
blob of liquid, that it actually has some physicality or mass or muscle to it. And that's what this break
suggests to me. When you see that curve suddenly do a slight change, it suggests structure, it suggests
that there's something more than just a big blob of something that's all equally spaced.
Not all the particles are exactly the same density. This is a far more interesting shape. And so this
technique has to be applied thoughtfully so that you think, okay, where would the break go? Where's
the most sensible place for it? And again, don't apply these willy-nilly for the sake of doing it. Think,
what is the appropriate position? So likewise here on the brow, perfect. So let's look at some other
examples. So this kind of character is a perfect example of a challenge because all the major features
are circular, and I've worked on projects that had characters like this, and believe me, it was a struggle
to get an appealing design out of it because everything that you had to work with was curvy.
So again, the breaks become crucial. And let me just point out a few again. We have this point, we have
another one here that suggests the structure on the brow. Here's a clear one right here on the upper
eyebrow. This one is very important here because this delineates the eyelid, the upper eyelid. And
where this works into this curve here is actually the eyeball, and we will be dealing with this in a later
chapter. Let's see, we have the, of course, this immediate change here on the angle of the cheek. There's
another one, of course, on the other side.
Lip here, very subtle. Another one here. I think those'll be the ones that stand out definitely the most.

The only lines in here that I would describe as a straight would be this one. And this one is even a little
curvy. You have, even these are all curvy shapes. So the fact that you only have curves to work with
doesn't mean that you can't generate really interesting looking designs. So here's one more example,
and it's the classic foul staff type, the rotund, happy character. And these again are big challenges to
work with.
We have some more straights on this one than on the previous examples. But again, the curves to watch
out for would be here, I see another one right there. And elbows, of course, they'll be the big points
where you'll want to have changes in the curves because they suggest the major anatomical functions.
Here and of course the knee. And there's even a bend here. So you could keep going through this
drawing and finding a few more of these breaks because I'm at the point now where I've done this for
so long, it almost comes automatically.
You almost stop having to think about it because you've put these breaks in these kind of places so
many times that you stop having to focus on it quite so much, which doesn't mean it ever becomes
completely automatic, but you do become more comfortable with it. You find out the hot spots where
the breaks are going to go, and you always watch out when you have a round shaped character to find
these points because they liberate you from that tyranny of the 1920s rubber hose.

Vary shapes, asymmetry, and texture

- One of the important principles about designing characters is the use of texture. The fact that your
details shouldn't be completely regular in they way they're laid out, at least if you want your character
to look natural. If you want a natural style, you want to avoid things like this. Look at these three lines.
These creases look like the letter W or E. They just don't look natural, whereas the one on the right is
being spaced a little more unevenly, and this creates the kind of thing that you see in reality. Reality is
fractal.
It has varying levels of detail. And you have areas of high detail and areas of relative low detail. You
want to capture this essence in your work. And you could even push this a little bit further. For
example, this line here in the middle, you'll notice that it's a little bit on the even side. They look the
same length, so you could even make it a little bit longer if you wanted to vary that a little more. And
we can see the same principle applied to these eyes here. Look at these creases and see how they're
evenly spaced. And this one is worse still.
It's flat on. It looks flat, but that makes it look graphic. If you want graphic that's great. If you want
naturalistic or more traditional animation look, you really need to be going for this feature here on the
right. And it's uneven on every level. And this is the kind of thing you would see in a photograph where
you've got these different lines of different densities, curvatures and spacing. One's long, one's medium,
and one is short. This is going to give you a much more richer look. The same principle applies to the
spacing of things like fingers on a clenched hand.
On the hand on the left side, for example, you'll see that they're all spaced at a very similar series of
intervals. I'm just going to go over here in red to illustrate. This creates spaces as well that are the same.
The same shape over and over again. If you're working on a character that you want to look mechanical
or robotic this is ideal. If you want them to naturalistic it's not ideal. And that's why this kind of spacing
here on the right side really looks much more naturalistic. And because we've pushed in the finger on
this side, it creates completely different shapes, and also allows us to intrude this interline as well,
which gives us a much more vivacious design.
This doesn't mean that these regular spacings can always be wrong. For example, on this hand here, I
happen to like this even spacing. It has a nice feel to it, but you might feel that sometimes I want a little
more, and in that case if you want to be a little less formal with your hand, then simply break apart
these end two fingers. Move them in a little bit. I'm moving this digit in by a few degrees, and this one
just a few less. That eases us into a very nice hand gesture.
This principle applies at the small scale, and now let's move up a notch and see what happens on the
next scale. Now we're looking at hair. And hair is something that this principle applies to a lot. Again,
I'll stress if you're working on a very simple style, you may like this treatment of hair where each
stroke, each curvature of the hair body is pretty much exactly the same even on the other side. That
may be a look that you want, but I think most people will at some point need hair that feels a little less

regimented.
And in that case, it's fairly simple. You take the same style, the same feature, this curved hair ball, and
you just vary it. It's the same stroke. But here, notice again, one big, one medium, one small. And we
just apply this as you see fit until you get a model that looks a lot more interesting because we have
variety. This principle applies all the way to realistic hair. And here again, we have areas of fairly high
detail here, and we have areas of relatively low detail here.
And again, this being fractal, that's how it operates. If I went in closer and closer and closer, I would
expect more detail in some areas and less detail in other areas. Here I have four very stylized treatments
of a mouth. As you can see on the left, we have the kind of mouth you would imagine if you were
working on a simplistic style of a robot or something like that. Completely even spacing. On the next
one over, I just moved it up out a little bit. I changed the vertical stroke so that they're all slightly
mismatched.
One step over we add one more layer of variation by shifting the upper and lower teeth. And then we
add a curved center line between the upper and lower rows. And you can already see how with each
addition of variety of texture to the detail how much more naturalistic it's becoming. Let's add one final
pass over this. I'm just going to draw an upper lip. I'm going to imagine that we're looking at this at a
slight angle. Let's draw a lower lip.
Getting a bit of a jutting jaw, so he's a bit of a gorilla type. And let's do an upper level of teeth. And
again, I'm just going to vary it with a curved stroke like this. The lower level of teeth will be jutting out
slightly. And now if you really want to make this guy look like he hasn't seen a dentist in a long time,
let's vary the angle and the spacing of these strokes. And when we do the lower level of teeth, imagine
also that they're growing up and jutting out at all kinds of different angles.
So like this curved point here comes in. It doesn't join with that, so I want these to look like they fit
together at all kinds of strange angles. At no point am I joining up two of the teeth at a tangent. I'm
already beginning to space everything apart very irregularly. Maybe put a straight-in next to a curve.
And if you really want to go crazy, you can add the gum line in. I'm just going to be a little loose with
this, but you get the idea that this is a pretty messy mouth.
That's how we get something that looks much more naturalistic than this kind of thing. This is the
transition from very geometrical all the way through, making it more and more irregular until we get to
something like this. Now we'll zoom out one more time. See how this applies to something like fabric
to clothing. Notice how we have this enormous area here. I'm just going to color it in green where
nothing happens. It seems it's just a big expanse of flat cloth.
And then on the other side, we have areas of detail where all the creases happen. Have one here, one
here, and one there. This gets contrast texture of detail, and then somewhere for your eye to take a
breather and rest. You don't want to have creases everywhere or detail everywhere, or your eye will get
tired. And now we see how this applies to an entire character. If we paint in the areas where pretty
much nothing is going on. His big belly, arms, big cuffs, or collars, rather.

Sleeves. Nothing interesting going on there. And actually we have good areas here where your eye can
take a rest. There's no detail at these points. I guess the parts here on the feet. And then we have areas
where we do have interesting things happening. There's the eyes in this area. The face. The nose. This
part. I guess the beard might have some detail here, but not there. Interesting ears and areas here. We
have even a little detail on the end of the staff.
The buckles of the shoe here. Buckles of the shoe here and there. And this spot in here is an area of
interest. And I've noticed also that even on the walking staff, the cane, you'll notice that there's not
much going on here, which contrasts with the base. This is how you can structure a character so that
not all of your focus is scattered. We really want to see, in particular, attention on the facial area. You
don't want your eye being drawn away from that too much, so hence that's why we have more detail
here.
And one last reminder. Just two very quick effect shots. We'll be dealing with this later on. But nature
itself is fractal. It has a variation on the levels of detail. You have areas of high detail and areas of low
detail. The spacing of natural effects is not regular, which is why you see more of a focus on one side of
the action, and more detail, more line weight, in one part of a splash than you see in others. And that's
why we have more empty areas here, or empty space up here.
Please remember this when you draw, and try to get into the habit of not arranging all of your pencil
detail, all of your line detail evenly across a drawing.

Point of origin
- A great method for controlling the position of a lot of the lines on your drawing is the use of the point
of origin. That's most clearly demonstrated if you look at creases on the character, especially under the
armpits, the knees, the joints, and, you can see on the right side of this image, I've drawn in the points
of origin with little red asterisks so you can see exactly where they're going to. You can see that each
line follows, even as you can't see, to this invisible point, where they all join together.
By using these points of origin, as you change the position of the character from key to key, or drawing
to drawing, you can keep them consistent, so you know exactly what's going on. Let's have a look at
another example. Now, here I've done two drawings of an arm in different positions. Again, the points
of origin are put in in little red crosses. You can see, as we move from one to the other, that the creases
obediently follow these points of origin. In other words, also on the second drawing, as the arm moves
out from the body, the creases decrease, and if we kept going to a completely straight arm, they would
disappear completely.
Here, I have a similar method applied to this face. This is a very different style from many of the others
I've shown you. It's much more linear and more illustrative, so how do you control all of these
hundreds of little eyebrow strokes and all of these hair strokes? Again, we use points of origin. When I
drew these, I simply imagined the little cross, or the point of origin, then, all of my drawing strokes
were splayed out from that imaginary point. This allows you to create an image on the left that appears
to be very almost haphazard, but has an invisible structure beneath it, so if you want to draw this guy, I
imagine him as some third century Celtic warrior or whatever, that's what he looks like, if you imagine
tilting his head back, as long as you put the points of origin in the new position and you work from that,
you have a much better chance of keeping him looking like himself.
We can apply the same method to hair. Very important that you apply this method to hair. In this case,
I've drawn an entire head of hair from a single point of origin, the blue cross. Notice how every stroke,
if you follow it back, almost every stroke, this one even, might, if you had an imaginary line, follow it
back to the point, they all originate from that point of origin, so if you tilt her head back, left, or right,
you have a very good chance of keeping all of these hair strokes looking like they are correctly attached
to her head.
There's no reason why you have to have only one. You can have a different hairstyle with two. In this
case, I've given her a mop hair. She has one side of her head originating from one point, the other from
the red. You can keep going with this, so, many hairstyles. You don't have to be quite so rigid with it, if
you want to draw it freely, but, at some point, you will have individual tufts or strokes that will have a
point of origin. You might have one point here, one point here. I'm not saying you have to have a
predefined network of these points, but they do certainly have to have, at least, a basis of this method
so you have a primary point that most of the structure, the body of the hair, comes from.
Don't think of the hair as being thousands of individual strands. They're really a single body that you

can then break apart into smaller units using this technique. What I want to show you is how you can
use the point of origin to control the features on a face. Let's do a simple face, I'm not going to get too
fancy with this, but we'll just do a basic sphere, with our eye line. Give him a center line. What I want
to do is to just, let's put in some eyes.
Start with the irises and pupils. We'll just draw the basic balls around there. What if you wanted to do
something with a lot of creases, a lot of detail? Something that might even seem intimidating? Let's
imagine that we have a point of origin somewhere around here, with the corner of the eye. You can
imagine that all of the various lines and strokes and creases, more or less, they don't have to be
mechanical, you can have little variations in this, but, more or less, they can originate from this point.
You could even have, for example, a good old Victorian-era eyebrow, something that's really bolted
onto some Dickensian businessman. Let's just radiate these out loosely. You can see, I'm drawing pretty
freely. I'm not being too inhibited by it, they're all just happily meandering out from that point. Going
to thicken the line a little bit so we can darken it a bit, but they're all coming from here, and here. Let's
just give him, just for some context, I'm not going to go too wild with this, but we'll just give him a
beginning of a nose, some creases.
Even if you give some forehead creases, depending on the style, you might be able to get away with
imagining these two also originating from these points, or roughly moving outside of them in a series
of concentric circles. Again, they're wrapping onto this sphere. Remember, you're drawing volumes,
you're not drawing lines. We're drawing an actual volume here, so it helps to think, at every point of
this process, "What is this thing in three-dimensional space, "even though I'm drawing it on a flat piece
of paper?" Now you can see how, by using a method like this, this helps you to lock down this position,
so were I to draw this character, let's say he's looking up, how do I control all of these lines? How do I
keep them the same? They're coming from the same point of origin, so if I make a change to the angle,
and I apply the same method to that new direction, I'm guaranteed to, at least, be in the zone of
accuracy.
That is the basic method of using point of origin, both directly, on creases and hair, but, also, in a sense,
indirectly, as just an invisible way of giving your character some structure and definition.

Open and closed areas

- Now I'm going to show you a very useful trick and it's a very simple one and this will enable you to
create a greater illusion of depth and dimentionality and naturalism. So as you can see we've pretty
much closed off the jawline here, it's a single continuous line. But what if you want it to look a little
more round, a little more realistic? So there's a simple trick of simply opening up that line. So I'm just
going to erase that black line just a little bit so we give the impression that it's just blending seamlessly
into the neck.
And depending on how far you want to cut back that line you've now created the illusion of a flow. And
this creates the idea that there's almost a lighting effect that's taken out the line. It's a much greater level
of naturalism. And if you want to flatten, the opposite is true, if you want your design to look flat then
close off the area. Here's another example of where this might occur on a hand. So I'm just going to go
in and give this a little more dimension. I definitely think this looks better.
And here's another spot where you'd have a choice of erasing a bit of a line. And that's up here where
the upper arm flows into the torso. And again now we have a smooth flow from the entire body area.
And another area where this will happen a lot will be in anything that flows, like hair. So here we have
several areas that have been closed off to varying degrees. This closing off might look good but let's see
what happens when we just open this out.
And she's a pretty stylized figure, I mean she's already a pretty graphical looking figure anyway. But
even though we do that, that looks nice I think. And we can even cut this back just a little more. And
let's do the same thing here on this line. I'm just going to chop it right there, bit of a haircut. And let's
take that line out completely and that leaves us the one bit at the top. So we can maybe chop this as
well, and just let that whole curve flow.
And that's a much richer, I think, hair design. And of course drapery, anything that flows is going to
create long lines. So here we have a case of the cape. It's become to look very flat, and with a style like
this you really don't want this to happen So let's open them out again, let some air in. And this will
really give the sensation that we're looking at an organic fabric, that it doesn't have such a stiff feeling
to it. And watch what happens as we get rid of all those unnecessary lines. I'm actually going to get rid
of that one completely.
And let's just open this out as well, so one shape seems to flow into the other. And let's just move this
down a little further. And look at that, such a simple change but a very powerful alteration in the whole
feeling of the drawing. So remember this and be conscious of when you might need to erase some lines
to make a fluid shape even more fluid.

Tangents
- The bane of most animators lives is the tangent. That's one of these things that just crops up when
you're moving so many lines around. Now, when we say tangent, we don't mean this kind of a tangent,
we mean this kind of a tangent. The ones in red, and that's where there's no reason for that hair to touch
the tip of that nose unless we've glued them together in the cartoon, which we haven't. They're in
different points in three dimensional space, and the same goes for this, that hair should be behind or in
front of the shoulder. So let's take a look at different methods for fixing this, and fortunately, they're
fairly easy.
So, we'll take a look at the next one. And here's another case where, okay this isn't a tangent either. I
expect these lines to converge at that point because that's a point of origin. Again, not a tangent. This is
a tangent, a headache, where the arm is bumping right into the belt, and you have this little cross, and
that is not a kind of shape that is nice to look at. It's confusing, your brain just focuses on it and goes,
"What's going on there?" And it's pulling your eye away from the parts of the body that we want to
look at.
And the solution is to move it. You move it up or you move it down. And in this case, I solved the
problem by moving the forearm down a little bit. I could have moved the belt, I could have moved the
forearm up. Whatever you do, whatever is the path of least resistance that gets rid of the tangent, follow
that. So here we have another kind of tangent and that's where a very easy one to have happen where
two curved lines blend into one another, and this is a real horror show because you actually get a very
long tangent at this point where these points just seem to be glued together. Can't stand that.
So again, there's two solutions, one, you move the head down, or you move the head up. I could've also
moved the shoulder but in this example it was just easier to play with the head. And so let's zoom in. So
this is the tangent. And that's the move the head down solution. And move the head up solution. I could
also have changed the shape of the mouth. So, any number of possible paths that would allow you to
get rid of these things, but just watch out for them, don't be caught off guard. And the other thing that'll
crop up too is when the character itself has a tangent with the background.
And here's a great one. Is he leaning on that wall? He can't be, because look at his feet, he's three feet in
front of it. It's a tangent, so let's get rid of it by either moving him to one side or moving him to the
other side. Or if you prefer, changing the design of the elbow. So again, whatever works best. So once
again, very quickly here, we have, guess what this is? Yet another tangent. So my library of solutions
will involve moving the hair there, or moving it to here.
If I move it out, then I have to draw through and correct the size of the head, maybe change a good bit
of the hair, so it might be easier to move it in. So you have those two options, one is a little more work
than the other, and you choose the one that looks best, and, or, the one that is the least amount of work.

Materials and drag

- It's easy to forget and it's very important to remember what exactly are you animating? Because its
appearance will be determined by its properties. Is it iron, like this ball on the left? Porcelain, like the
one in the middle? Or is it a rubber ball, soft and squishy like the one on the right? And the amount of
squash or in stretch for example. Notice how the cannonball or the iron ball is barely stretching at all
before the impact, whereas this football, this rubber ball, whatever bouncy object this is its stretching
and it'll actually squash after this impact point and then it'll stretch again after it bounces off the
ground.
So these are really important to remember and to have some idea as to what the various objects are.
Also don't forget that the environment can have an effect on the object as well. So if it's raining for
example, if you're drawing a character in rain their costume is going to change, their hair is going to
change based on if they're during the day and it's warm. So do not forget that your physical
environment that you're drawing has its own properties, its own internal life. And a single character can
have different parts of the body with different properties.
So in this case this cuddly bear has a big soft squishy belly, his head is like most heads pretty hard, so
as he moves one part has different mechanical properties than the ones around it. So let's see how these
feel when we actually do them frame by frame. We have drag on the belly, and then it's dragging again
before it settles. Let's go backwards again. So as you can see we have two different kinds of parts of the
body, so remember these will draw and behave in different ways. If we were for example to draw him
sitting down with his belly flopping over his legs understand that that will affect your design.
And same thing goes if you have a primary action, like moving a hand that's holding a flag, the flag
will drag, it'll be subject to wind resistance, the air, the environment. And so let's take a look at how this
object moves. So we begin in our start position, the hand moves, but the tip of the flag, this point here,
notice how it's remembering where it used to be. I could have even dragged it a little more or even
moved it out to this point. And now we move into this S shape.
Notice as well that I'm using very simple shapes to describe this flag. C curves and S curves. Move
again back and we have an overlap where this point of the flag moves from right to left and the tip is
moving from left to right. And that's a very nice trick to use in animation because this kind of thing
really gives a sense of life and realism. Still happening here. This point is still moving this way, while
this point is still moving that way. And then we settle. And ideally we would have a lot of in betweens
that would go between this drawing and this drawing, but this was enough to communicate the point.
So let me go back again, I'll go through them one more time. One, two, three, four, five, six. So again,
this flag, depending on what its made of, is it a thin flag, a heavy flag? Is it made of canvas or silk?
What is it? These will also affect how it behaves. And finally, don't forget that depending on all of the
things that I've just said that we are also able to invoke cartoon physics. And we've seen Roadrunner
cartoons where Roadrunner is running in the air for 10 seconds before he realizes he's off the edge of

the cliff and then he falls.

So it is possible in certain conditions or certain circumstances to do things in animation that we can't do
really believably in any other medium. So don't be shy about looking out for things that are violations
of common sense physics because there might be a great gag or a cartoon in them. So as a practical
demonstration, here is our caped character and he has two versions of the same costume. On the left
side I imagine that the cape is made out of something like silk. I am not a textiles expert, it's efficient
for me to know, okay, this is a very, very light material, and so it'll be like silk or satin, something like
that.
On the right side, something that's much thicker, maybe wool, or some heavier material, or could even
be denim for all I know. So it's something thick enough, something with a little bit of body. So let's see
how these will behave differently. Notice on the left there are more folds, more creases, a finer material
will have more and more and more of these. A thicker material fewer and fewer. It'll also move
differently. So let's see what they look like if we draw them in different positions. All I want to do now
is to draw a gust of wind taking the cape and blowing it up and then see how differently each cape
behaves, the silk one and the heavy one.
So let's imagine that we have our wind coming in from this direction. On a clean layer I'm going to
begin the second part of the cape. Just take the edge, don't worry so much about the inner details, you
just want to block in the main shape of this. And it might blow up like that, so it's going to give it some
dimension. So as you can see this is getting a little bit of dimension in here, so this is the underside.
And we can delete that layer there, or that line. And now to keep the character with all these folds and
this detail, this sense that there's a lot of stuff going on in there, what I want to do is to just put some
extra little creases, vary them, so that they're not all equally spaced. So now let's darken the line, just a
little bit. So I'll do a slightly darker tone over that and I want to rotate the screen as well so I can zoom
in properly. As being right handed it's a very difficult angle to draw that. So let's do this.
Now we can really add a little bit of definition to these tentative lines, these initial exploratory lines
let's call them. We don't want to be tentative, want to be confident. And we want to vary the lengths of
these creases, you don't want them all to be the same length or it'll look really phony. And something
realistic will have a little more variation to it. And then let's go and just delete some of the sketchy
strokes.
That looks pretty good. So we have a fairly interesting design and it's got enough of the character that
we saw in the original hanging position. Now let's do one for the thicker material. And remember that
with the equivalent amount of wind I don't expect this guy to move anywhere near as far as the other
one. It's just too heavy. So I would imagine it to look something more like that. So where this guy has
one, two, three, four, five, six bumps, this might be lucky to have two or three, with shorter lines,
signifying the various folds.
You want to suggest a little bit of body to it. You might have little curves around here. Let me go in and
just tighten this up a little bit. So you can see already the difference between these two forms. Now that
I look at these folds here I think we can give them a little more life than that. They look quite insipid.

So let me delete them and we'll just hang them a little lower. Let's give ourselves slightly stronger
shapes. And I like fairly confident looking curves going from these various little wave shapes.
So very different behavior based on the fact that these are different materials. So with that I think we've
covered the fact that you should always be conscious what are the various objects in my drawing made
out of? Because it's going to affect how I draw them.

