Temple of the Seven Golden Camels

Using Tones and Values, and Your First Homework Assignment!

2012-01-21T19:19:00.001-08:00

Kidding, there's not really homework, but an exercise at the bottom that you could try if you like (but I'm not looking at them, there's no prize for doing it, and no grades involved). First, some background...

At work, on of our story trainees were asking about working with tones and values in story boarding (basically, adding black, white or grey to a story sketch).

My friend Nathan Greno suggested an assignment: give them a complicated line drawing and have them add tones to it to get practice in using values. He suggested that we have them do it two ways: pick one drawing and shade it using only white, black and one grey value. Then, pick another drawing and shade it using as many grey values as they wanted.

The point, of course, is to show how keeping your value scheme simple can give you a clean uncluttered result that works great. Once you start using too many grey values it quickly gets muddy and hard to read.

There's an old post here that I wrote about using tones and values. The simple overview on using values for story sketch is that values can be useful for:

1. Mood, and for

2. Readability

When it comes to using tones to create mood in a sketch, I'd say that drawings with darker, heavier tones tend to feel more somber, dramatic and heavier. Drawings with very light tones (or none at all) seem more fun, exciting and lighter. That may sound like an oversimplification but there are a million variations within that idea.

Some examples (from Bill Waterson, Charles Schulz and Quentin Blake) to show how simple line drawings with little or no tone can feel fun, light and comedic (depending on the drawing style and subject matter, of course):

A couple of Howard Pyle drawings that have heavy tones, and feel somber and weighty as a result.

When using tones for readability, you're basically using tones to either separate things or group them.

A group of businessmen without tone:

The same group, with tones to separate them from each other and suggest depth, as well as add clarity and readability. Here, the use of tone enhances the idea that they are five separate individuals:

This is the way I use tone in story sketch about 90% of the time. Most scenes aren't heavily dramatic scenes so they don't call for heavy tones (in fact dark heavy tones would work against the feeling you want for a light humorous scene, or even a sincere character scene where two people are interacting). So usually I just throw some quick tones onto a drawing for readability: to separate things from each other and make sure everything in the sketch is clear.

Here are some story sketches from "Tangled" I did that show the kind of quick tones I sometimes use to both clarify and group things in my boards:

So here are the businessmen again, but this time they are all colored the same tone to make them all one group. As opposed to the previous example, here they read as a group of businessmen....and not as individuals.

And when talking about readability, never forget that the eye will always go to the area of greatest contrast first. Usually that means where black is set against white. Then use greys to sublimate the rest of the drawing where you don't want the audience to look. Like so:

So anyway, after Nathan gave me that great idea for an assignment, I searched out some complicated line drawings to hand out and have people add tones for clarity and/or mood. But there was never a good time to give the assignment and I never handed it out. However, if you wanted to try it yourself, here are some high quality jpegs that you could download, open in photoshop (or print out on paper, or whatever) and try adding some tones. Some are by Belgian artist Franquin, the rest are by Jack Kirby.

So do with them what you want (If anything). If you're interested in actually doing this as an assignment, here's how I'd approach it:

Pick one drawing and, using only black, white and ONE grey value, make the drawing read clearly. I'd pick ONE center of interest where you want the viewer to look and put your highest contrast there. Then use greys to create hierarchy with the other elements so the eye will go to the intended center of interest first. Also try using greys to create space and depth and clarity to the elements.

Then take a different drawing and use black, white and as many grey values as you'd like to use, but with the same purpose: pick one area to make the center of interest or the most important and create contrast there, then sublimate the rest. See if you have trouble controlling that many greys and whether you can keep the drawing from getting muddy and mushy.

You could also take a drawing and try creating TWO different centers of interest. Usually in story sketch we only want ONE center of interest because, when your storyboards are cut into a story reel, they may be on screen for only a second or two. They have to read very quickly, and there should only be one thing happening at a time.Two centers of interest is more likely to be appropriate in an illustration, where you have more time to examine the drawing and absorb it, finding hidden nuances as you do. So if illustration is more your emphasis, you might like trying that approach.

Then I'd take another drawing and try to use tones to make it seem like a heavy, dramatic scene (like the Pyle paintings).

Also, if you teach a class where this kind of exercise might be useful, feel free to use these drawings and assignment (or alter it any way you like).

My only request is to please not post your version online. I may end up giving this assignment one day and I don't want anyone to be able to cheat!

There's no right or wrong way to do the assignment. Each one could be done a thousand different ways. The point is to have fun and learn by experimenting and tweaking to get the best result.

"Tangled Ever After"

2012-01-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Tangled Ever After", a short film (and a sequel of sorts to "Tangled") that is opening this weekend along with the 3D version of "Beauty and the Beast". It'll be shown on television in the spring as well (at least...as far as I know).