Line weight
- I've said several times already that we're drawing volumes not lines, and one way to make your
drawing look like it has volume is to have a tapered line. Now at the top we can see a very graphical
stylized version of this. It's like something that you would do in Adobe Illustrator or some other vector
illustration program. Many times your drawings will end up cleaned up with this kind of a tool, so this
is a good thing to remember if you're a digital artist, that you can actually work with this kind of style.
At the bottom side of the screen, you can see a more pencil-like stroke, and this is a like a super close
up version of what your pencil stroke should look like if you begin to apply this technique.
So here you can see a very closeup of a pencil drawing and the pencil line texture is obviously jaggy,
and this is pretty much what you would see if you did a drawing on paper and zoomed it up to this kind
of size. Let's see where the heavy line weight comes in and you can probably notice it that we have a
very dark line around here and here, and this suggests some depth to the eyelid. This is the most
obvious place where you would use it. Also we have a thicker stroke here around the nostril, and there's
a slightly darker line here.
It's a little less pronounced, but you can also see that it's a little bit heavier there. Even this stroke here.
Imagine the light's coming usually from the top, so this stroke here is a little darker than the ones
around it. You could go further with this if you wanted to, when you're really cleaning things up, you
could make the under strokes of the eyebrows heavier. You could make this stroke part of the nose a
little darker, maybe this a little lighter. You can see over here on the mouth that there's a heavier stroke
at this side. Let me make a new mark here.
There's a heavier blackness on that side than there is here, and the line is tapering off to total whiteness,
and that suggests that we have a bigger shadow happening in the corner of the mouth than at the side of
the mouth. It's a very subtle technique, but it's very useful. Here we see it again. Another good use of
this method would be to put a darker line, I wouldn't go too heavy with this. A little of this goes a long
way. This line here, I've exaggerated it to really show you the principle, but this is actually pushing it,
this line here. If I switch it off you'll see what I mean.
I think it's standing out just a little too much, but you get the idea. Here as well I've also exaggerated
this under stroke and even these two creases here. Let's switch them off again. And you'll also notice
here that the same principle is being applied, much more subtly this time on this area of the hand.
Again we have light coming form this direction, so this is how we're signifying or showing that the
light comes from on side and not the other.
For example, if we were going to draw some shadows on this drawing. I'm drawing slowly, carefully,
because I want this line to be pretty accurate. That's all I've done. Now let's zoom back out again. As
you can see, we've made a very slight adjustment. You might feel that even this adjustment is a little
too much, but you get the basic principle that we use this method just to add a little bit of extra vitality
or depth to the drawing. I'm going to do one more little stroke on the face on the right, and I think the

underside of the nose would be a nice area.

This time I'm going to do one light stroke, just to there and taper it off a little bit. Now I feel it's a little
light, so maybe we can darken it a bit more, maybe just give a slight darker area here. Now let's go
back. Now you can see we have a very nice sensation of dimension on the nose, this area right here.
Certainly goes from looking like a flat line to looking like a much more round one. That's the
technique. That's how you use tapered lines to keep your drawings from looking too mechanical.

3. Drawing Body Parts: Detail 2h 39m

Understanding anatomy
- I'm not going to delve very deeply into anatomy beyond a very general and very quick overview of it.
So what I've done for you is draw a turnaround of a human skeleton adult. And as you can see, we've
measured it by head heights. This is a good way to get your proportion, if you remember from earlier,
our cartoon characters, we also measured them by head heights. This is an ideal. It doesn't mean every
body has to be exactly eight heads tall, and it'll vary from male to female, but this will give you a
working idea about where the various body parts appear. So as you can see, at the halfway point,
roughly we have our groin area, and a quarter area from the top we have roughly the line of the chest so
these will give you ballpark areas so that you won't go too wildly off model.
I began working in animation, our first couple of movies were cartoony, and our third film had very
humanoid characters in it, and I was intimidated by that, so I went and I bought a plastic skeleton kit,
and glued it together. A cheap one, it didn't have to be very expensive. But it was good. It had these
basic proportions, and then I found I was able to look at it in real life and tumble it around and move
the joints and see what the range of motion was. I strongly recommend, if you can find one that's not
too expensive, it's a very very good use of your time and money to do that.
And as you can see on the far right of the screen, here we have our baby character. What he illustrates
is a very important principle, in that, next time you see a toddler walking around, look at the size of the
head and compare the size of the head with the rest of the body. The head will be two to three times the
height of the body, whereas with an adult human, it's more like one eighth. So the head is
proportionally much larger to the body in a small child or a baby than it is in an adult. As you grow
older, you get to be more heads tall. So the head is the area that I guess grows less fast in relation to the
size of the body.
The body just rockets up. So let's take a look at the next slide. And so here I've just done a closeup of
the skull. Now notice that, again, these are idealized proportions. And you'll see a lot of idealized
proportions if you go searching online. Don't get too trapped in them. They're really rules of thumb. I
see some ones that have just wildly overcomplicated, and are frankly imaginary, so as an approximate
position of where the various parts go, the halfway point would roughly approximate with the eye line,
and if you measure, that is from the tip of the skull to the base of the jaw.
Obviously if a person has a weak jaw or a big jaw, that's going to change, but this is the ideal. The other
halfway point, approximately, you'll find the base of the nose, and another halfway down and you
really see it if you look at the actual skin version, another halfway point down, the lower edge of the
lip. So use these lines again as a way to approximate the positions that you choose for your eye line,
your nose and your mouth. Now when we apply this to a cartoon character, for example, some cartoon
characters are so simple that the head is a ball.

The whole head, you put the mouth on the ball, and I've done this with some of the drawings in this
course. Other characters, however, will have a jaw area that's separated from the skull. So depending on
which one of these you're using, you might want to shift the position of your eyeline on the skull. Well,
sometimes for a simple sphere character it's great to have the eye line purely at the halfway point of the
ball, that gives you plenty of room then for the nose and the mouth. But if I'm going to draw a figure
with a jawline, as I plan to do here, then it's a really good idea to maybe sometimes move the eye line
down to a 2/3 or even lower, but as long as you know, "okay, my eye line will be 2/3 down the sphere
"of the skull", and on the right side here you can see the difference, and what it does to the shape.
So on the left side we have the eye line at the halfway point, it creates a different kind of a look. And
on the right side I have moved it down by about 2/3. Whatever you use will be up to your personal
preference. Or if you're working in a studio, the studio will have made this designation for you, but it's
a good idea to know where the eye line is on the skull and what you think looks best.

An introduction to drawing eyes

- Now let's look at the eyes themselves. We're going to focus on this and take a really close look at it.
So as you can see we have a wide variety of treatments of where we can put the eye line and how we
can draw the eye. So let's move through these one by one. This is the classic teddy bear button eye, and
we've placed the eye line directly at the halfway point, the equator. And notice the vertical center line
as well. This allows us to space them left and right correctly. It's an extremely simple way of drawing. I
recommend that if you're starting out and you really don't feel like too confident, this is a really good
way to get used to the position of the eyes and the eye direction.
You can also add a few creases if you want to give him a little more personality. It's a simple device,
enormous appeal. Now we've gone up in a layer of complexity. This is looking more like a 1940's style
classic character. As you can see, these eyes suddenly have a little more anatomy going on. The pupils
are still pretty much the same as they were in the teddy bear version, but we've added the curvature of
the eyeball. We have the upper eyelid and the lower eyelid each along here. Same on the other side.
And notice the breaks. Now I've color coded these so that you can see them. Each line is helped with its
definition by having these little breaks. So the blue, which is the upper eyelid, breaks here, very subtly,
and there's a bigger break here and that's our visual cue that this green line here represents the outside
edge of the eyeball itself. And the yellow is the lower eyelid. We repeat the process on the other side.
And we've even added a little break on the eyebrows. And let me go back one. And now you can see
that we're not looking at just a bunch of silly curves.
These are quite sophisticated little lines. Now behind these lines is the invisible anatomy of the balls
themselves. Each eye socket contains an eyeball and this line here is the visible edge of that ball. And
this ball can be squashed and stretched. So on this side we have a squash and on this side a stretch,
which, of course, at least in this example, changes the visible shape of the eyeball. Notice that the
volumes are being kept fairly consistent even though you're not going to see these lines probably
wouldn't notice even if it did vary, but it's still nice to try to keep it consistent.
And it's also possible to shift the orientation of the eye. Now on the previous eyes, you'll notice that the
edge of the corner of the eye is sitting comfortable on the equator, on this gray line here. Let's go
forward, and now I've shifted it up just a little bit, and this is a great way to get the classic feminine
eye. It just moves you outside of that very, more prosaic eye line. And we can also rotate these eyes up.
Notice also that when you do this, it's a good practice to keep the different ellipses different shapes, so
the eye closest to you in general will look bigger than the one further away.
And often we exaggerate this and make the further eye ball even a little smaller than it might be
because it just gives the drawing much more depth. Similar principle applying here. And I'm just
applying some different eyebrow expressions so you can see how flexible this drawing style is. And by
making the pupils tiny, it gives them a frightened or a spaced out look. Notice as well that I've pushed
the eyebrow over the perimeter of the sphere, of the skull. It's a little cartoony device. Sometimes you

can get away with it, sometimes not. And now we have the position of the eye line itself and some
variations that we can work with.
We'd mentioned this previously, but it's a good idea to look at it a little more closely. In this case we
have the simplest possible formula. The eye line is at the halfway point of the skull's sphere. On this
one I've kept it the same. But what I've done is I've moved the eyes down, and you'll see on the top one,
the model design for this requires us to position the lower eyelid on the equator, but you can just as
easily decide to have the eyes positioned at their corners, here and here, and let that be the model. So
we can keep going. We can move the eye line down to a two thirds, and you can decide to have the
bottom of the eye sitting on that.
If that's you're construction, it gives you a big wide baby face. Or you can decide again, let's move the
eyeball down again and have the corners occupy that privileged position on this horizontal line. Or you
could even move it up by a third. So there's no rigid formula to this, so what I'm trying to communicate
here is the idea that these positions, you have a wide variety of options, things that you can choose
from. And also you're not even limited to orienting the eyes vertically. You can orient the vertical axis
of the eyes off of truth north.
In this case, I have moved them by a few degrees, and this gives you a completely different look of the
character. Spacing the eyes apart is also important. So you can decide to have maybe an eyeball width
approximately between the eyes, or you can make it narrower. But it's very important that you watch
the consistency between the corner of the eye and this point here, which will determine the easiest point
of reference between the edge of the eye and the next one over. If this drifts too close or too far apart,
your character will start to look very different.
So let's take a look at how we will draw some of these images. So here we have a pre-drawn sphere that
represents the skull. So what I'm going to do is to draw a couple of eyes in. Let's pick an unusual
position. So let's say we're looking up at this guy like he's standing on a podium or a plinth or
something, giving a speech and he's looking up in this direction here. So I'm going to make a slightly
thinner stroke for the center line. And let's say it's very impassioned.
It's good to have some idea about what this chap is doing. What I'm going to do on this one is, as you
can see here, I want to see a little less of the eye and really feel the depth. So in this case if we're
looking straight on, the corners of the eye would be about here. Most of it would be above, so his
eyebrow would be there, nose here. So let's get back to this. And if he's staring off this way, let's draw
in the pupils. And I'm conscious of the fact again that this line here represents an invisible eyeball about
there, and we would expect that the eyebrow itself would break on this line here, might be rubbed out.
So what I like to do when I get to a point where I've got my rough, but it's rough, and I want to do a
clean up version over that, either I will rub down the drawing so that it's faint and I see a vague outline
and I go over the same drawing on the same sheet of paper, or I put a clean sheet over it and draw a
fresh drawing on a clean sheet. So in this case, I'm working in Photoshop so I'm just reducing the
opacity of that drawing and putting a clean layer on top of it. Again on paper, I would be happy to get
an eraser and just lightly rub it down and then do a clean version on top.

So now I'm going to use a smaller pencil stroke. And again remember as I draw these lines what they
are. This is the upper eyelid. It's not a line, it's the upper eyelid. Always remember what the object is.
Now again, I'm right-handed. I want to rotate this so I can draw it a little more comfortably. And now
when I draw these pupils, notice how I draw the full ellipse. I did not do this. That looks flat.
I draw the entire ellipse of the pupil, the retina. I might go even smaller with this because it's such a
fine thing, it's very hard to get the subtly of it. That's okay. Now let's draw in the lower eyelid. Same
thing over here. So next thing to do is just to add a little bit of darkness for the eyelid area. I knew one
very, very good animator who would spend a lot of time really darkening the perimeter of the eyes
because he knew they were so important.
Now he's got his seams and this line here, the perimeter of the eye would always look like it had
eyeliner on it. So that's my process for drawing a fairly decent set of cartoon eyes. And this is one step
up from the button teddy bear eyes, so when you feel a little more confident, I recommend working in a
medium like this. We'll be doing more as we go along, but this is a very good foundation I think to get
you to grips with the ideas of where the curves go, what they represent. So I'm going to give you a very
quick and close up look on the anatomy of the eye.
And this is the similar principles that we've already discussed, but the eye is so important, I really want
you to grasp this and never forget this movie of all the movies in the course. So as you can see again
I've drawn in the physical curve of the eye in red on this character here on the left. And you can see the
arrows representing the corner of the eye, the lower lid, the eyeball, and the eyelid, and so on. So these
are the points of control of the eye. When we look at this in profile, we see much the same thing. And
again we have the corner of this gray line being the eye line that we set the eye on.
And note to the right of this, I've made a very cartoony stylized character and the same principles apply,
it's just that the strokes are much, much simpler, much broader and easier to see. And once again, I've
illustrated how we draw the ellipse of the pupil and the retina so these lines curve in, follow those red
arrows. Never, ever draw anything that looks like that. Sometimes this happens in flash animation and
CGI animation, it's hard to avoid, but if you draw, you don't have to do it. That's the beauty of drawing
it.
Various treatments of pupils, if you want to get different kind of emotional effects, these are very
funny. The guy on the left looks like he's seen something really horrendous. The guy in the middle, he's
tearing up, deeply emotionally moved. And the fellow on the right has the classic hypnotized eye spiral.
So these are cartoony devices, but they're very, very useful. One more thing, this is about open spaces
and closed spaces. And this is a style issue depending on your character design. Sometimes the entire
eyelids area will be drawn closed. Some styles like to have them open.
This isn't a problem either way, but if you do want a different color for the eyelids, then this is
obviously going to be very hard to paint if it's open like this. So we tend to use in traditional animation,
ink lines would be drawn, and these were in red, so they wouldn't be photocopied onto the transparent
cells to be painted, and then they would be inked by hand. It was very complex. On the computer, the
process is similar but easier. You would use an invisible stroke to close off that space, so if we're using

Flash or Harmony, that's a system that you would want to watch out for.
And all these principles apply to any style. They're basically universal, so what I'm going to do is
quickly show you how we apply some squash and stretch to different design styles. So here we have at
the top row, our realistic eye, in normal pose, scrunched blink, wide open in shock, and tired. Middle
row, the same thing for our typical 1940's character. Bottom row for a very stylized graphic modern
one. And now if we look at these up close one by one, this is the naturalistic eye, scrunch, open, tired.
Go back one more time. So you can see the amount of control and flexibility we have even with a
realistic one. Here's the cartoony guy, same process. And we have the stylized one. So you might be
working in the graphic medium and that would be the method that you would apply. So that's our initial
view of the eye, how you draw it, how you space it, how you control the volumes and make it look real.

Eyelids, eye blinks, and eyebrows

- Now when you're animating the eyebrows and the eye area, it's a good trick to imagine an invisible
mask around the eye. Don't go drawing this on everything but it's a good idea just to have an idea that
it's there. Because when you begin to move the eye, the left eyebrow or the right eyebrow, or distort
one side or the other, it gives you a sense for the relative squishiness and how they're interconnected in
some of the various creases and lines. Now regarding eyelids, and blinks, if you look at the top row
from left to right we see our classic cartoony eyes.
And this the the typical eye blink pattern. We begin eyes open, and then two frames later we are at 1/3
closed, the next image fully closed, two frames later we're 1/3 open, and then wide open again. And
that's great for a very nondescript eye blink where you don't want anything too dramatic to happen. A
much more extreme version of that is the full squint blink. And if you look at the middle row, you'll see
the more stylized eyebrows they're coming down along with the eyelid, And then we scrunch the entire
area.
So we have little things happen, these crease lines here are these crease lines there, and this line here is
just another line for the lower eyelid that's appearing from under this line. And then this ends with a big
scrunch, and then we reverse, and we're back to our wide open shocked look. There's kind of an
intermediate blink that you can use because sometimes the top row can be just a little bit stiff, so what
you can do instead of going for a full squint effect you can bring the eyebrows down just a little bit and
then have them resting here so that the line for the eyebrow is now aligning with the upper line for the
eyelids.
If you look at the top row, it will be as though this eyebrow here and this line here, are combined in this
stroke here. And then we begin to open the eyes, and we're back to wide open again. And let's see how
these look in motion. So this is the simplest of blinks. Easy. This is our more extreme squint. And here
is the intermediate one. And you'll notice as well I've used as cover for a change in eye direction.
It's a common trick to do this. So if you want your figure to look from left to right then you use the eye
blink this point here, and transition that. So now I'm going to look at eyebrows and different styles of
eyebrow. And at the top row you'll see the simplest one, the line, the pencil stroke. Which is great for
very simple characters, also if you want a female character that's a typical device used to make
somebody look more feminine. But as you can see it's quite capable of making somebody look very
angry as well. And here we have the middle row, kind of Groucho Marx eyebrows.
The third row down, I've given them like big owl, mad professor, or mad scientist eyebrows. And on
the bottom row, some kind of monster or dinosaur type eyebrow. And each of these types show
different ways of taking the basic shape, so what we've done is taken the basic shape this pencil stroke
eyebrow. And then just added volume, like a second upper line on the second row to create the Groucho
eyebrows. The same eyebrow basically was the foundation for all the lines here that follow. If you read
the vertical columns you will see how similar each one is.

They're the same version of the same design. So this is to give you a feeling of the design flexibility
that you have. Don't feel limited to a small library of basic shapes. So now let's see how these things
play out. So here's a simple eyebrow. And this pushes the eyebrow design through some fairly good
range of motion. So if you design a character, let's say with these eyebrows, it's a good idea to test out a
few of these different angles and see what will he look like in these kind of poses.
Will this be a good transition? Or this one? Or that one? And if you can do this for half a dozen
different wild expressions, your design is probably pretty good. This was a tricky one because it has
these jaggy eyebrows. And again, notice the point of origin, we have a point of origin here and here,
And all of the strands of hair spread out from that. So let's go forward. So this was easily the hardest of
all of the four to do because of these different strokes. But again as you see, it's quite doable.
And these transitions look good, they're fun to watch. And now we have our dinosaur. And again, good
transitions, fun to draw. They seem to be quite flexibile. So what I'm going to do now is do a fifth set.
So this dinosaur, he would be great for like a really muscular body builder type, but it's a little over the
top for most human characters. So let's see how we would do a toned down version of this. So I'm
going to take the four dinosaur head shapes and see how would I modify these.
So let's put a clean sheet over them and we'll draw on that. So as you can see we have the original
eyebrow line. So what I want to do is just take these and just tone it down a little bit. And when I draw
rough like this I like to draw with a reasonably scratchy line. It stays me from taking things too
seriously at this stage of the process. So what I want is to follow this curve of the skull and make it
look like he's like an angry dad or something, rather than a tyrannosaurus rex. So I'm not going to be
using these big, hard lines but some kind of a stroke in here suggests just a little bit of brow ridge.
Follow the original brow, we like that, and take this line from the skull. And I think he'd have a little
crease in there. Some brow ridge again. We'll do the same thing here. So now because it's kind of hard
to see what's going on because of the original artwork. What I'm going to do is go into that layer, and
rub out all of the dinosaur sized eyebrows and see what this really looks like.
So now we have the same process, to show how you can create a absolute range of treatments for
different eyebrows. So don't feel like the four that I showed you are the beginning and the end of
anything. They're simply stages and processes and I could vary these lines continually for example. It
would be very easy for me to go in and add a few wisps of eyebrows if we wanted to make it look a
little more free form. So you get the idea. And a lot of fun too.

Drawing realistic eyes

- Before going much further, I want to take a quick look at the female eye because it's very similar to
everything I've already shown you. There's some very slight differences. It's quite common to get that
feminine look, to shift the corner of the eye in various ways. And the most extreme being just move the
entire eye axis up so that the lower eyelid follows from point to point along this curve. You don't have
to go that far, but you can see what happens when we draw her from different angles. The eyes are
definitely feminine. We can move it by half that amount and we still get that look, but you can still get
a feminine eye even with the eye on a flat line.
It's really a matter of longer eyelashes, thinner eyebrows, and on using markers like that. And you can
see on the left, we have our typical leading female lady. But again, I want to encourage you to not be
beholden to that and you can create really fantastic characters that are identifiably female. But in this
case, she's a crazy punk girl who's going to get up to mischief, I don't know what. I had great fun with
this putting the buck teeth in, but clearly still female, we do use the extremely offset eye axis on this
one.
Notice how the corner of the eye is down here. It's almost 20 degrees or 25 degrees to get up to the
other corner of the eye. So again, I encourage experimentation. And there are three different basic ways
of treating eyelashes. You can treat them all individually and you can build up many of them. I just left
seven strokes here, but you can do 10, 12, 13, 14, or as many as you like. And you can do a single
triangular shape or you can vary these so you can have lots of little triangles and lots of strokes. This
style of triangle is very useful in Flash animation and in Harmony and other digital flat tools because
it's easier to control if you're moving a graphical shape around.
At the top here, we have something that's took a bit of time rendering. On the bottom left, there's a line
treatment in a very similar style. But on the lower right, that's also kind of realistic, but it's beginning to
use stronger strokes and more graphical elements. And we're getting away from some of this fiddly
stuff that you see in here, all these little lines. And you're getting to a much stronger statement. And
let's always remember that when you take on a project that might require a character to be realistic, it
doesn't mean you have to draw something in the intense and linear style at the top of the page.
So here are some stylized versions of eyes, just focusing on the eyes for this movie. And you can see
how strong these shapes are. They're big, bold strokes, they're not fiddly, and they really liberate you
from having to do lots of little pointy lines. So here I've done a style that is a little more realistic, or
linear. But again, to show you that even within that limitation, you can still have an incredible range of
motion. So let's have a look at this guy again and see, just a quick pass through, so we can see how we
can squash and stretch this very realistic design.
I'll go back through it one more time. But again, these shapes are very straightforward. I've broken
them down to curves: S curves, a C with a little tail on the end of it, straight lines for the bridge of the
nose. So these are strong designs even though they are, at least initially, realistic. So you can make

strong statements and don't get too far down the path of drawing every little detail.