The short has an interesting past: there were a lot of people who wanted to see (SPOILER ALERT) Flynn and Rapunzel get married at the end of "Tangled". We didn't do that for a number of reasons, the best one being that Rapunzel's journey is about much more than just meeting a man and falling in love; she gains her freedom, discovers her true identity, escapes her life-long oppressor and reunites with a long-lost family. So a wedding seemed like not-quite-the-right ending for the movie.

But apparently there were people interested in seeing Flynn and Rapunzel get married, so the idea came up that maybe we should see their wedding and give people just a little bit more of the world of "Tangled" with a short.

Obviously, it was pretty clear to all of us that just watching Flynn and Rapunzel get married would be a pretty uninteresting short. So Director Nathan Greno had an idea that would give a wedding to people who wanted that, but also have a layer of entertainment and comedy that would give some more screen time to Maximus and Pascal, who seem to be perfect characters to have their own comedic spotlight in the form of a short.

Nathan's idea was to have Maximus and Pascal be the ring bearers for Flynn and Rapunzel at their wedding, but during the ceremony they lose control of the rings and they roll out of the church. So while Flynn and Rapunzel are performing their vows, Max and Pascal are out chasing after the rings as they bounce through the town (without Flynn, Rapunzel or anyone in the church realizing that they're gone).

The beauty of this idea is that you get to have the sincere wedding of Flynn and Rapunzel while the comedic aspect takes place outside, away from the ceremony. As opposed to trying to make the actual wedding ceremony wacky and funny, which would take away from the satisfaction of seeing Flynn and Rapunzel have a nice wedding and finally tie the knot. But if the short was just concerned with the wedding, it would be pretty dry and not fit the comedic and fun world that we established in "Tangled".

Also, I'll be the first to admit that I find weddings rather boring and uninteresting. So this idea has something for people who like weddings as well as something for those who don't.

So Nathan pitched the idea to Byron Howard (the other director of "Tangled" and the other director on the short), Byron liked that idea and the ball started rolling.

Nathan, Byron and I had a brainstorming session early on with some of the story guys and they gave us some great material that helped us figure out the idea. The three of us boarded the whole thing and worked with it and shaped it in editorial. It turned out great and looks every bit as good as the movie, so I hope you'll check it out in theaters if you can or on TV when it's shown later this spring (although it's only in 3D in theaters, of course).

One other interesting side note for me personally was that when I first heard about the short I was really looking forward to working with the "Tangled" characters again. I love all the characters and I know them so well by now that it's really second nature to get in their heads and know what they're thinking and how they act, which is always the part that takes a while to get used to when you're developing new characters.

As much as I loved working with Nathan and Byron and everyone else on the short (and as proud as I am of the way it turned out), I realized that the thing I love the most about my job is the challenge of inventing new worlds and discovering new characters as you build a story from scratch. So even though it was a blast to return to the old characters and their world and work with guys that I enjoy working with, I'm more excited about the prospect of inventing a new world and discovering whole new characters as I work on the next thing that I'm going to be a part of.

So I hope you'll get a chance to see it and, if you enjoyed "Tangled", I hope you'll enjoy the short just as much and enjoy spending just a little bit more time with the characters and their world.

A Good Comic Book Resource

2012-01-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

As I've said before, I didn't really get interested in superhero comics as a kid. Mostly I read Disney and Looney Tunes comics and comic adaptations of movies like "Star Wars". I read Mad magazine religiously too.

Anyway the point is that my knowledge of comics and their "rules" is pretty non-existent. When I decided to try and create my own graphic novel I started looking around for resources to learn more about comics and how they're put together. One great free resource I found is all the articles on Blambot.com. Nate Piekos has written a few helpful pieces, including this one on grammar in comic books, which I found pretty fascinating. I am ashamed to admit that I had no idea that comic book grammar was so regimented and specific.

And yeah, I know there are probably other schools of thought, and more than one way to do it! But what Nate says makes sense to me (and looks right) so I'll stick with it.

He also wrote an article about designing a logo for your comic that I really liked. The same advice could apply to designing any kind of logo and I found it helpful. It's not something many people write helpful advice about, and I always enjoy that kind of thing: analysis of a topic that I never thought about before.

The full page of article topics can be found here.

Blambot also offers some free comic book fonts and sells some as well. I bought the "Hometown Hero" font to use for my comic because I really don't have the patience to write out my own dialogue, it was more reasonably priced than most other font sites and because I really like the font.

Anyway, I really like the site and I found it very helpful. If you're interested in that type of thing, I hope you will enjoy it too!

New Changes Coming

2012-01-01T08:47:00.000-08:00

In March I'll have been posting for six years and it's been amazing - thanks for all your great comments and kind words. I wanted to take a moment to mention some changes that are coming.

This is kind of a long post so here's the tl;dr (too long; didn't read) summary: I'm going to put ads on the blog this year, and also in 2012 I am going to start posting my graphic novel online for free.

Here's the long explanation:

Originally I had a different plan. I've been working on a graphic novel for over a year and a half and my plan was to always post that in installments on a different website online and put ads on that website because I've always wanted to keep this site ad free. But the more I looked at online comics the more I realized that having ads on a comics site really distracts from the experience - it's hard to get involved in them and get wrapped up in the story when there are ads flashing all over the page. So gradually I realized that I didn't want to put ads along with my graphic novel....I just wanted to post my story so people would read it.

So eventually I'll be posting my graphic novel for free. It's turned into a massive undertaking and I can't quite start posting it yet. I need to get farther into it before I can start sharing it. And my work schedule is always changing so I don't know when exactly I'll have enough done to start posting. Sometime in 2012 for sure.

I would leave both sites ad free if I could. However, my children are getting older and, of all the things that keep me awake at night, one of them is that I'd like to set more aside for their college funds. So it seems appropriate to take any money I might make off this site and apply it towards their education. I appreciate your understanding on this and I hope the ads won't negatively effect the experience of visiting the site.

Working on my graphic novel has definitely cut into my blogging time over the last year and a half or so, but I am excited to get to a point where I can post it and I hope you will all check it out when I do.

Best wishes for a happy 2012!

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-23T10:59:00.000-08:00

Here's my Christmas card this year (once again featuring our Miniature Schnauzer).

Best wishes for a wonderful holiday and a happy New Year!!!

"I've Got a Plan..."

2011-12-20T20:31:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that, in movies, when a character says, "I've got a plan", there are two things that can happen next.

One of those options is that the film cuts away at that point, and we (the audience) don't get to hear what the plan is as the character explains it to whoever he was talking to. Then, as the plan goes into action and it unfolds, we are surprised at how it twists and turns as the characters execute their plan.

Here's the scene from the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" where Jack steals the Interceptor out from under the British Navy that illustrates this first approach.

Jack never says "I've got a plan" per se, but it's pretty clear he has one and at no point do we (the audience) know what he's up to (nor does Will Turner, it seems). So as the plan unfolds, everything is a surprise to us and fun to watch...all the way to the end, where he anticipates every move his enemy will make to try and stop him. If we had heard all those details in advance, it would take all the fun out of watching it unfold.

The other way to go is that after the character says, "I've got a plan...", we do the opposite: we don't cut away. We stay with the character as he or she lays out their plan in detail. That way the plan - as the characters are expecting it to unfold - is clear in our minds. We know exactly what each character's role is in the plan, what they're supposed to do, and when, and what the characters expect to happen at each point and what they expect the final result to be.

The reason to play it this second way is so that they audience is completely clear on what's supposed to happen....and then dramatic tension (or comedy - think "I Love Lucy") is created when the plan starts to go completely wrong. Maybe the world doesn't react the way the characters thought, maybe the guards decided to change their schedule that day, maybe one of the characters falls asleep and misses the crucial step everyone was relying on him or her to perform. Doesn't matter....the point of this second way is to set up an expectation and then create drama (or comedy) by how the plan doesn't match what we were setup to expect.

The point of both ways is to surprise you - either by completely withholding information or by giving you all the information you need so that you can understand what's going wrong and how bad that is for the characters.

Think how boring it would be to hear the characters plan out their moves and then see them execute it in exactly the way they planned it out. It'd be like watching the same thing twice....once as they talked through it and then as they actually did it. It's be like watching a movie where everyone says what they're going to do before they do it: "I'm going to punch you now", "I'm going to shoot you now", "I'm going to kiss you now".

In a lot of ways, this little example holds the key to much of film making. Either withhold key information to surprise your audience with later, or setup an expectation that you subvert later by delivering something else. It's that simple. As Jerry Bruckheimer once said about film making, "Just keep throwing 'em curveballs."

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS (but not really)

"Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" falls into the latter category: that is, they have a lot of plans in the film and they definitely explain them out in advance for the audience to hear. I don't think there's any other way they could have approached it in that particular case: the plans in the movie are so complicated there's no way to explain everything that's happening to the audience as it's happening. And their plans are so reliant on getting technology to work in unison with the physical parts of the plan that I don't know how you'd ever explain that while it's unfolding. It would make no sense and would create pauses in the action that would totally destroy the rhythm of the action sequences. So they discuss their plans with each other before they put them into action, and they explain the technology-based parts of their plan to the audience in a natural way: they have one tech-savvy guy who understands all this stuff better than anyone else on the team, and so the rest of the team naturally has to ask him questions about all the technology, and he explains it to them....and to us, the audience. So as we jump into the action, we know as much as we need to know to understand what's happening and what the technology is supposed to be doing (and what it's not supposed to do, so we know when it's failing). Otherwise there'd be no dramatic tension if it started to malfunction or do the wrong thing.

There are better examples of this type of thing in the film, but here are some clips that are available online that illustrate the point.

Choices Create a Believeable and Consistent World

2011-12-15T21:50:00.001-08:00

As artists, when we create stories in a visual medium, we control the look of everything. Every character, every background, every prop and every detail has to be designed. We have to make a choice about how each and every thing will look, and why. It can seem overwhelming,

So how do you know which way to make those decisions? For me, everything always seems to go back to the story and what will tell it in the best possible way. Each and every detail you draw can contribute to the story you're telling, if you put enough thought into your work and design it right. And if you don't think ahead and don't put much thought into what you're doing, you can undermine what you're trying to say.