Drawing cartoony mouths

Before you get too deeply into dialogue, it's good to remember that the lower jaw is very flexible. It has
a huge range of motion, left to right, backwards and forwards, up and down. And so these drawings are
just here. As a reminder that you can really stretch the jaw, you can certainly do the same thing with the
cartoon character. So we have side to side, backwards and forwards, and up-down. And don't forget that
the tongue itself does most of the hard work when it comes to dialogue anyway. So on the top row, we
have the classic TVA 2F dialogue system.
And I'm only showing you this because if you do end up in the studio situation where they wanted to
design a character, you may have to draw in this library of mouth shapes. And the A, B, C doesn't refer
to phonetic sounds. They are simply labels for the different mouth shapes. So the A creates the closed
mouth, the B, the bah, mah and pah sounds and so forth. And on the bottom row in blue and red, I have
a more traditional style series of drawings. And the important thing to remember here is that if you do a
scene of dialogue with the character, it's good to stick in one family of these shapes.
So, for example, in this group we have the corner of the mouth is up, in this one the corner is down.
You wouldn't want to swap between these two very often in the dialogue scene or it might look a little
flappy, like this series here where the mouth is down, then up, then down, then up, then down. A
character might be happy for five seconds, sad for 10, but they won't go from back to forth every five
or six frames. So try to avoid that. And a reminder, when you do dialogue be flexible with it, don't be
precious. It's better to overdo it and then pull that back in, than to under do it.
So here is a very generic cartoony humanoid character, and I'm just very quickly going to run you
through these mouth shapes. The thing to notice here, see how chewy he is, and that's the magic word,
it's chewy. It's the ability to pull and pull the shape of this face. Again, not to be too precious about it; if
you overdo it, you can always pull it back in. And also notice that the upper teeth, they do actually
move. In reality your upper teeth don't move, of course, unless you have a medical problem. In this
case they do because it's a cartoon, and even if you do a natural style animation, it's often common to
cheat the upper teeth and move them, but it's the lower teeth that really got to have fun here, they really
move around a lot.
So let's move through these. First frame, and then notice that the creases in the eye drag and they'll
move around to follow the mass of flesh. On this one we pull up. Notice that the cheek pulls up with it.
That's great. On this one, the both cheeks pull up and overlap or just graze the lower eye. And on this
one we pull the eye down. And again we see the creases pulling out, the lips go over the edge of the
face.
And here the final face, the big smile. And that even creates little creases in the corners of the eye. And
again, remember we are drawing volumes, not lines, so always think about the physical object. Here we
have a profile view of one mouth shape, and the bad habit I think a lot of us are picking up from
working with programs like Flash, where there is a library where we use the same mouth shape over

and over and over again. Don't forget that you can have a closed mouth or you can have ten closed
mouths, you can have different kinds with different kind of emotional states.
So let's see how these play. That's our beginning, it looks fine. And there is a variation, and yet another
kind. As you can see, very, very different impression from this character. And finally, he's had a really
good piece of news. So, again, stay flexible. And here, our generic guy. And again, the main focus here
is chewiness. A good trick to use is to work with a closed mouth and open one, a cheese mouth where
his face is wide apart, and then an ooh shape, those are the four biggies, because those show you the
main motion that these guy is going to have to do with his mouth.
These three on the right, I just had them for fun. It was just to see what other kind of mouth shapes I
could get out of this character. So let's see how these play. Closed, wide open, cheese, and ooh. So if
you can get a good design out of any character with those four shapes, you are in good shape because
that means that I think you can be pretty safe, that a good drawing in any of these forms will get you
through almost any scene that you want to do. So, and then we have our novelty shapes at the end, the
F mouth where he is biting the lower lip, the into the face and the raspberry.
So this is the one I really want to focus on. And this is a much more, a hybrid I guess. She is not a
cartoon, she is not realistic, she has bits of both, and definitely more of a challenge because of that. So,
again, I have the closed mouth, the wide-open mouth, the cheese mouth and the ooh shape, and then
our little novelty ones. And this was fun, actually on this one because I got to put the gum line in and
she really looks like she is up to something in there. And, again, let's look at these in sequence, see how
they play. So that's our closed mouth, wide open.
Again, that was a challenge, and the challenge here is how do I get a nice shape, how far down can I
push that lower lip without this whole area becoming cluttered. And this is a very nice solution, and
there is also a nice little design on the lower teeth, and you see where we have this little S, this little
curve here, and we are seeing the edge of the teeth straight on, and it works actually. That was a nice
technique and that worked. Let's go to the cheese mouth. And, again, notice the cheek overlapping the
lower eye, and then we have the ooh mouth. And I could have put more detail in and add like that line,
pull this eye down a little bit, but I really wanted to focus more on the mouth, on this one.
And notice the simplicity of the mouth design, straight little S curve, C shape, C shape, C shape,
straight line, C shape, straight line. So I'm not getting into any hugely advanced graphical shapes here.
The mouth looks complex, it's actually made out of small group of very simple forms. And then we do
the F, where she is pitching the lower lip. Again, the cheek overlaps the eye. We have the err, clenching
her teeth, and now I'll introduce the crease line here. And again, that crease line wasn't on in any of the
other drawings, but guess what, she has a face.
So we pushed that face beyond the point. You'll expect to see crease lines where they didn't exist
before. And now we have the blowing of raspberries. So those are her basic seven shapes. Now what I
want to do is to do a drawing, see how it turns out. See if we can push this even further. So when I was
doing in that library of mouth shapes, I did the variance over this shape. I didn't do a variant and then
hide the first drawing, and then work on the variant because what happens is you drift off model.

So I'd like to work from the closest of the original, and here she is. So let's do a new drawing. So what I
want to do is fade her out a little bit. Now when I'm drawing this on paper, not on the computer, I will
put a clean sheet of paper over the top. If I have a light table, I'll put the light on beneath, and then I
would see through the paper and drawn on top. Here I'm in Photoshop, so I'm just putting her on 50%
or 40% opacity, and I'll do my drawing on top of that. So, it's the same effect, and let's see if my line is
about the right distance, more depth, it's good.
So what I want to do with this is to see if I can really give her like a absolutely wild smile, like
something that's demented. And so that's going to be something that's pushing the face up really high.
And before we get involved in like drawing the mouth, I feel safer if I had some idea about the overall
shape of the face, and then apply the mouth to that. Different people may have different methods, but I
like to have a better idea of context, so I know what it's going into.
So this is going to to push the cheeks up so high, I imagine that will pinch them right here at the nostril.
So let's draw this big pointy tension there. And next I'll just put in the line for the upper lip, and now
the one for the lower lip. And if we really want to make her look slightly crazed, let's push the corners
out, something like this.
But you might find that the opacity of the lower level is a little too much to see, so I'm going to fade
her out a little more, so I can see what I'm doing a little more clearly, then I'm going to stretch that
lower lip to really emphasize the point that the mouth is being pulled so wide. On this little line that
you can see here on the lower level, what I'm going to do is pull that, and maybe let's add some creases
as well. That really makes it look kind of frightening.
Okay. So now we have this face, let's switch off the layer beneath so we can see it by itself. Not looking
too bad. My old trick is to flip these layers horizontally, so I get that instant of freshness, so I don't go
totally blind to it. And that's also looking good even when I flip it. Let's go back. And now I want to do
is tighten this up, that's my rough pass. It's not bad for a rough pass. Normally I am a little rougher than
that, so I'm going to fade that out yet again on a clean layer. And now I'm going to go in and draw a
tighter version than this.
That's our cleaned up mouth, I'll put the lower head back on. And the problem with lower head now, of
course, is that has the other mouth through it. So let's hide that, we'll actually just delete that. And there
is weirdness happening with the eye. So I'm just going to go in a little closer because the eye should
react to the cheek, right. So let's do that. So I put a little crease line in there. And you could maybe even
hint that the lower eyelid starting to crease up there. We could go further and really start to mess with
this area, but what I really want to convey here is the area around the mouth and the nose and the
cheeks.
So here we have the face, I don't consider this final final, this is a semi-rough pass. She is terrifying. So
that shows you the scope of how you can maybe go a little further, a little further. I could probably go a
little further than this, but I don't know by how much. So it's good to know that you are at the extremity
of what you can get away with, with your design. So now just a quick note about things like female
mouths and the shape library that you can use with them. And this is just five that I did in the closed

and open position using this little M shape on the upper lip.
And depending on how you apply these curves, so in this case the curve is curving in. On this one that's
curving out. Here I tapered right to the edge of the mouth, took out the little divot in the top. And as
you can see, you can vary with this over and over and over again. And by changing the break of the
curve where the breaks happened or where the line curves in or out, you get different mouth shapes.
You can make lipstick or thinner than this. So, again, it isn't the case where you have to always use this
particular mouth shape because it's a female character. So it's good to break out of that constraint.
Similarly with teeth, you can do all white teeth, you can have a single stroke, maybe a little thicker in
here and thinner there. You can add as many or as few of these internal lines as you like, or you can
take them all the way and close off though shapes. So different levels of teeth also applies to
carnivorous mouths. In here we can get the gum line in and that really gives a good snarly feeling, and
you can do that on humans too, of course. And here is a fantastic trick I learned years ago, and that is to
offset the teeth, so that you have the teeth at an angle to one another.
And you can do this even if this breaks the anatomy. This is a fantastic trick you can get away with.
What it does is it creates a triangular internal shape. If you follow those lines there, you will see a
triangle. And that gives you really good space, it's where you can put in the tongue without cluttering it
up. So that's a really handy device to use. And tongues, these are just three examples, I'm sure you
could think up more, but essentially you can make them all round and cute and soft and 1940s, or you
can do the 1970s type potato chip, or you can go a little more naturalistic route and give it a realistic
tip.
So, again, many more varieties in just these three, but this is just to give you an inkling. Maybe watch
movies and see how other people have done. So here we have strange angles, and I can't give you a
library of every weird angle, but this is just to give you a suggestion that if you have things like weird
upshots, like dramatic upshots, this mouth is a complete cheat. That is more or less a mouth that you
would see from a front-on point of view, but your brain thinks it's correct because of the context. It's
within the context of an upshot.
So it's pretty much an illusion. And so when you go to these weird angles, the problem will be, what do
I leave out? For example, with this one I wouldn't want to see his teeth, it would look strange. So you
begin to lose teeth, you begin to lose other details. And from this rearview you wouldn't even see much
inner detail at all. So just get used to what you don't have to show. And with some characters like the
generic cartoon mouse or any cartoon character, some features are basically androgynous. The mouth in
this character is, it could be on a male character. It's the context of her having long eyelashes that
makes you think that that's a female mouth.
And great fun can be had with really older or wrinkled characters where you can get into the body
mass. And here we have old granny with her wrinkled mouth. I mean, she has one tooth, and notice too
I even had a little hint of the inner mouth there so. You can still push this, because she just didn't have
many teeth, you can do things with these mouth shapes that maybe you can't do with younger
characters. So that was a lot of fun to work with. So that's our blitz introduction to cartoon mouths and

many of the tricks and techniques that'll I think help you.

Drawing realistic and stylized mouths

- What I'm going to show you now is the library of more realistic mouth designs for a female and male
character. Again, I'm keeping them bald, don't want to draw a lot of hair. I don't want you looking at the
hair. We want to focus here on the mouth and the kind of distortions that a more realistic style of mouth
can get away with. There's no reason to be intimidated by the fact that this is meant to be real. It's still a
cartoon, so the big one to watch is the open mouth, and look at what you can still get away with. You
can do extreme range of motions, both in the purse shape, and even like these wide smiles, which are
actually quite unnatural if you look at them closely.
So, the other thing to notice about this style is that it's more straight lines, and it isn't a round round
round. Now the trick with this style and pulling it off is to be a little bolder with the line strokes and if
you're timid in any way with this style, you'll end up with a timid looking drawing. So, let's just go
through a few of these up closer and you can see what I mean. Again we have these little scallop shapes
around here and the chin is like a little stroke and the eyebrow is one stroke too so we'll just move
through, check out a few poses.
Again, curling the lip, don't be afraid of asymmetry. You can twist the mouth off to one side and if ever
you're in any doubt, look in the mirror. Act some of this stuff out and you'll see what I mean. Same
thing applies more so to the three quarters view, and again you'll see bold single stroke on the lower
eyelid. Notice also that the eye is oriented on a angle. Single stroke for that eyebrow, and another one
for the other side, so you'll find as you get more confident with this that your strokes will become faster
and less exploratory, and with this shape too, that's a single stroke right there all the way down.
I'm not breaking it up with like a little divot to describe the other corner of the mouth which we should
be seeing from this angle. But a stronger design just makes a stronger statement. It goes one big line to
that point there, back of the mouth, straight line. And so these are the kind of tricks that you'll see
especially if you look at the Disney animation that was done in the late 60's and 1970's or the early Don
Bluth work like Secret of NIMH or Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. This is this kind of look.
It's not easy to come by and I am not pretending to be a master of it. This really is the challenging end
of the design spectrum but it's fun when you begin to get into that territory and you get to see the
appeal of it. And certainly transitions like this are great fun to draw. Here's a typical male character.
Here you will really see the straights against curves because, being the more angular shape, you can get
away with it. Huge cheek bones, these curved lines curving inwards, massive straight line for the chin,
even the nose which you'll see more as we go along.
So I've given him the same library of mouth shapes as the female character, I just pushed him using the
male physique, and again we have the eyes slightly offset so they're not flat on with the eye line.
They're curving up the skull just a little bit. Look at this eyebrow. One line, it's almost primitive. And
you can really see it too in profile. Fundamentally, very simple shapes, and as we move you can see
them squashing and stretching, notice the activity on the eye with the curves.

So what I'm going to do now is to take the male figure in three quarters and see if we can do something
new with them. So here is the male three quarter head, closed mouth position, and this is the one that I
work all my variations out of. What I want to do with this guy is something that we didn't do in that
sheet that I showed you, and that is maybe put some fear into him. Let's see what he looks like if he's
looking really scared. So let's imagine that he has seen something terrifying, doesn't like it. So his
mouth goes "Ugh" like down in a down position like he's really lost his nerve.
So first thing that I expect to happen will be the whole jaw mass will move down a bit and if the mouth
is getting pulled down, maybe the corners are getting pulled down to here. Again, see what I just did? I
pull from the nose all the way down. It helps me to imagine the mass of the face, and what's happening
with it. I'm going to pull that nose down as far as I think I can get away with. Now it might be difficult
at this point to see because this often happens. Lower level is quite strong but that's where we're
heading.
Now when I toggle back and forth, there should be a good hint of whether or not this will work. I can
always flip this horizontally if I think I'm going a bit blind to it, not too bad. These lines here make him
look a little older than I would like, so maybe we can't quite yet use something like that. For now I
think that's pretty decent so let's put a new sheet over this and put that layer on an opacity, and so now
I'm going to go in with a slightly finer brush.
So now let's get rid of our rough layer, and now we can toggle from here to there. We have to watch
things like gaining volume. I think we are gaining volume on the eye area. But if I flip horizontally, it's
not completely awful. Let's go in and draw a few more lines over it, and you'll find when you draw a
second line, especially if the first one is reasonably accurate, you start to get a very nice feeling out of
it. Okay, I think I'm making him look a bit old.
So, what I want to do now is copy some of the original layer so this area of the ear and the skull, I want
that to match so let's copy that. So let's see what this looks like side by side. So, as the drawing goes,
for me that's a start. I will keep working on that but that's the general process of how I would pull that
face into a state that's quite different from the original pose. So let's take one final look at other options
that we have when dealing with mouths.
This is a style that would come from a more graphic end of the spectrum, and if you are working on
like super designing or really artificial characters, then this will be one possible school of design and in
each case, I've take the simple graphic shape like a little bow tie type thing, a little U.F.O, a little wave,
peanut and a pyramid and extrapolated mouth shapes from them. You can imagine these bolted on to
little geometrical characters for some kid's TV show so this is simply to illustrate that in the world of
dialog, there are so many more options open than simply naturalistic mouth shapes, and we do keep in
mind that you may end up at some point facing the challenge of making a pyramid talk, so with that I
think we're done with mouths.

Drawing the nose

- When drawing a nose, I find it's very useful to imagine a line going from the back of the head through
the eyeline out into space in front of your head. So if you look at it from the side, you'll see what I
mean. It follows the eyeline and out into space. Now some noses droop. So this is of limited use to
them, but it still at least trains you to think about the drawing in three dimensions. So let's see what this
looks like. Here we have six heads, different noses, and as you can tell this guy on the left definitely
that will help because this part of his nose is almost horizontal.
Similarly, with this bold nose it's floating bolted right in front of the face, and even this guy here, it's a
pointy nose almost like a mouse nose. Others are less so like this fellow here goes down at an angle.
This one is maybe able to help with him. This nose is tiny so maybe not, but it's a good device for some
designs certainly him, and this one, and that one. So I still think it's a good tool to have. Like I said, it
focuses your head onto thinking about this thing as a real spherical object. On top of that, imagine that
the nose is attached to the head by a triangle, this imaginary red triangle with the apex right between
your eyes sitting here at this point, and the two lower corner points attached to the head or the skull,
and from here we have the nostrils.
And then you can, of course, vary the tip of your nose will be the point of this pyramid. And this can
vary. The point can be up, or down, or near the head, or far away from it. It's an informal very loose
way to train your mind into thinking about the nose as a three-dimensional object and roughly where
the major structure'd go. It's general. It's like this point here will give you a general idea about where
the nostril area should be. And as you can see, we can attach different kinds of noses to the same
triangle.
And this is to show again that the incredible variety of treatments that you can have for even something
as simple as the nostril. You're not limited to doing just the basic shape, and that's one problem I've
noticed throughout the years. People tend to find a "go-to" nose shape and then they just do that all the
time when maybe other shapes will work better, really simple ones like this with nothing but a
silhouette to one with a dot for the nostril, all the way to a much more realistic rendering. So please
keep that in mind so you don't get trapped in a single style.
And here I took a realistic man and gave him a series of noses ranging from a really exaggerated
comical one, a pointy one, to a silly bulb, to a more realistic hooked nose. The only one of these four
that looks kind of out of place I think is this one that's a little too much for his style. But again it goes to
show you you can get away with anything from this shape to this shape and you're not again stuck with
just simple realism. And for different angles, this can be troublesome. I can't obviously show you every
weird angle with every nose, but here are just a few suggestions.
In general, try to avoid these kind of angles if you can draw your character from a better direction,
you'd do it. But occasionally you have no choice, and in that case it's just making the best you can out
of a bad lot. In this case, I always try to get an eye in if I can. It's sad if you can't get at least one eyeball

in. But these are fairly typical of the more difficult angles. Now taking the realistic style, here we have
a very realistic nose, but again we can reduce this and stay realistic. We can take it and break it down
and then break it down further until we have one stroke to define the vertical, one stroke the side
underneath, and this is almost one, two, just three lines here.
So we do have the ability to take a realistic style and still make it graphic and strong and, therefore,
easier to animate. And here we have some exaggeration. The man on the left I've given a huge nose and
a very simple one too. These are a minimum of strokes. That's only three, four, five strokes On the
underside of these large noses, you can still imagine the triangle, and when I draw a rough, I like to
sketch it in because it just gives me a really solid feeling that my drawing has some concrete weight
and mass to it.
And then when I squash and stretch the drawing, I'm able to control the squash and the stretch of the
design a lot more. And here are a quick variety of profiles. So again the original was a straight line.
That doesn't mean you can't add other bumps and curves, scallops on the nose to make it more
interesting if you want. And again, back to the pyramid. We have the imaginary red pyramid, and if you
look at these very stylized drawings, you can almost see the pyramid even though it's not really drawn
in. I knew it was there when I put these lines down. There's a point here, a point here, a point there, and
that's the invisible structure.
Here you can really feel it. So if I was to draw in these shadow areas, then you would really feel that
area. A female face, it applies here too. On the left, it's a little more realistic. On the right, we've broken
it down into a super simplified shape. And here we have six different styles of nose and if we look in
closer, you can see this would be a fairly common way of drawing a female nose, but there are others.
So you can reduce that line a little bit to break off this area here. That makes it look softer, a little
younger. You could define the nose more.
I like this look a lot because it gives you a really nice feeling of dimension and this stroke across here is
like the tip of the nose. It gives it a bit of definition. You could also get the same effect by actually
drawing in the shadow area under the nose. You could close this off and shade it in or paint it a
different color. You could even white it out, and in this case it's almost like we've blown it out with
light and all we're seeing is that faintest suggestion of the nostrils. It's a very subtle effect. And you can
take the nose and push it out or extrude it, do really extravagant things with it, you make it longer,
shorter, wider, whatever you like.
So again, don't feel limited. And once more, just some other front-on views of the nose and different
areas. Again, this one is so simple to do. It's really nice and here we're down to just a handful of
strokes. And profiles, again, can be varied with a female just like a male. They don't all have to be pixie
noses. You can do straight ones, bent ones, stubby ones if you can get away with it. So now I want to
show you how to draw some of these. Okay, so let's just do a quick circle for the head, and we'll
imagine the line going around the back of the head, and there's our imaginary line to the front.
In this case, I'll draw like the bulb-type nose, tidy it up a little bit so you can see it. So I'm going to
move him over here, and now what I want to do is to create a more angular nose. So again, we have

this triangle and let's say like a witchy nose something different. So in this case, we have the triangle
here so what I'll do now is I'm going to put that on a transparency so I can do a slightly cleaner pass
over that and notice that the strokes are quite straighforward.
I'm going to move him over here, do a couple more. So I'll do the action hero male. So let's say the
nose is coming in this direction here, tip will be about here. And again, one, two, three strokes and
we've got it. You can always add more, of course, if you want after that as you begin to build up around
it, but that's the core. So I think we'll do one more which will be the female nose 'cause it can be the
trickiest because it's visually the most subtle.
So the problem is here do we draw the nostril on the other side? And it's very easy for this to become
cluttered. So i'm just going to suggest it. So I'm going to flip this horizontally to make sure it still looks
good. I think it's just going out a little, not by much, just a little too much. And the other thing that I can
do is pull the nose in a little bit. Okay, let's flip again. Not too bad. So that will be an easy enough style
of female nose, and you could also be more conventional and draw something more like the male nose
as well which is our usual one, two stroke, one or two for the nostril.
You won't go far wrong with that. If you want you can add the lines for the bump, or second nostril, but
again, the more lines you add, the more danger you have of making her look 25, 30, 35, so it's always a
tricky thing with younger characters. So that's the approach that I use for drawing noses.

Drawing ears
- A very nice and simple technique for drawing convincing ears, is to use a straight line with a couple
of curves. As you can see up here, we have our straight line, and then a curve, and a second curve, and
here there's a break. And it's really that simple. So, as we follow along the right side, you can see how
with applying some internal lines, we create this form. The internal shape here is like the letter, pi. Very
simplified. But by varying the degree of the curvature of these inner strokes, breaking them down a
little further, you can get some very nice looking ears.
So, let's do one from scratch. So again, we'll draw a curve, a straight, and a second curve. And we know
that we have our break here, but now let's just draw through. In this case, I can draw a little S curve or a
C curve. Let's make an S curve and see what it looks like. But like the little, whatever this thing is, i
never know the name of it. Then, whatever internal shape you want. I'm going to get fancy with this.
You could make it like a bulge like that. Let's undo it, let's keep it maybe simpler. You can put a stroke.
It just has to indicate, suggest the structure of the ear. It doesn't have to do much more than that. Pretty
much that's it. You can vary it, of course. You could do a curve here, you could have the line bend this
way, you could have the line bend that way. Basic form will be something like this. The main thing to
watch out for is that you avoid parallel lines.
They're just unsightly. Notice here, we have a tapered shape. It's not parallel, this shape here is also
tapered. So, it's more triangular than parallel. Same goes for here, it's thinner to thick. So, that's the
basic process for drawing ears. Let me show you a few more examples. Here, we have some more. So
on the top left, you can see what I regard as a no-no. We have a perfect curve with no breaks inside
another curve with no breaks, and inside that, another curve with no breaks.
We have a big parallel shape in here. It's a lot of boring to me. You can use the very same design
system, and just by nudging it, by putting a break on here, pulling that line out a little bit. Pulling this
one in a little bit here, suddenly you've removed the parallels, and with the same basic three strokes,
you have now created a much more interesting shape. You can go further and put breaks on this little
guy if you wanted, too. Here, we have some variations. I've just put in more little bulges, or bumps just
to vary it.
You can see these tick marks, they flag the breaks. You can see where the curve of the line varies. But,
this should be a pretty good example of a virtue of avoiding parallel lines, and using curves correctly
and intelligently. And just some more variations. If you have a three quarter rear view of the ear, then
this folds, it's bolting the ear to the side of the head comes into play. We lose the little guy here,
whatever this thing is. We get this basic shape, and again a break, a break, and a break, or some other
variation of that, and you're good.
An elf ear is just like a normal ear. You add the tip. Here are some other variants of the same ear pattern
with slightly more complexity appearing. Different ear shapes, this is more like a bean, this is more like
your classic 1970s Disney or Bluth ear. So, you get an amazing control over such a simple shape.