Here's an example: our story (be it an animated film, comic book, whatever) opens on our main character's house, before we even see him.

Our character's house has walls that seem to be falling in and a roof that appears to be sagging. Most of the windows are too dirty to see in, but the ones that we can see through have old sheets hung in front of them instead of curtains or blinds. The house is in dire need of a paint job, and the front lawn hasn't been mowed in forever - the grass is waist high. Piles of old newspapers lie on the front step - the owner is too lazy to collect them and they continue to pile up day after day.

When we see a house like that, we make a lot of assumptions about the type of person that lives there. We ascribe a lot of qualities to them based on the way their house is kept. It doesn't have to be a house, of course...the character's car, their clothing, their posture, etc....all these things are choices we have to make as artists and each one can have a real effect on how the audience perceives our characters.

By contrast, picture a house with a fresh clean paint job with brightly painted shutters on the windows. The roof is clean and perfectly straight, and the windows are all sparkly clean. The lush, thick grass of the front yard is trimmed neatly and the whole house is surrounded by a perfectly even white picket fence.

In both types of houses we get a strong feeling about the person that lives there and takes care (or doesn't take care) of their home. We've made strong decisions that help tell our story and inform the audience about our characters.

Many times I feel like I see stories where people think "Okay, I need to show my character's house before we meet him" and then they'll just draw a bland, nondescipt house. The house doesn't tell anything about the character - it's not being used as story ammunition to tell the story in a more powerful, involving way. It's just a graphic symbol that says, "house". And it's a totally missed opportunity.

Or on the other hand, sometimes you see artists make a choice that doesn't quite feel right. For example, imagine if Elmer Fudd pulled out a rifle and pointed it at Bugs Bunny, but instead of his usual cartoon hunting rifle, the gun was a completely realistic looking gun, covered with detail and even tiny flecks of rust. It would feel totally jarring and it would take you out of the cartoon. You'd definitely be done laughing at the cartoon. You would be reminded of the fact that you're watching something made by artists that made weird choice that doesn't fit....the spell has been broken.

Good artistic choices feel like they weren't even choices that were "made", they just happened naturally. A good story where everything is designed properly just feels right, and it feels inevitable....like it's a real, actual place where everything actually exists. It doesn't have to be a realistic world, everything just has to relate to everything else properly. Everything has to be at the same level of caricature. Everything in Bugs Bunny's world should relate to Bugs Bunny. Everything in Pinocchio's world should relate to Pinocchio.

As an example, I'd like to point out something I saw in an issue of Jordi Bernet's "Jonah Hex" that inspired me to write about this subject.

First, though, here are some random pages from Bernet's "Hex" work to give an idea of the level of realism and grittiness he usually employs, which help give the story its tone and mood.

The grittiness and level of drawing help enhance the gravity and rather grim level of story telling. The violence feels like it has more weight and there's more danger and suspense to the stories because they're handled in a more serious way.

For contrast, imagine the page where Jonah is attacked by wolves drawn in the "Peanuts" style...the drawing style would feel really inappropriate for the subject matter. You'd never really worry that Charlie Brown would be killed by ravenous wolves. Just as, if "Peanuts" were drawn in the Jonah Hex style, they'd be a lot less funny!

So here's the section that made me think about this topic and inspired me to write.

In the spread below, Jonah is a young boy. His father kicks him into the sewage of the family outhouse and Jonah is forced to spend a long night climbing his way out.

Here's the particular choice that caught my eye and surprised me when I saw it: the stylized treatment of the stars in the panel when the camera shows the exterior of the outhouse.

Now don't get me wrong: this is entirely my opinion, and there's no right or wrong to this stuff, and I completely love Bernet's stuff - I always have.

But as I always say: the best way to learn is to look at other people's artwork and ask yourself why they did what they did, and what you might have done differently. More than anything, this is the method I used to learn whatever I have learned in life...it's the best method that I know to learn anything.

And here's the thing: personally I find the stylized treatment of the stars doesn't quite fit the narrative. The stylized stars are very charming, quirky and quaint. They work great for other types of stories that have more of that kind of feel. But "Jonah Hex" is about as far away as you can get from that kind of story. Particularly when the main beat is about being kicked into a pit of raw sewage (by your Dad, no less) and having to climb your way out. The sewage is certainly handled with a level of detail and rendering that sells the idea that the sewage is disgusting (a great choice, by the way). So why not handle the stars in a more realistic way to underscore the reality and the severity of the moment? Why handle them in a way that (at least to me) lends more of a charm and whimsy to a story?

Here are some pages from the same artist (Bernet) but completely different characters and subject matter: these are from "Claire de Nuit". The characters are more broad and cartoony, which fits the more comedic subject matter, and the stylized stars fit really well. As I said before, those kind of stars are charming and whimsical. They fit better here.

Of course I should warn you that if you go looking for more "Claire de Nuit" examples, they tend to be very NSFW!

Anyway hopefully you will all take this the way I intended: I am not at all criticizing Bernet. I love his stuff. But when I look at any movie, TV show, painting or drawing, I am always asking myself the same questions:

What choices did the artist make?

Why did they make that choice?

What would I have done differently?

Some people get outraged when they think you are questioning other artists, and that is not my intent. I have simply trained myself to ask these questions to learn from other artists and improve my own tastes by learning from what they've done. Agree or disagree with me on this post - that's not the point. The point is to inspire you to ask the same questions. Too many times we look at a great piece of art and just admire it. To get better and learn, we should always be asking ourselves: what did that artist do that I agree with, and what did they do that I might have done differently?

After all, that's what makes us all individual and why every artist is interesting and amazing in their own way!

Paul Felix Layout Notes

2011-11-30T21:50:00.001-08:00

The great Disney artist Paul Felix wrote some great notes on perspective and layout years ago. They are full of great information and very clearly written. If you've never seen them before, check them out - even if you're not particularly interested in layout they're full of useful knowledge about drawing.

Links to them at the "Unofficial Paul Felix Blog":
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

Or all in one spot at Dan Caylor's "On Animation":
Paul Felix notes

Probably the Strangest Drawing You'll See Today

2011-11-25T08:36:00.001-08:00

Sometimes people ask me to post more of my drawings....which I usually can't, because most of them are for movies that won't be out for a while. So here's a card I did recently for my wife for our Anniversary. It's our two family pets - a Miniature Schnauzer and a corn snake.

More on Caricature and Creating a Believeable World

2011-11-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

More on this idea of "Creating a Believeable World" and how the level of caricature and exaggeration can affect the emotional range of the movie. Animation is a wonderful medium because you can create any kind of amazing world for your characters to inhabit. But the animated films I love the best create a world with a lot of control and consistency so that the audience can relate to it and project themselves into that world, believing in it and relating to the characters as real, living breathing characters.

Animated animals are a good way to illustrate varying levels of caricature in Disney movies. Maximus in "Tangled" is a horse, first and foremost. He has some human traits that make him entertaining, but he's always a horse. He doesn't talk, he doesn't stand on two legs, he doesn't drink tea from a teacup....first and foremost, he's a horse. Although he has human-esque expressions and emotions, we buy that because we all have a tendency to look at animals and project human emotions onto them. So we're primed to believe this already.

People get choked up at parts of "Tangled" and are able to engage with the characters, emotionally. Now maybe it's just me, but I honestly think that if Maximus stood up in the middle of the movie and started speaking, it would be very jarring within that world and it would throw the audience off. I think that would destroy the credibility of the world of "Tangled" so much that many viewers wouldn't be able to engage emotionally with the end of the movie when things start to get very serious.

"Lady and the Tramp" is another good example, where the animals talk and express emotions, but stay enough in the "realistic" world that we buy them and the world they live in. Sure, the dogs in that movie talk....but only to each other. Which isn't that much of a stretch for us to buy, because anyone who's seen two dogs interact with each other can tell that they have a wide array of body language and vocalizations that are universal and makes them able to communicate with each other very clearly. So they already seem able to "talk" to each other in real life. It doesn't take much for us to believe it within the film.

However, if, within the movie, they could talk to not just dogs but people as well, we would be confused and we wouldn't believe in the world of the movie. We wouldn't invest in it emotionally and wouldn't feel anything for the dogs and their problems.

And I think the emotion in the movie works like gangbusters. SPOILER ALERT!

I love the ending of "Lady and the Tramp", starting with the part where Jock thinks Trusty has lost his sense of smell, and how offended Trusty gets when Jock mentions this....that's such an amazing moment to me, when Trusty gets offended and is taken aback for a minute...then just puts Jock's offensive comment aside and gets back to work to save his friend Tramp. That's such a great moment of thinking, feeling character animation that works because of the way the characters have been set up in a believeable way, and because you buy the reality of the world, you really believe the gravity of the situation: Tramp's life is at stake.

The part in the end where Trusty gives his life for Tramp (or so you think) is very emotional for me as well. And again, I think the way the world was handled and how realistically the dogs are treated really helps me relate to them and worry about them and feel empathy for them...and all that makes the emotional beats in the movie work really well.

If you're interested in the climax of "Tramp", start at about four minutes in on the clip below. This sequence is handled phenomenally on every level, one of my favorite sequences from any Disney movie.