Adding details to build character in a drawing

- Let's take a character and add some details: warts, brow ridges, wrinkles, tufts of hair, all that kind of
stuff, we'll really make him pretty. So the first thing I want to do is give him some warts. Let's start
with that. We will just draw in a few, and remember when you're doing this, these circles are attaching
to a physical shape, and try to follow the contours of what you think the area should be. So for
example, these warts here or freckles if you want to think of them as flat on the surface, they're just
going directly over a cheek that's curved, so I want to make them match that.
The cheek is like that, these warts should more or less follow along. One nice trick to use when you're
designing stuff like this is to remember that it's good to be able to draw these with some kind of
control. So imagine that there is a line going from here to the corner of the mouth, and the center of
these freckles or warts will always align with that line. As you stretch and move the mouth, they'll
stretch and move with it, and that way you'll know where to put them. Similarly here, you might
imagine the line going from these points at the tip of the nose to the corner of the eye, and then you
simply draw them along that imaginary line, and therefore you've got some construction control.
So that would be the main way that I would deploy warts or spots or mottles, objects on the surface or
contour of a character. Next thing we want to do is to put on a ridge, like a big, pretty ugly looking
brow ridge. Let's give him something pretty heavy. I'm imagining this as like the dinosaur, it's the brow
of a T. rex almost, it's really heavy, Frankenstein kind of object.
I'm going to really build it out. If you want you can imagine its contour lines are all like that. We don't
have to completely close it off. I think it'll look stronger if we feel that this is flowing out of the mass of
the skull, and it's not some totally separated block. We can match these curves over here, they'll have an
equivalent on that side. We can add more creases in here. So there's more things we can do to make this
guy look even less human. We can also make his head more cone shaped.
Let's imagine that we have the apex of the head around here, and let's say we want to give him a really
sinister look. Pull that up to there. So now I'm going in with a really dark stroke, because I just want to
really highlight the parts that we've completely altered out of pretty much all recognition on this guy.
So, that's the process of taking somebody who wants to look fairly human, and turning him into
something who's fairly inhuman.
So as they say, here's one I did earlier, and you can see the progression from left to right. All of this
builds character. You can take somebody who's fairly bland on the left and by the time you get him to
the right side, and you don't have to make him a goblin, you can do any number of things to a character
to add personality, but this a pretty fun example. Let's go on to the stop motion, there we go. Now I
want to show you how we add other details that are less sinister like a nice necklace.
So if you add details to the character that are say props or non-character based, they're still subject to

the same construction laws. In this case, the necklace is going to wrap around the neck in a C shape or
an eight shape or an S curve, and you can see here on the right side where we've drawn through, same
thing here on the right it's more of a bean shape. That's the process that you would follow for any kind
of object that's wrapping around the body or a contour. Another area that is a constant irritant for me:
large eyeglasses, they really play havoc with the eyebrows.
So if you do ever have a character like this, you have to take particular care that the eyebrows don't
converge with the eyeglass. The solution would be to move the eyebrow on a different line or a curve,
move it under or over, or change the orientation so that the brow no longer conflicts with that
perimeter. Of course, don't forget this is a great scope for gags, where you can take glasses off and this
entire area can be white to reveal tiny little button eyes. Maybe it's a one off, but they're fun if you can
get away with them.
And then the other thing to remember also if you are working in a cartoony medium is that the area of
the eye can be a white little overshoot into space outside of the character. Eyeglasses, jewelry, objects
that attach to a character, just remember that they have to be constructed and they have to be physically
coherent so that when you work them with the character that they fit to it. They're not just floating in
arbitrary space or as in the case of the jewelry you can feel them physically contacting the body.

Drawing hands
- Let's take a look at hands and these can be really intimidating, but really there's a process that we can
use to simplify the construction and drawing. Now, first of all this letter system that you see don't
worry about it too much if you're just drawing. This is for people who want to draw a lot of hand
reference images and maybe save them on a computer. And, if you want to do that it's really nice if you
have all of the ones where your palm, for example, is facing out all together so you can toggle through
them and find the variations more easily.
If you're just drawing on paper on a notebook forget all this, but the nice thing about this is they stack
in your folders on your computer really, really elegantly. So, let's move on So, here we have the hands
and I'm gonna toggle through them and these are good design solutions for the major angles. Of course,
the hand is facing straight on. If we tilted the hand towards you you'd have to have new solutions, but
this will show you the primary directions. Now we're going to look at how to draw this and a good
approach, a pretty standardized approach is to use the system of the mitten, we call it.
So, let's take a look at how this is done. So, what I'm going to do now is draw in the mitten on this side
here, so you can begin with the thumb, or the actual finger area yourself. Try to keep the strokes nice
and broad and loose, and then a big thumb. There's a little break here on the curve, you can see. It
suggests the joint of the thumb. That would be the first stage of drawing a hand. I may have gone a
little pointy at the top, don't worry about that for now. Let's just put in this little fleshy pad for the little
stumpy part of the hand, and then the crease here and then you already have this line for the fingers
more or less suggested anyway by the end of this ball area.
And then, you can add in the fingers. Now, you could do them like super simple if you liked. And, you
don't have to, of course, follow this exact curve this just gets you into the rough spacing of it. So, this'll
be a very typical rough pass. So, what I'm going to do now is just undo some of this and do something
that's closer to the example that we see on the right over here because you know you're going to break
this up anyway so let's just do that in advance. So, I'm going to take that little finger and just make it do
something a little more interesting.
Then, have the middle finger maybe bent slightly, too. And, you might want to clean this up at this
point getting hard to see with our outer line there. And, bear in mind of course, the middle finger should
be the longest, so we don't want the longest index finger looking crazy long. So, this is looking a little
more naturalistic because the fingers are feeling a little bit thinner, but you get the idea. So, that's the
process and by using this and by changing the width or the volume of the fingers you can get hands that
are quite cartoony or realistic.
And, keep your initial pass rough and loose. So, this would be about the speed that I would draw an
actual hand out if I was just going in for my initial design pass for the fingers and the hand. So, let's
move on. Here we have a slide that shows the same technique and this time we're just making some
variations to the fingers, so let's look in these in close up. Here we have the mitten, and now we've

added the internal finger strokes. And, see how we can curve individual fingers to get different hand
positions.
And, also notice these red marks are corresponding with the breaks. And, these breaks, again, with
different shaped line strokes so these outer stokes are more straight than the inner. That's because that's
where the bone is closer to the surface of the skin, and we have the squishy round parts on the inside,
and we have the same for the middle finger and for the index finger. So, you can create all kinds of
hand positions by these simple variations. Bring in the thumb you have a fist and you can splay the
fingers out and this splayed hands shows a very handy technique for making a good hand design.
And, that is to have two of the fingers closer and break one of them off. And, if you have a natural hand
you keep three together and break one off. So, let's see another example of this. And, here we have four
hands and again we have one finger broken off, one finger broken off, one broken off, and one broken
off and the other two are clumped together. So, let's see if we can do another one of these. So, I'm just
gonna draw the ball for the hand. And, let's do maybe a hand pointing off into the distance over here.
So, he's going to be pointing up into the sky or maybe he's got the other two fingers splayed out. They
could either be curled down under, or they could be pointing out that way. As often happens with my
rough sketches this one's getting very weedy very quickly, so let's put this on opacity. Let's move these
fingers down a little bit. Put a fingernail on it, it helps to read the direction.
And again, I'm building my lines over this imaginary ball. They don't have to exactly follow the
contour of that mind you, but that's just there as a guide just so I don't completely drift off. So now, let's
see if this is going to look clean. My longtime trick is to use this Flip Horizontal, it just feels a little off
balance, so I'm going to use one of the rotation tools in Photoshop and just point it like that. And now,
as I go back and forward it's not too bad. I might want to make some adjustments to the curvature of
the line here.
This one's a little harsh. That looks pretty good. So, with a little more polishing you can see I could turn
this hand design into something a lot more elegant looking with these beautiful strokes. But, that's
already solved the basic problem of where do the lines go. And again, using the technique of one finger,
two fingers. Also, do remember that the hand is flexible. It's not on a mechanical pivot. It can rotate
around, it's really like a ball socket. So, it's extremely flexible and when you're working with cartoon
characters do try to get this flexibility as you can see I'm almost turning it into liquid there on the left
side hand.
You'll have, I think, a much more enjoyable time if you can do drawings that look like this. Also, if you
hold your hand out in front of you as you see with this hand here, hold it right up, if you can hold it
vertically, and notice there's and imaginary line that goes right on the underside of the hand all the way
down the forearm. And, if you keep this in mind when you draw your hand even as you rotate it and
move it around this will help to give more anatomical structure. When we draw cartoons we exaggerate
this principle so we really make it extreme so you get these almost right angles sometime with these
hands.
And, that also creates a very strong design shape. Another common problem that you'll face is that of

foreshortening. Now here, I've applied that same principle where we've used the hard angle on the
outside of the edge of the arm and we've built the hand around it using the same system we've already
seen of the mitten technique. Now, the problem becomes when we look at the elongated fingers, or
when they're close to us, when they begin to foreshorten. You can have some pretty tricky design
shapes. So, let's have a look at how we would begin to approach one of these.
So, what I want to do is a hand where we're looking up at it, but the fingers are coming out towards us,
like he's a magician on a stage. So, first I'll just sketch in the wrist. And then, we draw in the pad, or the
palm of the hand. Again, remembering this red line here that would be roughly following the big sharp
curve. And, let's draw in the thumb. We're gonna be looking up at the hand, so this is the underside of
the thumb. Now, the fingers will be splayed out, so it's a good idea, I think, to draw in the outer finger
strokes for each and then we know that roughly the fingers will follow a path like that.
So, I'm drawing the fingers as a complete mass. And, I'm remembering that they're coming out towards
us like this. And then, we can begin to flesh in lightly again some of the inner strokes and I'm breaking
up the middle finger and the little finger just a little bit. And, do a little bit of clean up because at this
point it can be hard to make out all these overlapping lines, the construction area has done it's purpose.
And, you can add in some little suggestions of creases here if you want.
So, let's flip this horizontally and see. It's not too bad. So, what I'm gonna do is put that on an opacity
and put a clean sheet over it with a finer stroke. And again, we can reconstruct the hand but I wouldn't
do it too heavily on the second, cleaner version, no need. Maybe the thumb comes in a little bit. And, if
you really want to push the foreshortening on this just pull that finger down so that we're almost
looking at a curve.
So that if you want to make it more exaggerated that would be how you would do it. The more lines
you add just the more business you're creating, so sometimes less is more. Always be conscious that
maybe you'd have a better drawing if you take a line out than putting one in. So now, let' get rid of the
lower level, and that's a pretty good first start at a foreshortened hand. I think I would like to see a
suggestion of some creases there, I think that would also help sell that foreshortening. And, by flipping
horizontally again I just give my brain that little magic two seconds of looking at the drawing for a
fresh view.
It really works wonders if you have a mirror, also works. That's pretty good, I'm happy with that. So,
let's move on. So, let's see how these principles would apply to a slightly more realistic hand. And, the
major difference with this is you're going from a curvier process to a straight one. And, we like to use
boxier constructions to create these. So again, I'm gonna draw the wrist and then kind of a box shape,
something along this line. And, that will allow us to create the hand around that.
And now, let's say I want to have slightly curled fingers, something a little more interesting. This time
I'm just gonna draw each finger one at a time. You could as easily draw one big arching area, some
people like to do that, but when you know what you're doing, if you have a pretty good idea about the
kind of hand that you want this kind of approach can also be productive. So, it's really that quick. Now,
let's go in and tighten it up just very quickly. So, I'm going to not bother redrawing the construction for

this one because this is more of a finished drawing.

So, I can focus more on the lines. I would draw through a lot of this area here. And, on this kind of
hands don't forget you have straights on the outside and you'll be more likely to have curved strokes on
the inside where the fleshy pads are. So, now let's hide the rough layer so we can have a closer look at
this. Not too bad, I'm going to flip horizontally again. Feeling a little fat around here, so ideally I'll go
back in and fix that. So, these are the kind of corrections you can make when you begin to fine tune.
I'm going to go back now to the other orientation. I've just sharpened up this area, tightened it a little
bit, put some darker over it and that is essentially the process. And, here you see a three stage
illustration of how you would do a splayed hand gesture. Again, where we lay down the entire area like
it's a big mitten and then you subdivide it into whatever finger shapes you like. So, extremely realistic
hands can be broken down into this straight forward process. Female hands are also realistic hands,
same principles apply as in the preceding, but just make them slightly thinner, more curvy, or more
elegant.
As you can see from this hand here, we have nice curves on the inside, straights on the outside. And,
the same principle also can be applied to elongating the hand or being stylish with it. We don't have to
make them clubby little realistic fingers. And, if you're going to use a hand to hold an object this is
where the mitten technique really comes in useful. So, let's imagine we're reaching down we're going to
pick up let's say it's a cube, little box on the table here. And, I'm drawing very rough now. So, we want
the hand to come down and reach and pick it up.
So, we want to do that contact image. So, let's imagine where the hand will make contact with this
object. And, I'm going to imagine the hand is big enough that it can reach completely around it. So, the
hand's about this wide. So, let's imagine the pad, or the wrist will be about here. It's almost like a child's
letter block or something like that. Now, let's go to a new layer just so we can show that a little more
cleanly. So, you could wrap that thumb around too, it doesn't have to be on the other side of the block
like that. And, that's the process of wrapping the hand around an object and as you can see in each of
the example images you have to get that sense that this is a volume and it is curved around the object in
the grasp.
So, that's the hand, how we draw it, how we flex it, and get nice designs, both in cartoony and realistic
styles. And, how we make it interact with the environment.

Drawing hands: Details, touching hands, and fine points

- Now let's take a look at some of the smaller elements that constitute a hand. And here we have little
werewolf paw, and we have fingernails, and here we have a big claw, and then a more regular looking
fingernail. We have the joints. We have the knuckle line. So let's take a closer peek at these. So here we
have four hands, none of which has a knuckle line so let's look at different ways of drawing them. Now
the first thing to remember is the physical structure. This isn't my final drawing by the way. This is just
to show you the planes that we're dealing with.
So we have one plane here for the edge of the fingers, and then this plane here is the top of the hand. So
let's undo that and we will put our graphical representation in, or for that, nothing's stopping you from
doing something simple like a straight line if you want to go with that route. But the knuckle line tends
to be a little more interesting than that and so one way of doing it is to draw in like a little straight and
curved line like that. And these can be any different numbers of wave shapes. I mean you can,
depending on your personal preference, could be that.
We could break this form up. It doesn't have to be one continuous line. You could have maybe two or
three smaller ones. Another way of doing it, a little less obvious, a little less cartoony, is just to suggest
a little indent there and that lets us know there's some kind of a knuckle action going on. If your
character feels a little more bony, you can go this route. So depending on the type of character you
want, how elegant you them to look, this might be better for a female character. This could be better for
a grumpy old Dickensian landlord.
Then that's some of the choices that you have at your disposal. Another issue is the joints. How do you
designate the joints of the fingers? And one of the more common ways to do it is to put a single stroke
there if you like. I think it's fun to build them out a little bit more than that and to use a variety of these
shapes here. I've really enjoyed drawing them. Too many, of course, and the thing can become a little
too detailed so you might get away with a very light stroke, but just enough to hint that there's a
difference in the anatomy at that pont. You could also, if you prefer, do something a little cartoonier.
A lot of characters I think don't even bother with it so it may be something you don't even need. But if
you do need to do it in a less of a styled form than that, then you could put like a little crease line. So
that would be the joint system. And taken to extremes you get that old style 70s and 80s look, which I
think is fun too. A very subtle detail, but it's a nice one to know, is this bump here. Hold your hand right
in front of you, you'll see it. It's where your forearm meets the hand. You can use this in all kinds of
character styles and there are many ways to draw fingernails, something as simple as a fingernail.
And here are just a few that I threw out so just to give you an idea. It's nice to establish one and stick
with it if you have a character. Pick your style of fingernail for your character and pretty much try to be
consistent. You wouldn't want to be going from this one, for example, to this one and back again. It
would look weird. Now I'm going to talk about the phenomenon of making one thing touch another
thing. We've already discussed how to pick up objects in the previous movie, but now I want to show

what happens when two parts of the body touch or even if two figures were to touch one another, the
principle is the same.
The design will get very confused unless you use the trick of having the same line function as both
elements. So in this case, it's like a tile or two jigsaw pieces fit together. So in this case the red line
designates the fact that this line works both as the underside of his physical right arm, that's this one,
and also works as the outside of his physical left arm, this one, and let's see some more examples of
that. These are more simple examples and this is just hands clasped together.
Now in this case we don't have that same trick of the line working as two functions but still you see that
this area of contact is kept clean and simple and, were that to get too liney, then it might become a little
confusing. In this hand on the right, it's getting a little busy in here. It's not bad. I really like this look.
But it might be a good idea, for example, to eliminate that area completely, have that line move straight
up and into there and eliminate that little tiny stroke. But that's a subtle fix and I wouldn't call it an
essential fix, but it's the kind of thing that you would watch out for when you're doing these kind of
drawings.
And here's a really good example of how these lines fit together and if you follow this line up around
the face, notice that your brain unconsciously reads it as the chin but you can also look at it and go, no
it's not the chin, it's the hand line. And this is a very clean way to do these drawings, a drawing that
would otherwise distract you if you had separate lines for the hand and another line for the face, it
would pull your eye in like a magnet and then you would begin wondering what's going on in there.
So it's this simplicity that will help you with these kind of puzzles. So to give you an idea about how I
would approach one of these, let's imagine a drawing where a character puts his hand on his face in a
hmm kind of gesture like he's puzzled, he's thinking. And so this is going to involve the hand pushing
into the cheeks and really making him look he's confused or his brain is working. Very quickly I want
to just lay in an area for the skull. Jaw will be about here.
But the real business of this scene will be the hand on the face. So my first pass will be loose because
again we don't know if this is going to work at all, so I want to make sure that I'm not going to waste
too much time on this if the fundamentals are off. So what I've done is, with this stroke here, I've
created an area that now works as visually as the upper side of his hand but yet your brain looks at it
and goes, "Wait a minute, that's his mouth." So I could draw the mouth in.
Watch what happens. I mean I could do that. I guess it kind of works. But suddenly your brain is trying
to figure out is the mouth, is that the lip? I don't know what it is anymore. So undo it. Just get rid of
that. And if you wanted the mouth in that position, I would actually just move the hand up into that
position so that this little area here again does double duty. You could put a crease up here for the edge
of the mouth. You could maybe get away with doing something like this, showing the corner of it, but I
like to keep this simple, and let your brain do some of the work which isn't really very much at all
because it's fooled.
It's like an illusion. So let's look at the finished version of this image. So here we see the finished
version. On the right side, the area that's using the illusion is in red. On the left you can see the image,

and I think the brain goes, yep, that's the upper mouth area and yet it's also the hand. Also works great
for interlocking fingers. This is also a great way to keep these things clean. So always remember this
principle. It's pretty universal and if you have two characters touching each other or hugging or one's
carrying the other on their back, try to apply this wherever you can.

Drawing hand styles

- Here's a quick design idea, and this is to show you some stylized options for hands, that we're not just
restricted to strictly anatomical ones, and in case you don't see the joke, these strokes are meant to be
read as fingers, and there's the thumbs, and we have our scary guy in the background. Don't worry.
We're not going to be drawing this. This is just a demonstration that we should always be imaginative
about things, and maybe there's option that are going to be there for you to use props or other inanimate
objects as hands. Let's take a look at some other styles. On the left we have a fairly cartoony version of
the business that we've already been dealing with.
But other fun ways that you can handle hands, that might make it easier for you if you're starting out, is
this kind of very loose, rubbery style. It's a lot of fun. There's not that many straights. You can have a
straight in there if you like. I really like doing this whenever I can get away with it. On the right side
we have straight hands, and these, you'll see this style of hands in two recent Irish animated movies,
The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, and that's a really fun way to draw fingers as well. If you
haven't seen those films, check them out, and they were drawn on computer, but they were hand-drawn,
so a very good reference for you as well.
Here we have that similar style. You can see how much fun it is to work with, and it creates different
kind of shapes as well, so let me draw one of these for you. I'll just do a fairly easy pose for this, just a
hand, like he's asking for money. He's reaching his hand out. It's pretty much the same process as for
the cartoony mitten hand. The big difference is to really accentuate this style, just to flare out the
fingertips, make them really fat at the end, so instead of going to a tapered point, as we would with
many other styles, with this one we're creating these big, almost sausage finger shapes at the end of the
hand.
Often, I like multiple strokes. If you really want to get this look here that you see on the originals,
there's two ways of doing. You can do one bold stroke, and the other technique is to use lots of lighter
strokes, and depending on which technique works for you, sometimes I use one, sometimes the other,
as I feel it's appropriate. Now we can flip this horizontally and have a nice flip and see if it's looking
good in both directions. Like I said, just watch the type. I don't think you have to fatten the fingertips.
You could probably do the style and, have all kinds of different hand shapes. Throughout this course
I've been trying to remind you that I'm not trying to shoehorn you into any one of these styles. These
are just different ways to try to break you out of falling in to one way of drawing, or one way of
thinking about these hands or these objects. Let's take a look at the next one. Round hands, as I showed
you earlier, you could do very balloony hands. They're always good fun if you have a character who's
made out of water or some other natural element.
You could imagine all kinds of great uses for that, but another great use for the roundy finger style is to
make it stubby and then use it for either very big characters. As I look at these hands, I can't help but
think of a polar bear, for some reason, even though he doesn't have claws. This is one trick that you use

to get this effect of these very big, bulky hands, is to remove a joint, and you'll see he only has two
joints. There should be a third, if we were to be strict about it. Let's very quickly lay down a knuckle
line, and you just simply draw the finger so short that they barely break out of that hand area.
Of course, try to push this a little more. If I was going to do, let's say, imagine he's reaching out towards
the camera or something, we could still break out the fingers as far as we could. Give them some little
bear claws. That's the large, heavy, round hand, as well as the very mysteriously, liquidy-looking paw
over here. Let's move on again. I drew these again to show you that, if you're given a task of designing
or drawing or working with something unusual, I really set myself a challenge with this.
I drew this very interesting-looking robot hand on the left side, but then I thought, OK, it looks nice in
that position, but would I be able to do anymore with it? Could I make a fist out of it? It was a bit of a
puzzle, I don't mind telling you. It was not easy to draw this little fist, but I thought, keep at it, got to
see if it's possible. Now, it's slightly different. This thumb looks fatter than this one, but I did find that I
had to cheat these metal rods. You'll see them bending on the back of the hands there if you look
carefully, and you'll see them bending here as well. They're straight there.
These are the kind of things that you have to work out when you begin working with your own
characters, if you're designing a character and trying to establish the range of motion of it. Is this thing
practically going to be able to do the kind of things that you want it to do? If you have a movie where,
maybe, your two characters have to hug, well, can they do it? Do they have little tiny fins? Do they
physically have the ability to carry out the actions that you want them to carry out? You might want to
add, for example, another finger joint here, before you do half your film or your comic, rather than
have to add it halfway through.
But I think this is a fun-looking design. Let's look at some others. Remember, too, this movie isn't
really about animal hands, as such, but I do want to remind you that you have different appendages that
would be used as hands, anything from alien creatures or monsters, to big bears, to a slightly humanoid
dog, where we cheat the paws into human hands. We have a ghost or some kind of creature made out of
butter on the lower left here, and, again, he's going to have those wonderful, kind of blobby fingers, and
that would be a lot of fun to work with.
Penguins, and I've worked with my fair share of penguins, and, again, you end up having to cheat little
thumbs onto the penguin fins to make them function. Another huge challenge, and I've worked with
these many times, are birds, and then you have the problem of making bird feathers work as fingers and
cheat as that. And fish, of course, fish fins will also operate as hands. Just because your character
doesn't have a humanoid hand doesn't mean that you don't have the challenge of some of these design
issues that we've been dealing with through these hand movies, so try to remember them as best you
can.