For counterpoint, I love the Disney film "The Wind in the Willows" but I don't feel the same range of emotions as I do when I watch some of the other Disney films. The world of Mr. Toad is totally different from the world of "Tangled" or "Lady and the Tramp". In Mr. Toad's world, humans co-mingle with animals, animals wear clothes and live in houses, etc. In contrast to Maximus, Cyril in "Willows" is a horse who is really a cross between a person and a horse. Sometimes Cyril pulls a carriage like a horse, and other times he wears clothes and even gives testimony in a trial. I love the world of "Mr. Toad" and I love that movie, but I don't feel much emotion during the movie (to be fair, it doesn't try to play much, either) and I can't imagine that, if there were a heavy emotional scene in Mr. Toad, that I would feel much. It's just not that type of movie. There's nothing at all wrong with that. But the worlds of "Tangled" and "Mr. Toad" are built to tell two totally different types of stories.

"Alice in Wonderland" is another example of a movie that I personally don't really engage with, emotionally. I'm impressed by the imagination of the artists that came up with all of the crazy stuff in the movie, and I enjoy the look of it, but the "world" that the story takes place in is so crazy - where anything can happen - that I can't really emotionally invest in the characters. When anything can happen at any moment, it's hard to feel afraid for Alice when she's on trial and the Queen is threatening to cut off her head. Because you know you're in an off-kilter, surreal world and you know anything can happen and save Alice's life (which is exactly what happens), you can't really ever get the audience to engage with and feel worried or stress about what might happen to your characters. There's no real tension or conflict in a movie when it takes place in a crazy world where you know things can change at any moment in a completely random way.

Again, I'm not saying there's a "right" or "wrong" to any of this, or that any of these films are better or worse than their counterparts. But their worlds have big differences that influence the types of stories and emotions that can be played. When you're creating a world and the characters that inhabit that world, be aware of the level of caricature that you want to play, and think about if it's appropriate for what you're trying to do.

Squash and Stretch (part 3) and Creating a Believeable World

2011-11-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

This post about Squash and Stretch is more of a conceptual discussion. I talk about this sometimes when I'm giving talks to students, and it's a very important concept in my mind, but I get the feeling that people usually think I'm overstating the case or just crazy. But in my mind this is a big deal.

My first year at CalArts, I made a short animated film where I gave every object a lot of squash and stretch. Every object was bouncy and pliable. It was a lot of fun to animate (Early animated cartoons were often this way too - in early Mickey Mouse cartoons, Mickey could easily stretch out the tail of an airplane and make it longer. An airplane or a car was animated as though it was made out of the same material as a cow's udder or an animal's tongue).

As a worked at learning to draw and animate, I thought more and more about what I was trying to accomplish as an animator. I realized that I wanted to animate fun characters, but gradually I also realized that I wanted to tell stories that made people feel real emotions. I wanted to make films as funny as Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers shorts, and I also wanted to make films that could make you worry over the fate of the characters, like "Pinocchio", or "Lady and the Tramp", and make you get choked up or maybe even cry over what happened to the characters, like "Bambi" or "Dumbo". Those things seemed like great magic tricks, and I was always searching for answers about how that was possible using only drawings.

One day when I was at CalArts the animator Glen Keane gave a lecture and a handout on "Dynamics of Animated Drawing" (full handout can be seen here) and it contained a sentence that I didn't really take notice of at the time, but over the years I've realized that there's a lot of wisdom contained within that thought.

It says, simply: "Your character is bound by natural laws - we can fudge and cheat these to a certain degree, but the audience relates to these laws."

I think this has a larger implication that can really make or break an animated film and can be the difference between a film that can tug at your heartstrings and give you a satisfying emotional experience, and one that is fun to watch but doesn't really have deeper, more involving emotions and characters (and there's nothing wrong with just making a fun film, if that's your goal).

In order for an audience to really engage with your characters and feel empathy for them - even thought they're just drawings, or zeros and ones in a computer - the audience has to be able to believe that they're real characters in a real world. It's a contract that your audience can enter with you if you've done your job right, and I think a big part of it is portraying a world that your audience can believe actually exists. Intellectually, I think it's impossible for people to care about characters if they are conscious while they are watching the movie that the characters are too weird to be real, or live in a world that's too weird to actually exist, or if objects in that world have too much squash and stretch and don't react like the type of objects we experience in our world every day that make our world feel real to us.

So I'm not saying that you can't caricature materials or give objects a little more squash and stretch than they have in our everyday world. Certainly that can be a lot of fun, and people have pulled it off just fine without destroying the credibility of the world they're creating. But be conscious of this and I think you'll find that if you don't overdo it it'll help the believeability of the world you're creating and will give people "anchors" to relate to that help them get immersed in your world and help them believe in your world as a real place and your characters as living breathing entities. Because that's really a great feat when you can pull it off, and probably the best magic trick you can accomplish in animation!

Happy Halloween

2011-10-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've posted this every Halloween, I think....a page from the "Famous Artist's Course" where artist Stevan Dohanos talks about how he went about illustrating a "haunted house". I like it when artists talk through their process and reveal their thinking as they try to illustrate a specific point and tell a story in one image.

Also, if you're interested, I did these drawing as a craft project for my kid's elementary school. They needed drawings that could please a wide variety of ages - they had to be simple enough for kindergartners to color and cut out, as well as not scary or gross so as to not bother anyone's sensibilities. Hopefully the higher grades found them interesting as well.

Anyway, if you're having a Halloween party, or have kids that might enjoy them, I'll post them - they are sized to print out on regular 8 1/2 by 11 copier paper or card stock. They can be colored and then cut out and once you attach the limbs, viola! You've just wasted a bunch of time.

Kidding. Happy Halloween!!!

Squah and Stretch (Part Two)

2011-10-26T14:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so here's the concept I actually wanted to talk about concerning "squash and stretch": how it applies in drawing (as opposed to as a force in animation).

Basically this is all about using "Squash and Stretch" to help organize your drawings and as an aid in drawing forms that are fleshy or pliable.

When you bend over and touch your toes, you feel a stretching sensation across the back of your legs, your back and spine and the back of your neck, right?

And you feel a squashing sensation in your stomach, right?

This can be helpful in drawing. When one side of a form stretches, the other side side should squash...and vice versa. This really helps add life to your drawings, get a better feeling of weight and is an aid in avoiding symmetry. A drawing that is totally symmetrical (both sides are mirror images) is usually a flat, uninteresting drawing. Here's a refresher from Carson Van Osten on why symmetry leads to weak drawing:

I find myself thinking about Squash and Stretch while I draw and I often organize my figures so that one side is always squashing and the other side is stretching. And the reason that Rapunzel makes a good model to illustrate this is that I used that concept a lot while drawing her. It helped me organize all that hair in a way that prevented it from just being a shapeless mess (well, sort of).Click to see bigger:

Here, I've drawn red arrows to indicate the stretches...and invariably you'll find a blue arrow on the opposite side of the body part indicating a squash.

Wherever the bottom of her hair hits the floor and flattens out in a squash, I was always careful to try and give shape and form to the top side of her hair and add a stretch so it had shape, form and contrast. Here's a less confusing version (maybe?) where I put red lines on the stretches and blue lines on the squashes.

Sorry, it's a rough quick drawing but I hope it illustrates the point clearly!

Squash and Stretch (Part One)

2011-10-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

I started out writing about Squash and Stretch as it applies to drawing and then I realized that I first had to describe what Squash and Stretch means in terms of animation. Of course, it's been covered in a bunch of animation books (and covered well), so most people get all this already, but then again I realized that people use the term "Squash and Stretch" to describe a few different (but similar) concepts.

I'm going to start at the very beginning and try to be exhaustive. There may be readers who are totally new to this concept! So let me try to start at square one, just for fun...

One of the first concepts you hear about when you're studying animation is "squash and stretch", which is the idea that living forms (and certain types of inanimate objects) have a certain amount of flexibility and that they change shape as they move around under their own power, react to external forces or change expression.

The bouncing rubber ball is, of course, the first thing most people approach as an animation test to learn about squash and stretch. Without requiring any complicated drawing, it illustrates how a soft mass can stretch out when it's affected by gravity and squash down when it comes into contact with a hard surface.

Then you learn how to apply this to living forms. As people move from place to place and perform actions, their bodies, limbs, even their clothes and hair (and everything else) are affected by the forces exerted by the muscles working against gravity, wind and air resistance, and this is expressed by drawing the forms squashed down or stretched out. Also, bodies can squash or stretch if they're affected by external forces out of their control (like a person tripping and falling face first on the sidewalk...their face might very well squash into the hard pavement).

Then, there's the more subtle affect of squash and stretch to emphasize an attitude....a character sitting down on a stool, dejected, can sound like a straighforward and static pose, but using a little extra "squash" in the drawing can make him feel like gravity is affecting him more than usual and he has an extra heavy weight on his shoulders...whatever he's depressed about, it's almost like it's physically pressing down on him. Conversely, if he has an attitude change and suddenly brightens up, you might use some stretch in your drawing to show him perking up and escaping gravity a bit. He's lighter on his toes than usual because he's suddenly thought of something that lifts his spirits - a way out of the problem that was troubling him (and squashing him down) a moment before.

The third way I think squash and stretch is really important in animation is to show emotions and thought. There wouldn't be any acting in animation at all without squash and stretch. Squash and Stretch is the only way, really, to show a change of attitude on a character's face and body to show that they're thinking and processing ideas and emotions. When you go from a Squash to a Stretch, or vice versa, you see a clear change of attitude that shows a change is happening within the character's mind.

This last one is one that I find people under utilize in storyboarding, to be honest. If you ever find yourself storyboarding a sequence (or animating one, for that matter) and the viewer isn't quite connecting with the character, and isn't totally clear on what's going on inside the character's mind - what they are feeling and thinking - maybe you're not using the shifts in Squash and Stretch properly to clue the viewer in to what emotional changes the character is going through.