Feet
- So it's time to take a look at feet, another funky part of the body because it has a lot of interesting
shapes to it. And it can be very easy to draw weird looking feet, and by which I mean something that
just looks completely eye-catching and unnatural. So people usually wonder, how can I do that? How
can I draw just an okay looking foot? And if you start looking at the feet, you've probably done it
wrong because they're not meant to really catch the eye. So let's look at these turnarounds a little more
closely.
So here we have the feet facing front out. I've grayed out the other side so that the ones on the top looks
closer to us. It's easier to follow this rotation through. So that's it. So the trick with the feet is to think
about them as having, well, obviously a structure, so let's imagine them as a pyramid. I'll very lightly
sketch this in. Something of a triangular structure.
The apex here, so it's not like the ones in Egypt. It's a slightly different design. And this is where we
will connect with the leg. So there is the rounder ball at the back, round that off there. So that
approximately will be the structure of the foot. So what I'm going to do is just tidy this image up a little
bit and then show you that. So as you can see, we're looking down on the foot now. The area of the foot
that's touching the ground is in red and then so this is the base here and this is the upper edge of the
foot.
And then we have the hint of the leg coming down on top of that. So let's take a look at another aspect
of this. So what I'm going to do now is draw the side view. So we're looking flat on. What will this
thing look like just from the profile view? Something like this. This will be the approximate shape that
I would use for this kind of design for a foot. And you can imagine there's a joint here. That's the toe
area. You can bend the foot at this point.
So let me tidy that up just a little bit. So I'm going to move the page up just a little bit because I want to
do a few more drawings down here. So now let's imagine what this foot looks like if we're looking
directly down on it. It'll be a little fatter at this end. This is where this joint here is attaching, so this
circle represents where the leg comes in contact with the foot. You'll see it's slightly off center. We have
our big toe over to this side. And we're bringing this to a point where as an anatomical foot would be
somewhat different. This is a figure wearing some kind of a shoe.
So we have our toes all safely curled up in here. Don't worry about them just yet. So let me tidy that up
just one more time. So let's see what a more realistic foot would look like. Where do the toes exist
within all that? So again, we have the area where the leg meets the foot. And we have a larger area here
where the big toe will be. I'm just going to very roughly sketch in all the smaller toes. So as you can
see, a purely naturalistic foot will have a slightly different shape than the stylized one that we're
working with here.
But it's basically very similar. It's slightly off center. We have a point here, which is analogous to that
point. Let me tidy this up just a little bit. So as you can see now looking down at the finished foot, it's

essentially the same shape as the stylized one. It has the same point here that corresponds to the point
here. What we've done is just smoothed off the curvature of the foot somewhat and simplified this
indentation there. And as you can see, this is a very easy shape to draw. You could add a more realistic
shape to it, but I think it would just add complications to a very efficient way of drawing feet in a very
nice cartoony style.
Now I'm going to move these drawings over just a little bit so I can draw an upshot of this foot. So I'm
going to imagine that we have the leg somewhere in this position and it's lifting off the ground. And
we're looking up at this pyramidal structure. So the trick will be just to remember our red area over
here, and we're looking up at it. So I'm going to very quickly sketch in and tone that underside. I'm
going to draw a more realistic foot this time so you can get a sense for what some of those complex
shapes will look like.
But this is how the essentially simple shape would look. So you have, as you can see, the wider point of
the base of the foot is here. And then we taper to our joint there. So now let's see what a more realistic
one will look like. So the big thing will be to add the big toe and the joint where we have a hinge on the
foot here, and all the little toes are in there. So you see we're adding on to this simple geometrical ideal
shape with a more anatomical one. So let me clean this one up as well.
And so there you see it. And we have the same shadowed underside, so he's been walking in coal dust.
And the smaller toes, and notice how I draw them as a group, so that keeps them simple and stops them
from getting too finicky. Nobody cares about which individual toe is shaped like what, so I like to keep
them very basic forms. And we just added that ball for the base here. But essentially, it's structured on
the same principle as the pyramid, so it's this shape here corresponds pretty closely to this, just with the
extra joints and the realism added.
Okay, so what I want to draw now is two feet standing more or less front on to us. That can be an easy
angle, but surprisingly tricky. So we just want simple feet facing out. So again, I'm thinking about the
pyramidal structure and the tapering to the thinnest point at the top. The widest point will be about
here. So as we're looking at this in contour, I can imagine he's wearing slippers, you know, they would
look like that. Just follow these concentric rings all the way up to the joint.
This is kind of the volume of the feet. So I've colored them red so you can see that massive area at the
front, and that's where you have your joint as you walk. That's the part of your foot that flexes. And if I
color them red, they look a little bit like clown shoes. So let's take a look at a couple of other variations
of this. So here we have two more slight variations. We have a linear version without the color code on
the top and on the bottom version, we've taken the shoes off to get some idea about what the toes would
look like with their relative sizes, obviously without this structure around them.
So let me just zoom out one more time so you can see the entire image. So there we go, that is the
extremely challenging area of the foot reduced to hopefully a much simpler level, I think, which will
give you a feeling for how to break it down into some basic forms. Now we're going to look at some
variations on this. So on the top left, you can see how I often treat the toes as previously mentioned as
one little group. It's the big toe that's the one that gives any personality that the foot has I find comes

from the big toe. And that's the one your eye goes to.
The other four are like a little clump there. I just subdivide it into the smaller shapes. And whenever I
get into trouble with the foot, always remember that the basic form of the foot is, as we've already said,
this elegant, simple, triangular pyramidal shape. And we have the flexing of the foot here. But also
when you have a design issue sometimes with shoes, it's good to remember that the arch will
correspond to the natural arch of the foot, so some shoe designs will have very steep arches. Others will
look flat and a little more boring.
And some shoes will also have big cartoony clown bulges near the toes to make room for the toes, so
remember that. Whereas this one has a straighter, more stylish look to it. And these are just some more
image examples of the feet very roughly drawn. But as you can see, these arrows are simply pointing at
the fact that narrowest point in this design system is at the ankle. And then we have the big widening
out from the ankle. And let me show you a different way of doing this kind of foot. There's another way
of doing it where the widest point is at the point of the toes where the toe joint is.
And this is handy for really funky looking characters. Like Goofy would be a good example, I think, of
a character who would have feet like this. If you were doing a clown, this would be a natural style of
character for somebody that you want to look slightly funny. And it's important that you try to maintain
consistency so you don't have your character going from one of these styles to the other. So this guy, he
has a narrow point here, whereas the other one we were doing had the highest point of the pyramid at
the ankle point. This man's ankle is really close to the ground. It's quite different from the one
preceding.
Let's look at that again. So here you can see we have a big triangle. On the one following, that just
doesn't exist. Now it's the point of the pyramid is actually happening here. So whichever system you
choose for your characters, keep that in mind. And then you have bubble feet, and these are also
venerable classics, and the Donald Duck, Daffy Duck kind of duck feet design, which is a modification
of this and just a different style. And again, you'll notice with this particular rendering, we have the
thinnest point at the ankle. But you could also do something closer to the other where we have the
pyramidal structures of the apex of this foot is at the ankle point.
So these are not hard and fast formulas. You can play with them, vary them, make your own versions if
you wish. And here I've drawn some female feet of varying ages. A slightly older lady here, a very
elegant young lady here. High heels, of course, which really push the arch of the foot to a unhealthy
degree. But again, notice here we have the earlier pyramidal form, that's all happily working away. And
from the front again the ankle is thin, even thinner on the feminine foot than on the male. So that's your
introduction to feet.

Hair and beards

- Now I'm going to talk about hair. And hair is best thought of as a single mass, like one continuous
object. Do not think about it as being thousands and thousands of individual hairs or you will lose your
mind. So in this case what I have is a man with a short sensible haircut on the top and a woman with a
shoulder length sensible haircut on the bottom. Both quite similar physically. And as you can see the
major shapes and forms have been dealt with like they're one object, so we have the most of his hair is
up here in one big triangular shape.
And likewise with her we just have added the sides. So let's see how we would apply his shape to this
profile. And it's good to have a three dimensional idea of the hair. So what I'm going to do is make a
clean layer and just with a red line, so we can see precisely what's going on I'm going to make some
strokes. His hair will look I think very similar to hers from this angle, I would think it would be
probably something like this. The major difference between his hair and her hair would be that he
doesn't have this area, we'll still see his ear.
So we have the design issue of how to deal with this area and how it corresponds with this. So do we
do a square cut like that or do we arch it through? And that's a decision that you will find yourself
having to make many times. So the other trick we could do might be to put a curve in, like that. So now
let's go in with a black line so I can define this a little bit more. I'm not liking this for some reason, I
think it feels fiddly, so maybe we can arch it that way and just do a single stroke like that.
So that's one solution. The other solution might be just to do a continuous stroke. So instead of a hard
edge we'll just do an S shape, we're creating a parallel here. So maybe the solution then is to play with
his hair at the front, maybe we can move that somewhere. And that's giving us a little more room. This
is a nice triangular shape now. This negative shape is looking a little nicer. And I'm watching the point
of this hair to make sure that it matches. And as you can see it's drifting a little bit. Don't forget too you
have to draw this through, the hairline has to be consistently across the head.
You don't want this going at a weird angle that suggests that he has hair were his eyebrows are. So
again we're thinking about these things where they are in three dimensional space and not just as flat
interesting shapes. You could probably get away with that if you were only ever going to show him
from one angle, but if you have any ambitions to show him from more than one direction then you have
to consider this. Another issue with profiles is that we often don't dwell on profiles in production, but
they're still very useful to have so that if you move through this direction in an animation scene you
have some reference to fall back on.
But in general most of the work will be done in front, or most often in the 3/4 view and from the rear
view, which we have no reference for. I think that's an easy enough one. I'm just going to very quickly
suggest and it would look something like this. You might see the ear, depending on the size of the hair,
you might not. We might see a hint of the ear on the other side. And we can put the central line down.
So that gives us a pretty good idea about what the hair would almost certainly look like from that

direction.
And keeping this tuft here is a nice way to keep a nice silhouette. So that's how you take care of
designing a turn around. Try to keep the fundamental basic shapes simple, try to use a basic series of C
shapes and S shapes, try to avoid too much of this. And then we can proceed on to looking at these hair
areas in more detail. It might be useful to think of these hair masses by themselves, like a wig that's
been taken off a manikin. And this just a quick and useful tool, especially for more complex shapes,
maybe they have bangs, and that way when you begin to do more detail on these you'll have at least a
basic knowledge of the structure and then what it will look like when it's rotated into different
directions.
So for example, and this is a very rough sketch, if you take this guy with the inappropriately long hair
and tilt his head back this gives you a pretty good idea what these two triangular masses are going to
look. So let's go and see how we take this essentially simple graphic form and do something with it that
looks more interesting. So here we have a generic female character and she has a very simple hair. So
what if we want to break this up and make it look a little more interesting? Well, my approach would be
to take each of these large triangular spaces and just break them up.
And I'm going to go in with a big thick red line and that is essentially the process. I want to make one
very simple pass over this and to do nothing too dramatic with it, but you begin to go in and break up
these big shapes into slightly smaller shapes, more detailed ones. So let's see what that looks like when
it's cleaned up a little bit. So here she is and we haven't done anything too drastic with it. As I pointed
out in the previous section all I've done was added two areas where once there was one. Let's go one
step further.
So what I want to do is to get away from this extremely graphical style and give it something that looks
more naturalistic, let's say. So let's give that hair some body up at the front. And we can start breaking
hair off here in groups. And I'm using this point here as a point of origin. And so all of these strokes, if
you follow them back they all originate at that point. We can have another point of origin over here if
you want to have these lines tapering off of that.
If you want to make this hair look really loose, like maybe it's a windy day, maybe her hair is not
always this messy, but we want to see the messiest possible version of it. So I'm just going to focus on
this area up here. I'll go in a darker black line now. The good practice here is to try to keep these strokes
fairly irregular. What you don't want is to have one, two, three, four, five all the same, so you try to get
into the habit of varying the spacing, the size, and that way your hair will look a lot more natural.
So you'll see me go in here. It's very easy. Your brain tends to fall into the habit of making things just
mechanically, so it's a good practice to say, right, let's make this one fatter, I'll make this one shorter. So
here for example, this one would be one single stroke, the next one will be maybe a different thickness,
this one will be a different length, that one's much longer and fatter, and so on. So, and again,
remembering our points of origin.
So that's the process of taking this and opening it up. And let's see a finished version of that. So with a
little more time this is the end result. And as you can see we've gone drastically further from the

original flat version. Let's just get that and move it over to one side, so you can compare both of these
together. And in the middle, if we can squeeze her in, we see the simpler one. So let's move them a little
further apart. So that's the transformation from very simple hair to slightly more complex hair, to
extremely feature style animated hairstyle here.
And this is just a quick reminder of our previous movie where we covered points of origin. And points
of origin are critical when you draw hair, never forget these. So if you've forgotten this or you didn't
watch that movie, please do watch it. So another good example of point of origin would be a ponytail
or some other situation where the hair is bunched up and flows from one point. And another good
example of that would be the top knot or braids. And let's take another look at the braids here. So what
I'm going to do is go in a little closer on this, so we can take a really tight look at it.
Now one thing that'll really help if you're going for a very rich features type look you don't want this to
become flattened. What you don't want to do is just draw lines like that. Because that's going to look
flat. If you want it to look flat, fine, but if you don't, if you want it to look traditional, something that
you would have seen in the feature movies, then this kind of line style is better. When you go in and
when you draw you're drawing the actual volumes of these shapes, you're not just drawing flat lines.
And you see I'm drawing through, I'm trying to feel the curvature, as I draw the pencil I'm imagining
with my mind the curvature of these shapes. Do the same thing here. And I'm letting my line flow out
of the central spine. So now when we put our final line on, I'm just using a thinner pencil for this one.
So that's the process of creating artwork that will have more dimension and mass and volume,
especially for something as complex as hair.
So here are some examples of facial hair from the basic mustache on the fellow here to our evil goateed
villain. And here we have an example of a big friendly Santa Claus type figure and the way I draw this
kind of beard is just draw the mass. As you saw earlier we drew the basic mass of hair and then broke it
up. So the same thing here. The outline, the main form of the beard is drawn first, and then it's broken
down into the constituent strokes, which you can then modify or change.
These look a little regular for my taste, so it would be nicer if some of these were more varied, but the
rest of this looks pretty good. And on the bottom left here we have a Colonel Blimp kind of character.
And he's got the enormous mustache. And as you can see from the little red insert each of these
mustaches, this is built around a skeleton or a spine of this little C curve on one side. On the opposite
side there's a S curve on this side, there's a C curve on that side. And the rest of the mustache is simply
designed around that spine.
And you can do this for very complex shapes. For example, the old wizard on the right. These
apparently incredibly complex shapes are fundamentally simple. This side of the mustache is an S
curve and even this huge beard for the most part is also built around an S curve. So let me show you
how we'll do that. So now let's add some facial hair to our Colonel Blimp character. And I've shaved his
mustache off, rotated him so his face is facing in the same direction as the wizard, just so we can
compare them. And I'm going to very lightly sketch in the line of action on the mustache.
So I'll give him an S curve on one side, a simple C curve on the other. And let's see now, from the chin

we'll bring it out like this and taper it down and end it in a little curl. So it's basically an S shape, like
that. That's it. And now we'll just fatten it out a little bit so we get the volume. And let's make them
pretty, pretty healthy. We want it to look interesting. So now on a clean layer, so we can remove this if
we have to, I'm going to draw with black line now. And as you can see in the wizard he has all these
little tufts and whatnot, so essentially let's look at the far mustache and it's originating from a point of
origin around here.
And so all of our clean up lines, like our rough lines, will emerge from that. And it's just a question of
having a nice loose treatment, so that you don't have even spaced hairs, otherwise it'll look artificial.
And this can also achieved by breaking off, if you think there's an area of too much regularity you can
break off a few stragglers. Do it on the other side now. Maybe have one side of it fairly straight, have
the other side messy. And this one we can actually have the same point of origin for both of these.
If you want to move them you can have a slightly different one, but as long as you have a consistent
point of origin that looks good for all these different parts. Maybe break it up just a little bit at the end.
So now let's switch off the red layer and we will go back to Blimp. Now what I'm going to do, because
it's kind of difficult to see precisely what is going on because of all the overlaps, I'm just going to
quickly get rid of the areas beneath and the areas that are conflicting.
And now we can set them to the same level of darkness. And as you can see we have a wizard on our
hands. So obviously the line is a little heavier than the Blimp line. One more beauty pass over that to
tighten it up, to clean it up to something that looks more like this and then we'll have an integrated
design. So that's the process and as you can see it's quite fluid, doesn't require many, many strokes. The
real challenge is getting your spacing of these hairs and keeping the shape simple. And like I said, an S
curve here, a C curve there, an S curve here, and watch your point of origins.

Drawing clothes and flowing materials

- So now a quick note about clothing. And if you look at the guy on the right who's holding out his
hand and pointing, the first thing to notice. Look at that sleeve and see how it's hanging. It's good to
have an idea about just what the material is made out of. And I don't expect a person to know precisely
which textile an object is, but it would be good to know if those jeans are made of denim or silk, for
example. They're going to behave and look totally differently. So I imagine these as a pair of jeans. And
I imagine that shirt as being, maybe not silk, but still a pretty soft, very gentle fabric.
And that's why it hangs the way it does. If it was even lighter, it might even hang straighter than that.
So, we can see, also, if we switch off this layer, you'll see that beneath this in red line, his physical
anatomy. And you can't just go drawing clothing without having some idea about what's underneath it.
So, at the very least, have an outline sketch of the construction of the character beneath all these clothes
lines. They're there for a reason. And you can see the same principle applied also in this bent leg. You
can see the anatomy of the leg in red.
So that's why this fold happens where it is. Also, on the right side you can see, again, the point of origin
right here where the cross is. And there's another one right here. Many of the folds in your clothing will
follow creases that follow right back to points of origin. And if you look at the collar on the neck, see
the construction line. So it's a good idea to draw through. When you're drawing these shapes, don't be
shy about drawing right through. You can erase them later on, but it's very important that you have
structure and solidity with the clothing.
And remember, again, it's a volume, not a line. With some characters, you might be able to cheat
certain costume elements. If this chap was to be in one scene, I might be able to just hack out some
scarf design and not worry about it. But in this case, maybe this guy is in seven scenes. Maybe he's in
half of the episode. So, if you're going to draw him again and again and again with the scarf. If you're
going to do scenes where he takes it on and takes it off, you'd better know how it wraps around him.
And in this case, I've shown, like, a top-down view where you can see. And I had to think about this.
Like, "How would he do it?" It actually wouldn't be a bad idea to get a scarf if you have one and see
how you put it on.
Would he put it on the same way? Would this be on top or on bottom? And so forth. And to draw these
materials, for example, to draw a scarf or something long and sinuous like this, you can draw a very
long spine, like an S-curve like this, and then build your structure around it as you see fit. So, in this
case, I would draw the different shades as I'm roughing it in for one side, working into the other. And
draw the lines through as I need to create that form. This is fantastic for all kinds of flowing material.
So, it might seem intimidating when you look at it in the finished form, but, again, the process of
drawing this can be fairly straightforward. If I wanted to add, like, a little fold or something, that can be
added. So, that will be how you create these very long, fabric-like designs. Quick note about headgear.
Be sure that it sits on the head. Remembering, again, everything has form and structure. So, you have

your skull masks. You have your hats. Let's give him a little bowler hat. Laurel and Hardy.
If that's going to sit on the head, this circle here is going to have its resting place. You want to at least
have a fairly good approximation of, a sense of the physical solidity of these objects as you draw them.
So, drawing, like, long fabric with many folds can definitely be confusing. So to get something like
this, let's do this from scratch. Imagine this is a towel hanging from a rack. Something not too
challenging. There's a little pole there.
So, we have our fabric. And what I'm going to do is, not this one exactly. I'll do one that's, like, a little
bunched together perhaps. But it's the same essential shape. So, let's imagine that the base is folding
out, maybe hanging a little bit lower. So, this line here. Let's mark that in red. So, around this line, let's
make a series of waves.
And I'm going to go to a really dark black line so you can see what I'm doing here. And now, from
these bunched areas here, this will be our point of origin. We can draw a series of lines that will pull
back to their respective corners. Wherever you think they're most appropriate. And don't forget to fill in
the reverse side, of course, because you want this to have a back as well as a front. That's the essential
process that I use to create fabric and folds. You can add extra little details.
Further little creases and lines if you want to really add a lot of detail to it, you can do that. But that's
the essential way of doing it. And we can even go in and tighten this up by even erasing some of the
colors, and now you can see it more clearly. So what if you want to do something that's a little more
dynamic? Let's say there's a breeze or let's say you want to work on a dress. Let's take a simple enough
example. So, I'm going to draw this in red. Let's do it over here where we have some room. If we have
a female character with, like, a gown, something really, really flowy, the base of this gown won't just be
a flat line.
Don't forget it has 3-dimensionality to it. So, there's the invisible side that we can't see. And, depending
on how windy it is, or how fast she's moving, this hem, this area here, could be the shape or a figure
eight. Or we could be looking up at it. But essentially, it will be some rough variant of one of these
shapes. So, that gives you an inkling of the control mechanism for this. So, let's draw her over here.
And imagine she's sitting across, left to right, going in this direction.
I want to see this dress really catch some wind resistance, so it pulls up. So, again, we're drawing a
shape. A figure eight would be good for this. Maybe her foot is hitting the ground here. So, now on top
of that, it's kind of hard to see because, we're seeing through this, so what I want to do is, just very
quickly eradicate that rear view. Now, the next step is to add some folds and flare outs that are
secondary to this. So, now I'm going to go in and just do this in black. So, then we have to ask
ourselves, "Where would the individual folds be most likely to appear?" There's one that I've already
hinted at here.
So, it would be nice if we had some kind of a curvature on the line there, and that's not bad. So, you can
add more if you want. If you think, "I could really like to see a few more." Here's how we would do
one. Let's say we want to add one really long one. Let's do it the other way around. We could imagine
the fold going the other way. So, that's the essential way that you would approach fabric, a simple piece

of cloth, or a dress. I'm going to show you the same example again, but just in a more elaborate form
because this is the kind of thing that could really throw you.
It's a ballerina dress and something with as many fold or creases as you could imagine. Let's just, in
red, very quickly going to draw in the shape. So, if you want to draw something like this, I'm going to
go in on black now. And it's as simple as this. Depending on how many waves you want, you can make
these very steep or shallow. Let's do a few of them. And see what that looks like. Let's see. We'll
imagine that they're emerging from this point. And then we just draw the outer line to there.
And it's a question of figuring out which curve corresponds with which point of origin. This one doesn't
necessarily need to have a line attached to it. But I think here we would have more. Let's switch off the
red layer. See what that looks like. So, you can see we're getting close to something that looks like the
reference art. And you might want to put little secondary lines in here. But, again, keep these shapes
varied. Keep the curves varied. And, depending on how detailed you want this thing to be, there's
nothing stopping you from doing something really wild.
And, when the person looks at the finished object, they might think, "How would anybody ever know
"where to put those lines?" Until you actually see the trick, and it's really as simple as that. So, imagine
all the design shapes that you can conjure up using this kind of technique. So, that's pretty much it. I'll
just end with this slide with these various character sketches I did, For some reason, drew this 1920s
Charleston lady. You can see the red understructure, so I knew where to hang the dress. I couldn't have
known exactly where to put the dress were it not for that.
And, also, when the dress comes to rest, I'll know where her legs are, so where the folds might go. And
on the second drawing, notice how all these bunched lines have gone into reverses. So, that's going to
be, if you were to animate that that would be a really nice looking transition. And a more realistic
looking treatment here. And, again, we have point of origin. One on this side. We have one this side
that only has a couple of lines coming out of it. That's an overview of clothing and the general
techniques that you can use to create some really nice looking clothes.

Drawing animals
- Obviously explaining the anatomical differences of different animals is a bit beyond the scope of this
course, so I've got one movie to talk you through a general approach that will keep you out of trouble.
Here we have our classic bipedal humanoid figure. And I've color coded his limbs: blue for the right,
red for the left. And I've used a solid blue for his forearm and a light blue for his shin area on his lower
leg. So if you look at how this compares with a dog, for example, the dog anatomy is very similar, it's
just all rearranged.
And you can see basically the same bones, they're just in a different layout. So this area here
corresponds to the human lower arm. And the hatched blue lines here correspond to the hatched blue
lines on the hand, their fingers, and ditto with the feet, the pads of the feet are the same here as here.
The range of motion is also very similar, let's take a look at that. On the top left we have a more
anatomical rendering of a dog and you can see I've used the same color pattern. The blue represents the
right and the red for the left.
And what would be on a human being, the forearm, or the lower arm, and the lower leg. So these would
be the hands and so forth. On this diagram here you can see how the shoulders, elbows, and wrists
correspond along with the range of motion, so you're going to get the same approximate range of
motion on each animal. Bear in mind, that obviously a dog doesn't have the ability to splay its arms out
away from its body like a human does. So it's not a perfect analogy, but it gets you into the zone of
being correct as to what you can do and how you can't bend it.
For example how you wouldn't want to bend the dog's leg like that. Unless you were doing this as a
frame within an animation that was not really going to be seen for more than a fraction of a second.
You might get away with it, but not for a held drawing. That would just look really, really painful. On
the bottom level, we see two ways of rendering a dog. On the left, the man in a suit. This would have
been common, still is with many studios. Bugs Bunny is as much of a rabbit as I am. He's really a man
in a suit, and they bolted on big ears and a tail.
This is fundamentally a humanoid biped. On the other hand, this style of drawing a dog is an attempt to
make an anatomical dog, but simply have him pose like a human. But in general, you would try, if you
were drawing in this style, to make this animal look more dog-like. Indeed, if you wanted to, there
would be nothing stopping you from making this character look like a real dog. I'm not beautifying this
very much, this is a very quick gesture sketch, but as you can see, this character here can very quickly
become a wild animal, whereas this guy here would look kind of silly doing that.
Now this general principle will apply to pretty much any four legged animal. However, the way the
various joints are distributed will be different. For example, look at how different the camel's back leg
is. You wouldn't want to apply the dog design to that. Although the basic layout of the way the bones
are distributed, the functions rather, the upper leg, the lower leg and then the foot and the toes, wouldn't
be too far dissimilar. You do need to research these, so anytime you're given a project with an unusual

animal, I strongly recommend you use the Internet as a research tool to find out exactly what the
differences are.
For example, the feet of a horse are quite different to look at than the paws of a dog. If you've ever seen
a horse up close, you'll never mistake it for a dog. So be sure you do the research on it and notice how
different the jointing pattern of the rear leg of the horse is compared to the camel, and the elephant, for
example, has so much weight that it's pretty much vertical all the way down. Because, if it weren't, if an
elephant were to have a jointed leg like this, maybe it couldn't support its own weight and the leg
would break.
The way these move will be different also, depending on these different layouts. Strongly recommend
you simply don't apply a generic quadrupedal anatomy to all these animals. However, you can get away
with this kind of cartoon physics. You can break all the rules. You can turn these realistically drawn
animals into almost supernatural creatures that can pound along on two legs. I don't want you to think
you have to be hyper-realistic all the time. It'll vary from project to project as to how you can treat
these animals.
Jungle Book, for example, has a very realistic portrayal animation of cartoon elephants. I don't recall
off hand if they did anything like this in Jungle Book. They may have had a dream sequence. I think in
one of the older movies there was, much more cartoony elephants. So it goes across the spectrum of
realistic to complete fantasy. A quick note on primates. They are bipedal like humans, so they're the
closest thing to us out there. The main difference would be the way the bodies are hinged. They can't
truly walk around bipedaly.
So you have rather smaller legs relative to their body, curve back and arms that allow them to do a four
legged walk. Chimps, I believe, can walk for brief periods on two legs, but not for extended ones.
Again, many varieties of apes, chimps, gorillas, orangutans, all quite different from one another. In
general, that is the primary difference I would see when drawing these creatures compared to a human,
is this posture.
But regarding the individual details, how you would, for example, draw an orangutan? Again, the
Internet, fantastic resource. Get photographs, get live action first, before you start copying a previous
animator's style, nothing beats going to the actual, real animal and using that. Create your own version
of it and then maybe see what other artists have done. Bird wings are a great analog for the human arm.
Here you can see we've arrowed in the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist. This is how they would be
compared to a human if this was a human arm.
That's what we would be looking at. So the way the wing is drawn, as you can see here, we use this
joint at the top to extract the feathers for the fingers. These become the digits. And then you can finish
off the rest of the wing, just by drawing in some large strokes like this. As you can see here, on this
side, this hand is, well, it's a hand. Those feathers are blatantly being used as a human hand.
Now, down here, we see the feet. Birds anatomy, it looks pretty alien, like how is this joint working?
How does that happen? What's going on back here? Well, I told you a while back to go research it, so
let's do that. So here's this website called Wikimedia. And it's astonishing the level of detail we can find

out about things. This is a beautiful illustration. As you can see, the joint that we were looking at,
sticking out of the body of the bird, is the ankle! And the knee is actually hidden up tucked away, for
the most part inside the body of the bird.
So the curvature of the bird that we would draw, would be about here, whereas this part, is what we're
seeing outside. So let's bear that in mind when we return to that image. Again remember, this is the
ankle and the knee will be somewhere inside here. We will rarely draw it. You might see a hint of it
here, but it's one of those things. It is good to know that it's there, it's good to know that this is the ankle
and these are the toes, so, again, it's analogous to human anatomy, but the proportions have been shifted
to a point to where, to us it looks strange. But once you know what they are, then you have an idea
about the range of motion.
This will be able to move up and down, just like an ankle would, and, like I said, use the Internet,
research this stuff. So here I've drawn some beaks in a couple of typical angles. To give you an idea
about how these look when they move, let's do them frame by frame. And again, I've done these
mouths in the Closed Mouth, Wide Open, the Cheese Face and Oo. These four will give you the major
design challenges that you would face when doing any given dialog scene.
Of course there are others, but these are the four big ones. As you can see, when we go from one to the
other, that's a very nice chewy transition. As is this, he feels like he's chewing gum. A nice big Oo
shape. Let's look at the profile view of this black bird. A very strong transition, Look at how bold these
shapes are. One single straight line all the way down. An S curve, a C curve, a C curve, a C curve, a
little S line here. Fundamentally simple shapes, but they all work together to make these very strong,
appealing designs.
A big Oo? Notice how I've gotten rid of any lines here. No reason for it. Just push it right out. It's a
very, very strong transition. And then back to the big Cheese Face. And again we've pushed the cheeks
back, couple of crease lines in, straight line here, and a curve there, so these create very simple, but
strong shapes. I will stress simplicity. It looks complex, but the lines putting this together are fairly
straight forward.
I wanted to give you a quick pass at how I would do a beak. I want to zoom into this area here, and also
to show you these four shapes. It's the same as the others, just with an upshot. It give you a feeling for
the dimensionality of this thing. Again, we have an object here, that if I was to draw it as a simple
geometric shape, you could model it as a diamond, really, these little triangular forms would go
together to create one side of the beak. Let's shade that in here. So keep that in mind, that is a form that
we're drawing.
We're just trying to find a nice, simple way to illustrate it. Now this time we're looking down at the
beak, just to give you a different angle. What I want to do is a big smiley Wide Open, so i'm going to
draw the construction line through. Give me a feeling for the three dimensionality of the space, and
where I think the lines might go. So there's the lower beak. So as you can see, we have the corner, the
corner, the upper point, the point of the beak there, and then all this will be inside mouth and if we want
we maybe hint at a tongue.

So that's our first pass. Now let me pick a darker color. Let's have the tongue break out of the silhouette
of the mouth. So that would be the approximation, I think. Let's get rid of the red underlayer. So that
gives you a rough idea of how you deal with this dimensional object and then try to get these
fundamentally simple drawings out of what appears to be a pretty complex geometry. We can break this
thing down to just a few lines.
Just a few strokes. That's the bird beak! Here we have the snake and this is one of the least human
animals you are likely to have to draw. The secret to the snake is to have areas of the drawing that are
thick and thin. So here we have a thin area and a thick area. Here's a thin one and a thick one. This style
is deployed throughout the snake when possible. So you might notice a couple of spots that are a little
bit parallely. Let me point one out to you. Notice right in here, these lines are a little too parallel for
comfort.
So how wold you fix fix that? Just vary it a little bit. That's the kind of thing you have to watch out for
this kind of character if you want to make these designs as strong as possible. As much as I like this
one, you'll still find spots here and there where parallels will creep in. On the right side here, you see
the end of the snake's tail used as a hand, as a fake hand, which is probably the easiest way to have this
character interact with the environment if you are working on a humanoid snake. If you want to do
things like knots, then the secret to do this kind of thing is to draw through, and to think through, for
that matter, as though the whole thing is a transparent substance.
Same with this line. Imagine it flowing through. And that way we keep these lines continuous. So it's
easier if I show you a new stroke. Now we can go back in and rub out. Let my eye follow through from
here like it's a maze. Then follow through. Does that work, does that work? Yes, it still works, it still
works. So that's solid, that is an actual dimensional form. It doesn't have any illogical flaws in it.
I'm just going to move the page up a little bit now. As you can see here, the process that I used to draw
a snake is to draw this red spine, or a spine line and then build the snake's body on top of that. For
example, let's keep it really simple. I will put a black line on top of this. Then if you want to draw the
belly, then you follow the separation, the terminator line. Imagine where the underside should appear.
Again trying to avoid parallels if possible. When I draw these marks, these segments, I almost imagine
them wrapping around the body. Never draw them flat. So that would be process for a snake. This
technique is very useful for an octopus or an alien, any tentacled creature. The design issues that would
arise drawing the body of a snake would be very similar with any of those kinds of animals. So just a
quick note on aquatic animals. They obviously no real arms or legs to worry about, but they do have
fins, that's their nearest analog.
Nothing stopping you from using a fin like that, unless it is a super realistic style. Generally, a fish
body is some kind of elliptical bean shape, or ellipse and then we build the construction on top of that.
Quite simple, center line, most fish eyes will be on the side of the head, because most of them are prey
animals, unless they're a predator. Predators have the eyes on the front, like sharks, as they're hunters.
The more harmless fish will tend to have their eyes on the side of the head where they can see the
enemy coming.

The octopus, in this case this is an extremely cartoony one, but here you see the tentacles, and these
tentacles have the same design issues that we mentioned on the previous snake section. If you can draw
a snake, you can put 8 snakes together to get the bones of an octopus down. The big challenge with an
animal like the octopus is keeping the negative spaces interesting, because you are going to have a lot
of these overlapping tentacles so you might find it easier to draw a skeleton, just a spine of each leg, to
see if that works as a design before you start adding in all this pencil mileage.
Big bulky animals like the whales, even though their actually in reality quite curved, you might find
that using a boxy design will give you a greater sense of the volume, the mass of these things, than
using a strictly curved one, but again don't feel an one way of doing this. These are just some
suggestions to get you on the way, when it comes to dealing with the world of animals.

Drawing creatures
- Many or most of the design principles that you will deal with when drawing animals will apply to any
number of different creatures, from the fantastical to the extinct. In this section, we have space aliens,
dinosaurs, cloud monsters or creatures, horror creatures, whatever this walking thing is, and robots, so
I've tried to include a little bit of everything to show you the, kind of, challenges, and the principles that
we have to deal with those challenges are fairly universal, so let's take a closer look at some of these.
What I wanted to do was to, just to pull a bunch of typical challenges that you will face from project to
project, how to make something that doesn't have human hands at all, would it be possible to get a
creature that has no analog to a human anatomy, and how would you go about drawing one of these
things? In this case, I think a pretty easy solution to this is just to regard the alien as a big teardrop or a
blob, and then you can deploy as many tentacles as you think he needs.
The beauty of an alien character like this is, it gives you the option to do things that you might feel
inhibited to do with an actual known creature. You notice when I'm sketching with this, granted I'm
using red. I just want to have the new stuff stand out, but let's put a little black over that. I think that'll
be fun. Roughly something like that. That'll give you a feeling for how easy it can be to sketch
something as exotic as this. Dinosaurs, and we have plenty of visual reference for these and preexisting
projects that have done work with them.
There's a lot of material out there. If you do one of these, then I guess the easiest way to handle it is to
work in a cartoony style at first. In essence, the anatomy of this is very similar to dogs and other fourlegged animals. Of course, in this case, birds would be the closest analog to dinosaur anatomy, so any
bird reference that you dig up for visual reference could be very useful for this. To draw something like
a dinosaur head, you might find that the box technique, given the sheer size and the volume of these
things, might be more useful to you.
Let me put a darker line over that, so then you can start adding the cartoonier details to it. Now your
perspectives will be pretty close. Then you can start breaking out of this box that you've built this
around. You can keep some of the illusions to it. Let's get rid of the red layer and see what that head
looks like by itself. Let's do a bit of dental work on him. Lower jaw feels a little bit out of alignment.
Let's flip it horizontally again. Looking better.
You see how the flip horizontal tool really does help you to get an idea of where you might be drifting
off model, because when you get into a drawing like this, you tend to get very lost in it. Flipping your
drawing horizontally just gives you that really nice, fresh look at things again. That would be my
general approach for drawing a dinosaur head. The rest of the components, you'll see, are remarkably
similar to bird bodies or parts of them might be more like a snake's tail, and many of the techniques we
saw in the previous movie about drawing a snake would be very applicable to this kind of part of a
dinosaur anatomy, and similar principles would apply.
If you're familiar with drawing an elephant, then the design issues that came up within the elephant will

be resolved with large dinosaurs, like a brontosaurus and so forth. I just want to show you this to give
you an idea of the fact that we're not limited to physical things. This is animation. You could make
creatures out of fire, smoke, water, if your project permits it, so keep this in mind, and it's great fun to
draw something like this, and we'll be dealing with effects later, so this is just out there as another
funny idea. Here we have the Frankenstein monster.
There's nothing here that we really haven't dealt with already from a design point of view in dealing
with humanoid anatomy and all the rest of it. The only thing that would be really noticeably different
on this character would be the very strange construction shape that we use for the head, which you
would expect from the Frankenstein monster. It's a great opportunity to use something that you would
never use for a shopkeeper or a bank manager. I've used this really nice-looking squashed football, and
then bolted him onto a big cylinder, and then the rest of the body looks strange, simply because I've
radically changed the proportions.
Here we have a creature made entirely out of hair, and in order to create something like this, well, he
definitely has a construction of sorts, but I didn't want them to be tied down too badly with huge
anatomy, so you could even simplify him if you were animating him, into a, kind of, a blobby figure.
Then the rest of the characters, we've already covered, all of the previous chapters have dealt with
points of origin and hair, so the rest of his design is simply deploying the correct amount of hair in the
right places to get the look, and as you can see, I'm drawing almost instinctively, picking a point here,
and then all the rest of the strands just break off of that.
These apparently complex shapes, they can be put together very quickly once you've become familiar
with the basic principles that we've already covered. Finally, a robot. I wanted to pick somebody who
wasn't entirely symmetrical and who was built out of basic shapes, so what we have is a box, cylinder
we've bent around, a sphere, another cylindrical or a conical shape, torus for the wheel, and then just a
couple of cylinders for the arm.
The fundamental components that make this character, again, quite basic, quite simple. The fun part of
this character would be, you might be able to do things with curving the neck into knots. Anytime,
again, you have a chance to do something exotic, I say go for it, and try to use your imagination with it.

Drawing cartoon effects for animation

- Now let's look at natural effects. In animation traditionally when we said effects, we mean natural
effects; smoke, steam, water, mud, fire, anything that's elemental, our shadows, even sparkles, that kind
of thing. So these three images show you the general drawing sequence that you could follow when
animating effects or just drawing even just drawing a single image. You start out with the basic
construction form. You don't go in on the right side just drawing that. Like a character, an effect has a
physical structure.
So let's take a look at this in more detail. We'll just go in a little tighter so there's our first, and you'll
notice in this case I've drawn it with a figure eight loop. And if you remember from a previous movie
we drew a dress with a similar pattern. I could also have made it circular or varied this, but this is a
good shape to use. And on top of that structure then I've drawn very loosely this splash pattern. So I
favored more of the splash on the far side to this end and less on that to correspond roughly with that
figure eight layout. And you can see where the figure eight dips here so does the splash, but I am not
committed to following exactly along that curved line.
That's just a structural suggestion. And then on the last pass, you add smaller details, the holes and gaps
in the splash, and the little drops that break off. You have to try to keep these irregular. The worst thing
that you can do with a natural effect is to make it a regular shape. So if I had deployed these spots at the
same interval it would look kind of weird. So what I'm going to do is to zoom in on our construction.
And to give you an idea about how I would begin to approach this quite loose on a layer over this.
There's no reason to change this one. I mean, I like having this on its own sheet so if I mess up the
effect layer I can go back to that. But just roughly follow along the line, and then you can start adding
in things like gaps if you think that... Well, that's a little ugly shape, but let's change that. And when you
add these particles, try to keep them irregularly spaced. You might do a group of one large one, one
medium, or two or three small.
So let's move on to the next one. Another common use for effects animation would be clouds, or
smoke, steam, and there's different styles of dealing with this ranging from the very stylized which you
can see up here where we have these very ornate curved loops. This is a really fun way I think to draw
natural effects. And we have the very slick kind of stylized version here, and there's any number of
ways you can polish that up.
And on the lower right, a more natural one, and it's still kind of stylized. It still has these very stylized
loops. So, again, you could go even more realistic than that. But, again, when you draw these clouds
remember they have a form and a volume. And if you just start drawing curves, well, you can probably
get away with that, but it's a much better idea to treat the cloud as a volume. So, again, this is
something that's best done, I think, when you're quite relaxed. You don't want to be in a hurry. I
strongly recommend that anybody doing a lot of effects animation has a very calm temperment, and it's
certainly its own little mini universe.

And there's many animators who don't do character animation traditionally anyway. They would just do
effects. So it's a little world all of its own, and if you don't like it then I strongly suggest that you try to
adapt to it because any good animator should able to animate or draw natural effects like these. Fire is
one of those challenges and can regularly crop up because you might have a character walking through
a scene with a torch and maybe you want them to hold the torch and have a little flame coming out of
the top.
Be nice if you could do that yourself and not have to hand it off to somebody to do it for you. It's quite
a tricky fire. It's one of those weird things, but it's like a fluid. Technically, it's a plasma and it can tear
off quite quickly and change shape in a way that no character that you'll ever animate probably will. It's
just a trick of when you come to draw it anyway, I can't speak in this course about how to animate it,
but at least to draw it. You'd keep them very fluid. Don't be afraid of breaking off shapes and tearing it.
They can dissipate into nothing very, very quickly.
So that is fire, a lot of C curves, S curves, very sinuous. I don't recall ever really drawing many straight
lines in a fire. I think they're all kind of serpentine shapes. So that's the fire. Drawing water is not easy.
There's no hiding that. It's one of the trickier things I think you'll probably have to do, or at least an
ocean scene like this. So I really enjoyed this one, but it was tricky. And because water flows from one
form into another in a way that's very, very challenging to do, very difficult to animate even for an
experienced effects animator.
I'm going to draw this in blue as well. I can't dwell on this for too long because it would simply take too
long, but you try to keep these shapes very gentle, very flowing. And remember that there's no real
boundary even though these waves are going to appear and disappear. They merge and meld one into
the other so the trick will be just to make this look like it's a continuous almost like a sheet if your
heroes are sailing over the horizon, for example.
And again, lots of curves breaking one into the other. But I strongly recommend when you do this just
to draw loose and this would be one case where I would also recommend hunting down scenes of water
animation in animated movies to see how other artists have solved, or tackled the challenge of this
because really animating ocean, it's, I think, is up there.
So that's the general process that I would use and then you can obviously suggest a further line of water
in the distance and that doesn't have to have the same level of detail as what's in the foreground. And as
you can see, the ocean in the background is just a complete undifferentiated mass. The layer right
beside that has a little more detail in it. We begin to see some lines. And the maximum level of line
weight, that's in the foreground. And also very useful to have these white areas on the rim of a wave.
That's where you'd expect to see something that's a little more eye-catching. So that's oceans. And
finally, effects impacts, and like a zany cartoon effect when somebody gets whammed with a hammer.
So the first thing to do would be just to draw the impact ring. I've drawn it as two circles, but you can
draw it as one probably quicker. And then around that, then you add all of the impact material, and
radiating from the hub. So you can imagine all of these arced lines coming out of that if you want, or if
this style permits it, then you can add a few energy strokes coming out, maybe even some cloud poofs.

There's any number of ways this can be modified. But again as you can see, it's constructed, even
something as simple as this, is constructed and has a form beneath it. So that's our introduction to
effects.

Drawing objects
- Let's take a look at objects. How do you draw things? So a good example would be a book and it's a
very simple form because basically it's a box. However, you open the book and suddenly things get a
little more interesting. You get pages and all this. So what I want to do is just do a quick fly-through as
to how you might handle an object like this. So let's say I was going to draw a book pretty much like
the ones you see above just sitting on a table. And as long as you have a reasonably good grasp of
perspective, you can probably get something down that's reasonably solid like that.
So what happens if say, you want to open the book, or pages are like that or you want to open the book
this way? So again we have the spine of the book, that's here, that's going to flop to this point. And
again we have the flat pages, the rectangular spine, and maybe the wind catches some of the pages. The
pages will have an s curve or a c curve shape, very unlikely they would have much more detail than
that.
So we can again, just draw the forms of the overall group of pages. We don't have to draw each
individual page. Now that I've got the corner of this one, I don't want that to go totally curved like I had
on the rough. Remember the principle of texture, we don't want lines everywhere, we want some
density in some parts and open spaces in the other. And let's say the librarian, that's their thumb, they're
holding the page like that.
So that would be how I would approach something as apparently complex as a book. Now let's look at
some other objects and see if they're any different. So here we have a newspaper and nice design hands
are holding it. So again, to structure this you would begin with the spine of the paper which is about
here. And let's say we want to change the angle a little bit on this one so we're moving over. These red
arrows signify the point of origin. These crease lines, they're coming from somewhere in here or in
here.
The paper is being pinched by the hands somewhere in there and we have a natural point of origin here,
of course, because all the pages are radiating out from there as they will here. And so if we have
another hand on this side, more fingers, so we can crease it a little bit again just as we have here. I like
doing this because it just gives the paper a feel of weight. But again it's a fairly basic shape. Now this
crease here makes it look fancy so let's do that.
So that would be the general procedure for drawing something like a newspaper where it can crumple
or has a little bit of flexibility to it. And I have done this one fairly tight but there will be nothing
stopping you from crumpling it up or maybe it's been raining and it's starting to get a little bit soggy.
Just make these shapes curvier, not straighter. So let's move on to the next one. So here I'm just going
to show you this as an illustration of different styles because you can be a cubist about it if you want,
and incorporate straights and this would be like a classic 1950s, super stylized, but you can take aspects
of that that are very flat and yet have a part that's in perspective.
So this part of the cup is in flat space and yet this part we're seeing perspective. So these are things that

good designers will play with and if you want to be super designy about it, you can add what's like an
offset. That's what they used to do back in the 50s, get really graphic about it. Well on the right side we
have a more realistic treatment and here I'll introduce the idea of dealing with a basic family of shapes:
cylinders, cubes, and spheres, and cones.
So most of the shapes that you can draw will be some variety of these by extruding them, or squashing
them, or distorting them, but the basic fundamentals will be some variation of these primitive shapes
just as you would in 3D or CGI animation if you model an object in that medium. So let's see how that
applies. So here we have a chair and what I'll do is just draw another angle. So let's see, if we have an
upshot, we have a worm's eye view and we're looking up at the chair.
So I'm not going to draw the leg, I'm going to draw the box. That red imaginary box surrounds and
defines the chair. And if the seat of the chair is just below the halfway point, put that about here, then I
know that at least that's correct. The back area here will be somewhere similar and again, if we have a
problem finding that alignment, then let's just do that and now we'll just tighten it down a bit and you'll
be able to see how we can begin to apply some of these geometrical objects to this so the seat of this
thing is little more than a cube, I've just squashed it.
And so now when I hide the original construction box, let's just go back to compare, and in case I've
gone blind to the design, let's flip it horizontally. It's definitely very foreshortened but if we had a little
adventurer, a little mouse guy looking up at it, then you would expect him to see that kind of viewpoint.
So that's using this bounding box to at least bolt down your construction of some of the larger areas and
forms of the drawing objects. Let's look at some more. So what I want to do now is just over these
drawings, draw some of the objects that are defining them.
So we have, remember, a cone, sphere, cube, and cylinder. That's our family. So the top of the baseball
bat is very spherical. You can imagine the sphere in there. And the body of it is very conical so that's
explanatory enough. This little stump down here is a sphere that's just been squished down. The teapot,
sphere.
And we also have another object which I'll add to our little collection called the torus, that's a donut,
and that's what we have here. It's very much in the family of the sphere, it's a spherical thing. Here we
have our cone. Here we have a torus. Sphere, cone, this is a little cone. It's just been placed upon a
more interesting spinal path.
The area here on the teapot, that's conical as well, torus, another torus. And the helmet, let's see, here
I've broken it up already. We have a cylinder, cone, cylinder, and we have a conical structure for the
hat. Even something organic like a handbag. This was in a coffee shop and I was drawing this and one
of the girls left this on the ground so I was looking at it going, I wonder what the forms would be if I
was doing that as a cartoon structure so I broke it down in my head just to a cube, just elongate it this
way.
And then this shape here I guess you could regard that as a cube if you widen the base, but it's certainly
a very simple, primitive object, a little pyramidal. So we're dealing with these essentially simple
shapes. So in the case of the handbag, if I wanted to change the angle that I draw that at, this gives me a

very easy way to re-position it and then put down the natural strokes. Let me switch to black so you can
see that. So that's the essential process of breaking down fairly complex shapes into simpler, more pure
platonic shapes that you can then control.
So one last note, and that is to again remind you that you may end up being lucky enough at some point
to work on a project where you can use some of these tricks on objects that are yet alive. And the
famous animation test is to draw a bag of flour and then to give that bag of flour personality, to make it
act and perform. And that's really one of the acid tests of being a good animator, to take an inanimate
object, to say, oh look, that bag of flour looks sad, or that one looks mean, or strong, or whatever.
So always look out for an opportunity, if you get it, to insert an emotion or a content into these objects
that's just beyond the material. And you won't always have that chance because many shows, many
cartoons are fairly simple but occasionally you'll get one where there's some magical component. So
that's the world of objects.

4. Bringing it All Together 13m

- So it's time to bring together all the things I've been showing you. And here we have just a simple ball
to designate the skull, and we're going to draw a burned-out 1960s flower child, and this is going to be
a man with long hair, scraggy, he's seen better days, but he's got a heart of gold. So, let's get going on it.
So, first things first, we have the skull so I think sometimes I like to just do the eyes. Let's start with the
eyes. Lines a bit dark, so I'm just gonna brighten it up a little bit.
This particular brush in Photoshop gets a little cloudy. My paper drawings are usually not this cloudy.
It's a little bit of a frustration I've had with it in the booth. So, when you draw, don't feel under any
compulsion to draw a blurry line. And again, when I draw the iris like this, I'm bringing it in all the way
to the curve. Now really that's as much detail as I want to do at the moment. Now let's just start doing
to rest of the figure much more loosely than that.
I just wanted to put the eyes in to give us a little sense of the head direction. So, let's start on the rest of
the figure, but now I'm going to loosen up quite a bit. So I'm guessing the body will be kind of bent
over. Like to see him a bit hunched up, shoulders up to here. And let's give him a really long face, a
scraggy chin down at this end. I'm going to give him higher cheekbones, and I want to give him a really
shocked, spaced out kind of expression.
And, like really sunken into his chest, so the neck will be down here. That'll be a bit of the jawline.
Then they are open, so it seems a bit saggy. Put the Adam's apple in. Very likely the center line, I'm just
going to lighten it up a little bit. Think now we can maybe block in some of the nose, and so what I'm
going to do is give him, like, a really long and graphic one not too realistic.
So, now let's do the mouth. We've got the range of motion on that. And I think big teeth, something a
little unusual with this guy. Yeah, he hasn't been to a dentist in a while. He doesn't believe in dentists.
Time to shade in the back of the mouth.
Probably shouldn't redo this if I was going to color in this particular drawing, but this is a rough sketch,
so it's nice to get a little tone in there. Give him a few eye wrinkles. And this is a good use of straights.
So we have a straight line here and break it. Same on this side. He doesn't look like a hippie yet, but
don't worry, we'll get there. So, let's give him some really big eyebrows. And let's just block in the
overall shape first before we draw any strands.
And this is a rough drawing, so it's really nice if you can be loose on this. Don't be trying to clean these
up. This is where you have a little bit of freedom to make some bolder shapes. You think you've gone a
little too dark and you want to lighten it up a bit, not a problem. Erase some of that. A few wrinkles
would be nice. And, don't forget the ears, and this is a straight line, curve, and another break on the
curve down here. Gives us a strong, not too blobby ear shape.
And I think we should give him a brow because this eyebrow is really flooding up into space. So, you
see how the skull there is a sphere? That does not mean we have to draw to that sphere. That's our

guideline. I can take this guy and give him a little brow ridge. And we can have another one on the
other side here. Put the hairline up pretty high. Starting to recede, but finally. And let's have the hair
flowing. Now we're going to be adding an arm in here in a little bit, so I'm not going to worry too much
about this just yet because we could be covering up this space very soon.
Add some wrinkles on the eyes to show a little bit of aging. And like all good hippies, he has to have
big mustache. So, I'm beginning from a point of origin about here. There's another one here, just under
the nose. Let it flow from that. And these shapes are pretty simple. They're an S curve and a C curve,
and the mouth's getting in the way a bit from helping us to read this, so let's fix that.
We'll just paint that in. And I'm just going to fine tune some of the area around the eye. Need more
white back in there. Now let's go back to black. We're darkening the eyes now just to really get them to
read. So we can begin to add little details. Hairs on the chin. Maybe a crease on the mouth here. And
then want to change the line at this V-neck so it just comes down a bit lower.
And then just, erase back some of this stuff here. Going to put a few more lines. I think this mustache
looks a little too clean. We should make it a little rattier. And let's give him some big core. And big
eyelids, heavy eyelids would also be a pretty useful signifier here. So, we have big indention, heavy
there. The eyelid line here, and we'll make sure that that's heavily drawn so we suggest a shadow.
Same on this side. I think I'd like to cut back some of this mustache area. Maybe thin it out just a little
bit. And this also gives us a little room in here to add a jaw line back in. Maybe put some whiskers on
it. And I'm going to bring in the arm, but from this point. Just give him a very droopy, dejected limp
wrist here.
And I'm thinking about the material that his shirt is made of. I'd like it to be something very loose and
floppy so we really get this inside line here on the cuff to hang straight. This is our hand area, thumb.
So, let's have him here holding up a flower.
So, we'll block in the palm of the hand here. And next finger. And the other three fingers will just be
minding their own business, not grabbing any attention down here. So the position that'll attach his
physical right hand with the flower to the body. We'll have another droopy sleeve here. And there's a bit
of an overlap here where I originally had the shoulder a little higher.
So, either I'll erase this line here for the shoulder or I will move the arm up a bit. I like that taller
shoulder. It gives him a more hunched look. So, I'm going to go in and erase that properly. And see how
I'm leaving that space open? I'm not closing it off. No reason to. It's one fluid area from one end to the
other. And we can do the same thing here. Let's just clean up as well, some of this area. It's getting a
little bit cluttered.
And we also have an area here where we can define that hairline a little more sharply. So, there's a
couple of little extra details that we can add. And that'll be eyeglasses and a bandana. I'm a bit skittish
about drawing eyeglasses directly over this drawing because I put so much effort into it. So, what I
want to do is to do them on a separate layer, and that way if I mess them up I can rub them out. So, let's
do that. So, be careful not to draw these new layers, the eyeglasses and the bandana.

What I'm going to do is make the old layer a little bit opaque, and that way we can see more clearly
what we're doing and how if affects the design of the other elements around it. So, let's put some
glasses in. I like some- something nice, like that. And now you see, suddenly this character who I think
at the beginning you were probably thinking, how is this guy looking like an old 1960s hippie type? I
think now he's coming in to it.
And a lot of it is, you know, things like the glasses, the hair, the mustache. Take a few of them off and
he starts looking like somebody else. The bandana is what I'm going to wrap entirely around the head,
and this will give us the opportunity to make some changes to the hair. And you'll see how this affects
the material property of the hair that it comes in contact with. Let me just tighten this up a little bit. So
what I'm going to do on this layer is just redraw the hair, and then correct the hair on the layer beneath.
So, if the bandana is pinching the hair here we can expect to see something happen like that. And this
hair that currently was floating free, is not going to do so anymore. And now it's being pulled in a bit so
I think surely we would expect to see something like this happen and let the ear be completely in front
of that hair as well. Trying to avoid tangents or anything like that. Then we have our points of origin for
all these scraggly bits. So, I want to take care of this area here where the eyeglasses and the corner of
the nose interact.
We don't want these to be fighting, So, they have to coexist peacefully. So, let's be sure we really are
careful around here. And either have the glass cleanly in front of the nose or the corner of the nose
cleanly in front of the glass. And we may need to move one or the other, and this kind of eyeglass issue
is constantly a problem. I'm just going to select these. I'm going to cheat because I'm working on a
computer, but if this was a physical drawing, we'd now have to rub this out and redraw it.
So, let's move the glasses up. I think that's the easiest of the two options. And then I'll deselect them.
Go back to my pencil, and let's also clean up the perimeter of the glass. It's got some wreckage on it
there. Notice now, since I moved the glass up, we now have a tangent with the crease line that was
below the eye. So, let's move that up or down, and see which one works best. I think let's move it
down.
It's got cleanly breeches there. And this is, the common problem that you have as you really begin to
tighten a drawing, so not the kind of thing you want to worry about too much at the beginning or it'll
just inhibit you, but as you begin to tighten the drawling, then these are the king of things you have to
start looking at. That's looking pretty better, so now we have to go to the layer beneath and just erase
out all the parts that are conflicting, and there's a part here that we need to delete.
And that's where the bandana moves in front of the eyebrow. Let's get rid of that. And now on the lower
layer, I'm just going to go through and erase all these overlapping bits that are getting a little cluttery
and then we can combine these two layers into one. Or, alternately, we could just keep drawing and do
a more cleaned up version on this upper level. Okay, so that's pretty much it. We have our sixties hippie
flower child, and so what we've done is try to integrate as many of the techniques that we've covered
previously during the course.
I just want to flag a couple of things. Firstly, this is a rough drawing, but the focus on here was getting

the personality of the character, not getting a really finessed line. That would require one more pass
over this to really go in and pinpoint details and really work out stuff like the precise position of these
creases and where does this line really begin and end. Little things like that, they add up. So, here you
see, all that doesn't just work to create a quote, cool, design. The whole point about this drawing was to
create a personality, a character.
So, I hope we succeeded in doing that. So, try to incorporate that procedure and that thinking process
when you do your own characters.

5. Full Drawing: From Start to Finish 44m

Starting with a rough construction
- Now what I'm going to do is take this character, our little space cadet fox who I've pre-designed, and
we're going to put him in an action pose, and by doing this I'm going to show you my entire work flow
as it would apply to a full-figured sketch. Don't worry about this model sheet for now. We'll cover this
in a later movie. What we're going to do is to take this three-quarter pose and make him do something
interesting. What I'm going to do is to create a gesture drawing of our figure and, just roughly matching
his proportions, and sometimes when I do this I like to have the model sheet or a reference image for
the character off to one side, so you may find that helpful so you don't drift too far off.
Line of action was my first stroke, and then I began blocking in the main body and this is a gesture
drawing, so what I want to do is a very quick, very dynamic pose that captures the essence of the
action, so we have his finger pointing up, and I'm feeling like it might be time to go in a little bit darker,
so let me just darken my pen a little bit, now I can just do slightly more detailed, like one defining line
out of most of that mess.
But as you can see, we still have form. I can see that the hip joint is here, there other hip is there. We
can delete the line of action, it's becoming a little bit distracting. Block in a slightly larger form for the
arms, and just a big mass, like a bit mitten, for the hand will be fine. This is almost like handwriting,
when you get fast enough at this it feels more like you're signing your name. Just keep going. That's
pretty good. The pose is recognizable. If I want to be absolutely sure, I'll flip it horizontally so I have
my moment of freshness so I can see, yup, it all still looks good.
If it still flashes as a good solid pose in that quick reverse moment then you know you're on good
territory. So that's it, that's our gesture pose, so let me show you the principles behind this pose in a
simple series. Here's a slightly more tied-down version of that. I've just done one more pass, just so I
have a completely clean line, but it's still pretty rough. Look closely and you can see there's lots of
scratchy little marks. I haven't gone too precious with it, I haven't done any interior details beyond an
eyeball just to show us that we're looking straight up here. As you can see, the red line is the line of
action, and this is the first stroke that I made when I was drawing the gesture pose, and that's to get the
energy and the weight of the drawing down.
The second thing I was worried about was the structure. This is the proportion to make sure that he's
on-model. The size of the head is roughly correct in relation to the body, and I wanted to get the hips
and the shoulder twist drawn solidly, and you can feel the strong, simple leg positions, they really have
the waist of the character taken care of, and then the other aspect that we didn't quite see but it was still
something I was worried about was the negative shape, and here we have a very strong silhouette and
negative shape around it, and even in this state, you can see what the character is doing.

Once you have this kind of pose complete, you're ready to move on to the next step, which is tie-down.

Tie down
- So this is a slightly tightened down gesture drawing from the previous movie, so what I'm going to do
now is show you the process of putting the character on top of this, the process of tying down the
rough. So let's put a clean sheet over this drawing so we can draw cleanly on top of it without getting
all tangled up. So where you begin on this could be largely be a matter of what you think is the most
important part of the figure. What you think is going to be the biggest single challenge. And it might be
an idea, so you don't waste too much time, to target the hardest point because if you can't crack that
then the entire drawing could be moot.
I think that the hardest point will probably be this area here with the character who has a snout. So let's
put the snout in, and remember that the snout will be if you imagine that the head, for example we have
our eyeline, centerline, and these go through the head. And imagine the point the nose coming up at
that angle. That's how I'm positioning it. Of course you can cheat that, there's cheats you can do to slide
it a little bit to where it shouldn't be maybe, if it makes a better design, but it should be roughly in this
area.
And again, I'm imagining this is a conical shape. Not as a series of three or four flat lines. The cheeks
will be about here. And he has kind of a pointy cheek because he's roughly meant to be a fox. I wanted
somebody with a bit of angularity to him. And he's looking up, he's amazed so we'll give him a wide
open mouth. And I'm using a straight line here and a curved one there. It makes a nicer shape
comparison.
Maybe have his teeth bending down this way on the lower jaw, bending up on the upper jaw. So one
tooth is aligning that way, and the other is aligning this way. It creates a nice, triangular wedge. And
now we can sketch in the back of the mouth. And to really sell the fact that the head is tilted back, it's
nice to have the upper eyebrow at breaking the perimeter of the skull. And I put this line in here, you
can notice here that I'm taking care to not make a tangent with that nose, it would have been very easy
to have that line accidentally making a tangent with that collar separation area on the nose, we don't
want that.
So as you can see here, that's not happening. And I'm just going to try to hint at the other eyebrow right
about there. It's a shame that we only see one eye but this is an extreme angle so I wanted to pick one
that was definitely not going to give us an optimal. It's ideal to have both eyes showing, but sometimes
you just can't, and this is one of those examples. The hair is going to be a big tuft of hair will be
flowing from the back of the neck if we imagine the whole structure, like this.
The ear will flow from this angle certainly from the skull and I think that it connects somewhere around
here. Now this is getting a little fiddly, so I'm going to go in and make some commitments to one or the
other. So I'm going to have this line simply be the jaw area. And I'm going to not worry about
illustrating any of the hair, I think it's just going to look fiddly, so we can imagine it's safely hidden
behind that whole line area.

Now let's go in and erase some of this, it's getting a little messy in here. Again, commit to one shape or
the other. The worse thing you could do is compromise. And I think that you'll find that a strong, bold
decision will nine times out of 10 give you a better design. Now a little bit of confusion's going on
here. I'm trying to figure out exactly where the, that's the eye mask, and I want to figure out where that
ear is coming in. So let's tidy up this area. So I think we can just suggest that the ear is at the tufts of
hair there.
Good, I want to flip that horizontally. Now I'm actually tilting my head, so that I can see, I think it
looks all right. You might be gaining a bit of volume here. Let's rotate this a little bit and have a look in
from a different angle. So maybe that's a little sharp, so let's round that off just a little bit. So I'm going
to undo all of that. And we're shaving here I'm taking off just a tiny amount of volume. I'm just giving it
the smallest of curves.
So now let's just move on, I'm just going to simply move the rest of the body and see if there's any
potential trouble spots, anything that's going to cause me to lose sleep. And I think that's a pretty easy
enough shape for this nice little padded shoulder thing. And remember that this is resting and you can
see even working over the rough, the shoulder pad is just resting and flowing from the hand. And
remember he has a glove. Try to stay loose. I know I went a little tight on the face, but if you like, you
can make a very tight pass on this if you have the skill for it.
But you might find that it's also pretty good to keep it reasonably loose at this point. You can do a
couple of tie down passes as you get nearer and nearer to the final artwork. And I'm placing that belt
buckle over the centerline, favoring this side, just a little bit because it's got a little depth to it. And see
how simply I drew the fingers, just a big block facing right out at us. One, two, three, and just follow
along. The rough is pretty good. So now let's hide that lower layer.
And if we can delete out, you see the little squares, we don't want to see them. So that's our first tie
down pass. Well, what I'm going to do is show you a next layer of tie down. So what if the previous
version is a little too rough, and you just need to go in yet again, one more time? And I want to stress
that there isn't like a hard and fast series of lulls here as to how many times you can tie down a
drawing. Some drawings I've tied down seven, eight, or nine times, and struggled with them. Others I
can go from my very first gesture drawing straight to a very tight tie down.
And I did work with one guy who could go from almost nothing to a finished drawing with nothing in
between. Very few people are that good, most of us have to struggle a little bit and do a series of
exploratory sketches. So it's a good idea to get used to the process of doing a drawing, putting another
layer or a sheet over that and do another version of it, getting closer, and closer, and closer to your final
artwork. So that's what we're going to do on this part of the figure. This is just a single, rough sketch as
a first tie down pass of the hand pointing towards the sky.
So let's see what it takes to go in and just get this much, much tighter now. Because I want this to be
more of a tie down, I'm not going to worry about drawing in any of the construction under it. I want
this to be a much more completed piece of artwork. So relax, deep breaths, nice and still, slow, take
your time. Sometimes when I begin I'll use many overlapping crosshatch strokes. You'll find as you go

through the day, or the drawing, you'll begin to loosen up.

And see, I'm putting in a crease here. So it's not a case of, I'm simply tracing this off, that would
literally be a disaster. I'm still thinking about the drawing, the physicality of it, what these lines
represent. So for example, this area here is the fleshy underside of the finger. This is the bony
upperside. So guess which one gets the straighter of the two strokes. And similarly, with here. So I'm
still looking out constantly for areas that I can improve. See on the rough how there's one, two, three
strokes? That's because it was a rough and that's what you do with a rough, you're relaxed, you're
sketching, you're making multiple strokes.
But really, I want this particular figure only has three fingers and a thumb, so we only want one stroke.
And there's no reason why I have to trace the precise line, but where it works I will try to match it, and
where I think it's weak I'll try to strengthen it. So this curve here, I could keep that curve. or I could
straighten it. Let's see what might work best. When I straightened it the shape became a little bit too
tight. We're getting a little parallel-y in here, see this space here seems a little parallel to me.
I don't want that. So maybe we can just extend that line down a little bit, take it in at the top. The other
possible solution would be to change the curve of this finger. So you see how there's still a thinking
process going on here. You never stop thinking. Maybe we can add another curve there. That will help
break up that boring space. Now you might want to sharpen this up here, you see where I have two
overlapping strokes? Depends on how tight you want your drawing to be.
So I'm just going to reposition the drawing now to recenter it. And then we'll just finish off the forearm.
Now let's hide the layer beneath so we see the finger by itself. Not too bad. I'm still looking for some
fine details to fix, so there's a little blobbiness here, I'm just going to go in with a sharp eraser and fix
that. And there's a little bit of thickness here. Let's even out that line. And maybe we can put a crease in
there.
If he weren't wearing gloves we would add fingernails, but he is wearing gloves so we won't but they
would be roughly in positions like that. And because this lower curve of the glove is, I would imagine,
facing away from the light source which would be from up here, I'm going to just darken that light a
little. And I'm really thinning my line now so I can get some really finer strokes, especially for the
creases. Now before you fall in love with adding lots of extra lines, I'll remind you that simplicity is a
virtue, so I've been fairly careful about not adding lots of extra little creases.
I'm not saying never do it, but just be aware that every time you add one maybe you're putting in too
much details. So do it under control, be conscious of what you're doing and don't just add all these extra
lines because you think you have to have them. So that's a pretty decent tie down of the original. Let's
have a look at the original beside it. So here on the left, that was our initial tie down pass, a very rough
tie down pass, but still it was starting to put some meat on the original rough. On the right side, a much,
much closer tie down pass.
Now this, as you saw, took a lot more time to do. And I only do these if I'm very, very happy with this
stage, because I don't like to waste my time drawing at this level if the actual pose itself is something
that I realize is wrong. And always be on the lookout for these time traps because that will really take a

lot of the fun out of this process. So now let's take a look at the entire figure with the final tie down
style applied to it. So now on the left you see that's our rough pass. On the right side, a much tighter tie
down.
And the beauty of the version on the right side is it's so close to final that you can really begin to see
where the color's going to go and what the final structure will be. So for example, were we in a
animation studio and drawing a production by hand, either on paper or on a computer, then the drawing
on the right could conceivably be used as color line artwork, whereas the figure on the left is just too
loose for that.

Cleanup
- So now, let's look at cleanup. And this is in case you need to really put a black line -- let's say you
want to paint these characters with a paint program like Illustrator or Photoshop, Flash, Toon Boom
Harmony, TVPaint, one of those guys. So let's take a closer look at these. We have four on the left,
we'll begin there. There is a pretty clean tie down, but let me go in close, you can see it's still not quite
perfect. It looks nice enough, but there are still gaps here, and little holes in it. So let's move on to the
next one and see a cleanup pass.
Now this, certainly it works, it's all black lines and it closes off the areas, but it's just not really good.
And the reason why is because it's been traced, and if you go back and forward, it's as if somebody just
went in with a marker pen and just drew down a solid black line directly over the original artwork and
didn't try very hard to make anything interesting happen. And that's just not adequate. So let's take a
look at a slightly better version. Now, this time I used a jaggier line, which still might not be perfect for
some projects, but it certainly keeps a bit of vitality into it.
And when you toggle for now from the trace one, I'm going to the trace one, back to the better one, you
have certainly more vitality. And notice certain areas, I'll draw your eye down to this area in here, on
the superior version; now take a look at the traced version, it's just gone flat. And you even have little
bumps here. I have seen cleanup drawings that look like this, I'm afraid to tell you. So, on the superior
version, we've increased thickness and thinness on areas wherever you might expect, a little dimension
here, on the eyebrow, there's a thicker stroke at the end of the nose line, here.
Still, this isn't perfect, we have a bit of parallel space here, but let that slide. There's an open gap here,
so we might want to close that off, and a few little spots that might need to be polished, but it's
certainly a lot better than what came before, which is a traced version. So now, I'm going to go forward
to the comparison screen, and in red, you can see the areas that were adjusted from the original
drawing, and you can see that the red is where the eyebrows were, for example, and look at where I've
pushed them to. And the point of the ear is raised up just to give it a stronger shape, and this area here
was also pushed out and firmed up a little bit.
This stroke is moved down slightly, very subtle changes. It would be unusual to make very drastic
changes on a cleanup drawing, but you certainly want to be looking out for the finer details that you
can improve. Indeed, down here, look, that's a nice one, where the original stroke was quite flat. So,
we've given this a curve, a little bit of a wavy bump there. So let's see if we can go in one more level of
detail tighter. So, I'm going to focus this time on the hand that we worked on in the last movie. You'll
remember the rough tie down and the tight tie down, and there will be some styles, as I said before, that
you could apply color, you could colorize this image.
Let me show you what I mean by that. So, this movie isn't specifically about color, but what I want to
do is to show you how you could apply a color in a program, for example, like Photoshop or Toon
Boom Harmony, to a drawing like that, because those programs do have very nice blending modes and

allow you to combine a rough line with a solid color area. And, as you can see, it looks pretty nice. So
let me take you back to the original image, so, as you can see, the hand here in the center is certainly
clean enough to be colored in a style like that, but you will have projects, sometimes, where you'll want
a really, really dark line.
An absolutely pristine black line. So let's create one of those. I'm going to hide the rough one and put
the final tie down on an opacity, so I can draw on a clean layer. And I'm going to go in with a very tight
brush. So I'm going to start here, just make a few strokes, and I really want to zoom in on this, so let's
go in a little tighter, so we can really see what's going on. And it's nice on these lines if you can get a
tapered stroke, if your tablet has pressure sensitivity. If it doesn't, then multiple strokes can do the same
effect.
And because I am right-handed, I will have to constantly spin this image around, and in the good old
days, when we drew on animation desks, we had circular drawing boards, the center of the board was a
metal disk and we drew on that. And it had a sheet of glass so that we could put the backlight on behind
it. And they would be spinning around all day long. So, when you see this happening on the computer,
it's pretty much the same process. Here, see we have a very thick line, so we can put it in the middle, I
could put it on the lower end, I could put it on the upper end.
I'm going to favor the upper; again, we're tapering off this crease here, so thin and then thick. Now
we're going with the second stroke, just to firm that up a little. One stroke often looks a little spidery, a
little weak; something magical happens when you put two or three lines down together. So, this can be
tedious (laughs). There's no nice way to put it. It's a lot of work, and if you have a lot of drawings -right now I'm just drawing one little hand -- but imagine what it's like -- and I've seen it happen when
somebody has a 20-second long scene, and there are 12 drawings, or sometimes 24 drawings in one
second, and they all have to be drawn like this.
So, before you become too romantic about the glory days of doing animation by hand, it's a very good
idea to remind yourself, and if you have a project of your own, do some mathematical calculations, and
when you do a couple of these drawings, then you multiply that by however many seconds there are in
you project, and how many characters there are in your project, and you'll soon know if you think you
have the stamina and the time and the energy to work like this. And I'm not trying to persuade you to
not do it, I'm trying to persuade you to have a realistic idea about what the amount of work that's going
to be involved, in doing a lot of work like this.
Now I'm looking for a spot here, too, where I maybe can exaggerate this "S" curve, it's a nice curve, I
like it, but I think we can just push it just slightly. It'll be a little more curvature. So when I draw this
one, you can start pretty much where the corners are, nothing wrong with them. We can certainly, as we
draw that cleanup line, just favor, ever so slightly, the bottom end there. And favor the upper end here.
So I want to accentuate this curve, too, so I'm going to favor the inside of that stroke, just a little. So,
here we have them, side-by-side, on the left, the rough tie down; in the middle, a really clean tie down;
and on the right side, a cleaned-up drawing. Now the thing to remember is the amount of time it took
me to do that hand. I am not a native cleanup artist. I think I'm OK at it, and even so, it took me maybe

five minutes to, maybe 10, hard to tell, to do the whole hand by itself.
I was talking through it and taking my time, but even so, to do a full figure, like a complex key frame,
even a good key cleanup artist might take anything from half an hour to an hour to clean up one full
character key frame. You have to remember this when it comes to these kind of projects. So, which of
these two styles you choose, be very realistic about exactly how much you can take on, and if you're
happy with this, like, personally, I prefer this look. I think it's got a really nice jaggy feel to it, and I
think if you look at the old classic cartoons, even movies like "Jungle Book" and "101 Dalmatians",
take a good look at them sometime.
Take a good long look at the line quality. It's not as pristine as a lot of people might think, if you frameby-frame them, a lot of scratchiness through, occasionally you'll see construction lines even on the
finished film. So that is the process of going from tie down to cleanup.

Troubleshooting and plussing

- One of the concepts that was used in the Disney Animation Studio back in the good ol' days was the
idea of plus-ing a scene. That was taking a scene that already worked, already looks great, and can you
push it any further, can you just give it a little bit of extra vim? So, here's an example of a gesture
drawing where we've done just that. I think we did mention this kind of process earlier in the course,
but now I'm just going to show a more cohesive way of dealing with it in a little more detail. Here,
we've taken a pose and really pushed it. I mean, look at even in the stick figure format, look at the big
eyes popping out.
It's the same emotion, but it's dialed up. It may not always be appropriate, but if it is, then you really
want to do this. So, let's see how this is a applied to a more polished character. Here on the left, a
perfectly serviceable drawing, and nobody would be bothered if you presented that drawing. But if you
look at the one on the right, you can see how we've taken the very same pose, the same attitude, and
just dialed it up. Let's see how these look when you play them in succession. Here's the first drawing.
He's maybe talking to his bank manager. He's not too happy, the loan has been rejected.
Well, this is much better. As you can see, the state from one into the other. It's vastly improved. Even
details, look at the shoulder, look at that. His upper arm is pushed through his little space cadet
shoulder pad. It's really giving him extra attitude. It makes him feel like a much more physical entity.
Even the crease lines in his armpit look angry. So, what I'm going to do now is show you yet another
pose, and how I would do this with another character, this time with a more human one. So, we used
this earlier in the course to show a nice trick about using on hands touch faces, and how you can get a
nice drawing out of that.
So, I'm going to take this drawing, and see if I can expand upon it and just push it a little bit further. So,
let's take the opacity down, so that the new drawing can go on top of that. So, this is essentially a man
drumming his fingers on the table. He's bored, so let's see if we can make him a little more bored. Give
this face a little more plasticity. So, we can purse the lips. His finger's pushing into his cheek here.
Well, what if it actually pushed some cheek out and up? Maybe we did dig into the cheek a little bit
with his little finger.
If we're pushing the cheek up like this, well that'll crease the eye. Since we're pushing the cheek up, I
might expect the nose just to move just a hair's breath, just that. So, that's a very subtle example of how
I would take a scene with a perfectly good drawing, and just take it up by one. Could I go further than
this? Probably, but this is enough to give you an idea about the process.
If you go too far with it, you may end up breaking it. So, I would never go deleting your original
drawing, just in case you go a little too far and lose the aspect of the original drawing that you liked in
the first place. This is definitely a great way to sharpen your drawing skills.

Model sheet and turnaround

- Now it's time to take a look at the model sheets. A model sheet is as the name suggests a sheet of
paper or an image that has the character in various positions, angles, expressions. And here we have our
space fox laid out with these lines and head heights on the left side of the screen so you can see he's
one, two, three, four head heights tall. For this purposes of this construction that's been easier just to
split them up this way. Another character might have four heads that are in four separate spheres, but
it's handy because if you notice the hair more or less starts at a half-head on top of the full head.
And you'll notice also I've actually measured this head sphere to be the base of his neck. His skull is
actually roughly about to here. it doesn't really go all the way down. It's close enough and so by
measuring the head from here it gives you a really good feeling for the rest of the dimensions of the
character. So if I'm to draw the figure if I'm drawing a sketch of him and I want him here, I know that
his end of his waist would be somewhere in this region. At no point will you ever see me getting out a
ruler, and I say that like it's ridiculous, but I have had clients who literally were measuring things with
tape and projects that I just couldn't fathom.
It's no way to work. So unfortunately those clients are out there. You'll encounter them, but try not to be
one of them. And the whole point of this is this is a cartoon and nobody, nobody that watches a cartoon
is measuring the screen with a tape I promise you. So the important thing about the model sheet is
general proportions and general constructions. Don't forget that during the course of animating this we
will be drawing these figures in all kinds of different foreshortened directions where we're looking up,
maybe he's throwing a space rock into a space distance, and we could have his feet floating in space
like this.
When we do that, all of these proportions here will be still relevant, but they'll be so foreshortened
nobody's really going to be able to tell. It'll come down to your skill as a draftsperson to see if you can
actually make that look like it's him. It's about feeling more than about a scientific formula. So these
lines are your friends, but they're like a rough guide. They're a rule of thumb. Also in case you're
curious, I name them A, B, C, D, and E because I prefer that naming convention to calling things
profile, three-quarter, three-quarter left, three-quarter right, three-quarter profile.
It drives me nuts, and I'm not the only person that does this. I invented this working by myself and then
found out that a studio in Santa Monica uses a very similar system. This is a way of working that will
help you when you're cataloging your poses to know what angle is that? That's the B angle. Oh, okay.
Go to the folder called B. If you want something similar, it'll be in the folder called C. It won't be a
million miles away. So it helps to store things. This is a model sheet that is specifically focusing on the
head so we've taken some of the stuff on the previous page and just zoomed it up a little bit, and as you
can see it gives us a little more idea about the general position of the eyes and the mouth.
So just to flag a few points. You can see that the tip of the nose, for example, is on this line here. Well,
let's start at the top first. We have the top line, the bottom line, we have the half-line, and the half-line is

where the eyes sit, and you could have put this line at two-thirds height. This design I decided just to
keep a little simpler. Notice again I have the base being measured approximately here, and the sphere
of the skull doesn't start until this area so it's a little bit of a cheat. There's no formula that says we
absolutely have to measure from this to this.
I found this area here to be a useful measuring stick. The next halfway point between the half-line and
the bottom line gives us an approximate position for the underline of the nose. We're a little more floaty
when it comes to the eyebrows, but they're about at halfway point again between the top and the halfline. They get you into the zone. Guess what? When you're animating, these things move around. It's
just nice to know that the apex of the eyebrows in their resting or neutral position is close enough to
this point.
So were I to draw the head in a different position, let's say we're looking up at it now, it becomes very
hard to see well exactly where are these lines moving? This is why I stress again the utility of being
flexible, being more focused on what it feels like using your good judgement to go, "That looks like it's
on model, or that doesn't." but at least it gives you an approximation. Notice, as well, that as this nose
moves even along these lines, see how it's no longer sitting on that line. I really wasn't bothered by it
for the simple reason that this object is moving in three-dimensional space, and even though you might
not think there's perspective here, well, guess what? There is.
As this was moving around in three-dimensional space it's getting smaller, it's moving away from us.
This is physically closer to us. That's nearer. This is pretty similar, but still a little further away, and if
we were to move into a three-quarters so that we were looking away into the distance, and then it's
right behind him, it's further away. It's a little bit smaller. It may not ever be sitting on this line at this
point so remember that. Don't be too geometrical about this part of the process. Now in some model
sheets it can also be a good idea to provide the animators with another library of shapes.
So you may remember this character from earlier in the course. He kind of grew as I drew the course
into this little space fox guy. So what I've done is I've just put in some areas, this color area here that
you see in the original model sheet. I could have gone a bit further and drawn in a bunch of ears if I
thought it was going to help, but it would have cluttered up a lot of the area for adding more details
here. So I decided to leave them out. It was a matter of preference. The important thing is if I were
going to make a TV show or a project using this character, I could then give this sheet to the animators
and say, "This is a style of dialog I want you to do." And not that you have to robotically use these
exact shapes.
We could do that in some projects, but this gives the animator an idea that they can really push the
style. They're not being limited to a tiny little boring library of six mouth shapes, for example. And
over here we have some difficult angles and they're already pre-thought out for the animator. So if the
animator has a scene with a difficult upshot, they know, okay, and that could be enough to be figuring
out the rest of it. I know that the little cheeks will be there, but I've got the basic outline now of the
head. As you do more of these drawings as you solve more design problems, you might make more
model sheets as handouts so that as the project grows in size so does your visual library of models.

And you can do the same thing with full body poses, of course, just as with different head angles. It's
great as you do a good scene and you're really happy with it. That was a really nice drawing. Well, if
you have any aspiration like working on a big scale and having a team work with you, take that
keyframe, take that drawing, put it onto a model sheet, copy it up, pin it to the wall so everybody sees
that's the kind of pose we want this guy to do, and it'll inspire other people to match that style or to
match that quality. So that's the world of model sheets and pose sheets and using these as a visual
reference, but not as a prop.

Advice on drawing in different styles

- Throughout this course, I've stressed over and over again many times, you're probably sick of hearing
it, that you have different style options available. The reason why I've said that is because if you get
pigeon-holed into drawing just one style, it could really, really limit your career options. And I have
heard of people who got onto one TV show, got baked into that style for that show, could not draw
outside of that style and when the show ended, so did their career.
So you don't want to be that person. You need to be flexible. If someone says we have a project, what
kind of style is it? Oh, it's a cartoony style or it's a realistic style or it's a graphical style, you need to be
able to migrate from one to the other and not be totally shocked by it. You can still have your favorite.
You might have a preference for one or the other, but it should be well within your ability to do one or
the other or the other. These are simply three examples. Again, there are more than just these three
styles. There's many, many intermediate stages between them, but I've been using these as a constant
reminder to keep your options open design-wise.
Don't be pigeon-holed, be happy to work in any of these styles or any other styles that come along your
way. Don't get stuck doing just one thing. If you find yourself doing one thing, be it anime or Disney
style or flash TV style, you might want to try to break out of that from time-to-time. I think you'll find
that actually it will benefit all of your work. So, for example, even if you only were to animate within
the feature style like this and you occasionally worked in something as flat and totally graphic as this,
some of the design tricks that you would learn, I think, would benefit and make for a stronger feature
style of animation.
So, with that, I think we're ready to move on to next steps.

Adding color to your drawing

- So, here I've taken the fox space cadet and given him three different color treatments, and, as you can
see, the effect on his appearance is pretty enormous. So, do take your time, play around with different
color combinations. My personal color tastes, and, this is obviously a huge field, and you could do a
whole movie about color, so, this is only the tiniest of introductions to this, I just want to show you
some of my preferences, and methods. I like a kind of subdued palette, I guess, more than a lot of
productions I seen now, which are hyper-saturated.
So, the beauty of this is it's a lot easier on the eyes, especially if you're gonna be watching a feature
film, that's like an hour and a half long with these colors. This way too, you can pick particular areas to
be hot spots. So, if the entire figure is brightly colored, then, essentially, it beats your brain down. So,
that's why I like to use desaturated areas for pants, that way you can use a highlight, say, on the
kneecap, and desaturated boots, and, the color tone for his head, his hair, even is quite mild, it's not
overly bright. Your eye will be drawn to the hotter colors, like red, yellow, orange, they will jump out at
you most, red, the very most.
The blues, and the earth tones, the browns, they're more neutral, so they'll be more subtle, and
definitely easier on the eye, like this green, this blue. As you can see, the color on this character, too,
the sandy color, it's very naturalistic, even though he's an extremely unnatural character. Even these
brightly colored blue hair, it's still my usual subtle variant of blue. So, you may have a brighter palette
sense, or taste, I'm not stopping you, but, just beware about using bright colors for every single part of
the character.
Here, I've colored in, very loosely, a figure that we saw earlier on in the course, and he's a typical
Shakespearean Falstaff kind of character, I guess. I went for a very naturalistic color scheme on this
guy. I also used warm colors, even though they're desaturated, I used a fairly warm brown, well, it's an
earthy color, but it's still got a hint of red to it. If I wanted to be a little colder with this guy, I would've
made him gray, or black, or, maybe pale green, or blue, or something like that, but he seemed like a
jolly chap, so I gave him earth colors.
Also, you'll notice his skin tone is fairly naturalistic, as well, and, I know some prefer a hotter, brighter
pink. Again, a lot of this is a matter of personal preference, so, but this is just an example of how I
would think through a color scheme for a character. Another quick and rough example of a color
scheme that might cause trouble. This is the snake that we drew earlier, and if you recall, we drew him
with segments. Now, you could color all of these segments the same color, so, they could all be yellow
or orange. The problem with interlacing them like this, is that, it does create more work.
Now, you have to be very careful if you animate this character, because, if there's any mistake in
painting these color areas, it's going to jump out at you. So, I'm not saying not to do this, or design like
this, what I am saying is be very careful when you commit to it, you're committing to a certain amount
of work, and you've just increased the amount of time you, or, your people, are going to spend sitting at

a desk. Here's an issue that you have to remember with a character who is all one color. Now, the bird
on the left, is black on the back, white in the front, so, that gives us a lot of possible solutions for any
problems you might have with silhouette.
Here you can see, look at the hand, we can easily see what it is. But, what if he's a crow, or a blackbird?
He's completely black, then what do you do? No matter how strong your silhouette skills are, you will
have moments when the hand has to cross, or, the wing has to cross in front of the body, and, we will
look at a big black hole in the screen. So, this was a problem on the movie Secret of Nimh, there was a
very memorable bird in that, it was all black, and, one solution to that is to use an ink line. I'm going to
zoom in now, so we can really see this.
This is a very rough example of an ink line, this wouldn't be final production quality, by any stretch, but
this allows you to draw some of the lines that would, otherwise, be black inside the silhouette, as white,
so that makes the inner line work visible. The other possible solution is to add a lighter layer. So, you
would close off a part of that design, and then paint it in a slightly lighter color. So, either of these two
techniques are available to use, if you do have to have a character who is completely one color.
Here, I've taken the page of strange creatures, and colored them all in a good variety, I think they're all
nicely contrasting each other. With the space alien, because he's such a weird space alien, that's the kind
of thing you really want to exaggerate, and make him even more alien with his color scheme, so, I gave
him a pretty nice purple pink skin. The dinosaur I was conservative with him, or her, I'm not sure what
gender that is, and then, just went with a neutral earth tone. The cloud I wanted to be a toxic cloud with
a heart of gold, so I gave him a kind of a sickly yellowy green color.
The bottom left is my favorite, that's the Frankenstein monster. Given the fact that this is a cartoon,
we're under no obligation to work with any pre-existing Frankenstein design. Do remember that the
original Boris Karloff design's copyrighted, so, the further you stay away from that, the better. But, if
you recall, from that movie, of course, it was black and white, but the behind the scenes photographs
reveal that Karloff was actually painted an incredibly intense green, so, it's shocking when you see
those rare color photographs of the production. So, I like to go with something that's really hideous,
like that, and even kept his feet green, he's not even wearing socks under there.
So, I kept a nice tonal contrast, and, this is also good to bear in mind, because we're not just dealing
with color, we're dealing with tone, as well. So, the skin is a lighter tone than the shirt, for example, and
we might even accentuate that, make the skin a little paler, if you wanted to exaggerate that. I put
lighter areas on the toes of his feet, because, this being a horror movie in the style of the old
Frankenstein movie, he may have scenes, for example, where he's walking through a dark environment.
Imagine if you've created color models for his feet that have very very dark shoes all the way through.
If you have a project like that, then do remember that the colors that you select have a direct impact on
the environment, and often, how you animate them can be affected by the environment. So, I want
those shoes to at least read at some level, and not disappear completely into a gloom. So, the hair
monster, he's very simple to color, because he's all one color, he does have a specific issue that I'm
going to come back to, in a moment. The robot I wanted to have a color that suggested metal, the

logical colors for that would be some kind of steely blue, and I used a warmer color, the yellow rings
on all the joints, and I used the same consistent palette, just slightly altered to get the different color
areas.
I'm going to zoom in on him, so you can see what I mean. So, as you can see, this collar, and this joint,
and these joints, they're all basically just tonal variations of the same color. I decided to give him a red
eye, because red is a very hot color, the rest of his figure is relatively cool, either blue, directly, or a
fairly cool version of yellow. So, I wanted that to have the area that your eye is drawn to the most
drastically, be that red, and it's quite shocking. So I kept the rim of the glass white, as well, so it would
really pull your eye in to it.
Now, I want to talk about the hair monster, and there's another lovely technique that we can use that'll
really help us with him. So, I'm going to switch off the others, and just go in and focus on this guy. So,
if you look at the hair monster, notice how we've done with the eyebrows, and how cool that looks.
Having the eyebrows just one little tone brighter than the rest of the body pushes them out at us, and
creates this amazing illusion of depth. So, what if we wanted to do the same thing with these strokes
here, with these mustaches? What if we wanted to color them? Unlike the eyebrows, they're not closed
off, these spaces are open, so let's zoom in a little closer.
There are many different ink and paint programs out there, so, I cannot speak to the mechanisms of
how this is done on each and every one I use Harmony and Flash and Photoshop, so I know how they
do this, and I know it's a pretty common enough mechanism, but the solution is to paint in this area,
and not have a line enclosed here. So, in Flash you'd have a Stroke set to Invisible. In Photoshop, I can
do this on a separate layer. Harmony has its own way of doing it with an invisible stroke, but there are
many programs out there.
There's TVPaint, and Anime Studio Pro, and way more than I can possibly hope to cover, but, if you
want to do an effect like this, the correct terminology, that I think will be most commonly used will be
ink lines, and invisible color separation. So, any given program worth its salt, I think, should be able to
do some effect like this. Let me just rub these back a little bit. Now, I'm going to do the same thing with
these hands, this is another good spot where we can add, yet another, one of these little layers, and let's
take the opacity on that layer down, and, that will have the result of making that effect quite a bit more
subtle.
Now, let's zoom out. So, you see the difference. Also, I could add another layer on top of this with a
darker color. You can add as many layers as you like, depending on how much time you have, and what
your software, or your artwork style will permit. So, this is how you will take a monochromatic
character, who might look a little flat, otherwise, and give him a fantastic illusion of depth. So, when
you work with color, think of the personality of the character, what the color tells us about them, what's
appropriate for them, also some of the environmental issues.
Meaning, are they in a dark environment, or a bright one? Do they have other characters of a similar
color around them? And, don't just fall in love with the first color variant, as we saw already, doing
three or four more versions of the character before you settle on one's a really good idea, too. Most

importantly of all, when you are painting the characters, enjoy it, for me, this is the fun part.

Next steps
- Well that just about does it for Foundations of Drawing Cartoon Characters for Animation. I hope you
enjoyed the course and I hope you gained some valuable insight into how to begin creating your own
characters. If you want to learn more on drawing skills, Von Glitschka does a great 5-day drawing
challenge here on Lynda.com that will test your skills in a loose, fun way. If you want to learn more
about animating your characters, take a look at my previous course, 2D Animation Principles, which
covers all the basics of animation. I also have courses that deal with animation software that will allow
you to animate some of these things such as, Toon Boom Animate and Harmony, as well as Adobe
Flash.
Famous animator, Richard Williams, also has an astonishingly comprehensive DVD course called The
Animator's Survival Kit. It's extremely expensive but it's also available in a much more affordable book
form, which is a must-have for every animator. Thank you for watching.