It doesn't have to be an extreme change. Even very subtle shifts of a Squash to a Stretch (or vice versa) can say volumes. We all have seen an actor (or animated character) lift an eyebrow, or purse their lips, or just slump their shoulders, and immediately with that subtle change you know exactly what that character is thinking and feeling and it's more powerful than any more extreme change would be.

Anyway, more to come next time.....

Virgin America Safety Video

2011-10-05T06:47:00.001-07:00

I recently took a flight on Virgin America Airlines. Their pre-flight safety video is a nice piece of work and uses animation in a unique way.

As I was watching it I kept wanting the animation to be more exaggerated - from an animation standpoint it felt a bit restrained. But on the other hand, the gentle quality of the animation had a calming effect, which I assume was a deliberate choice. The style of animation, the quirky designs, the soothing music, the calm narrator and the eclectic humor all seemed like great choices to calm and settle nervous viewers right before their plane takes off.

Also the choice of animation (and the unusual style) is a nice change from the typical pre-flight video which always features real people telling you about the aircraft's safety features. I think passengers are more likely to pay attention to it because it's so unexpected and different from what you expect before a flight.

So I found it to be a smart use of animation and I felt there were a lot of smart choices made in the execution to fulfill a specific purpose.

Dissecting a Sequence From "The Dark Knight"

2011-09-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a link to this video, which is great. In it, Jim Emerson, a film writer and critic, breaks down a sequence from "The Dark Knight" and explains why he finds it confusing. It's a great primer on screen direction and the 180 degree rule, and why those things are important.

In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight) from Jim Emerson on Vimeo.

When the audience is confused and disoriented, they start to use their brains to try and decipher what's going on, rather than to engage with your movie and care about what's happening onscreen. In an action sequence it's particularly important to keep your audience absolutely clear about where all the characters, vehicles and landmarks are in relation to each other. Otherwise, there's no tension or drama.

"Kagemusha" and some Composition thoughts

2011-09-11T22:10:00.000-07:00

I was streaming the movie "Kagemusha" on Netflix and, like all Kurosawa films, it had great compositions. So I screengrabbed a few to share and talk about.

If you've never seen a Kurosawa movie, check out "The Hidden Fortress" and "Seven Samurai". They're subtitled, and both are made in black and white, which I know is kind of a turnoff for some people. But that's a shame, because these are both amazing films, and not in the typical film school "this is a boring movie that you have to sit through because it's become a classic" way...they are really great, entertaining and amazingly well-made movies. I have watched both of them multiple times and they are truly great. And a delight to watch.

Anyway, back to "Kagemusha". I've talked before about creating a "frame within a frame". It's a handy compositional tool, useful for getting the eye of the viewer going where you want it to go. You just create a frame within your composition to frame your subject. Some good examples from "Kagemusha":

In this one, Kurosawa uses frame-within-a-frame to separate the people on the left from the person on the right, to sell the idea that the people on the left are unaware of the person on the right and do not realize that they are being overheard.

You can see how it's a useful tool for creating depth and interesting compositions, as well as for directing the viewer's eye, and can be used in an infinite variety of ways.

In this one, the land and the ocean create useful frames for separating the two groups and emphasize the differences between them (which you can get a good idea of, just from the differences in their costumes). I like the way the shoreline leads right to the face of the figure in the foreground to make you focus on him and his expressions.

In this example, Kurosawa creates two frames to show the two groups spying through the holes of a collapsed house. It's a great choice of location because the walls of the house make an interesting texture that fills up the frame.

Same thing here - he creates an interesting composition by placing the two people at the right and left edge of the frame, which is an unusual choice that creates an interesting composition. Then he places a rock between them that creates an interesting shape and is full of texture that looks great onscreen.

Here's another good example. An interesting composition is created by putting the watching figures higher than you might expect and widening out the shot to create an interesting texture with the rocky hillside. They're spying on an army, so the choice of putting them so high and making them so small really sells that idea that they're hiding and peeking down from their secret perch.

In fact, this reminded me of a layout concept that Dan Hansen (former layout teacher, and now the head of the Character Animation program at CalArts) used to say. He said that when a character is at a location that's down low, place them low in your composition. And when a character is up high, put them high within the composition.

Why does this matter? It helps because it reinforces visually what you're trying to say and helps keep the audience oriented as to where everyone is in relation to each other. Try it yourself - draw a storyboard where a character is down low, but put them high within your composition. Then draw a storyboard of a character that's in an up high place, but low within the composition. Look back and forth between them and see if it feels okay or seems awkward. It's definitely possible to pull this off, but I think you'll see if you try it that it can seem confusing, and the other way works better for simplicity and clarity.

Here's another great compositional technique that people don't use very often but that works well. You have one part of the frame (in this case, the background) lit all in warm colors...then another part of the frame (the foreground in this example) lit with cool colors. It separates the two areas and gives it depth while creating a nice contrast.

Anyway I hope you found these examples interesting as well and I hope that if you've never checked out a Kurosawa movie you'll try one and see what you think. Personally, I haven't seen them all myself although I'd like to, someday. I haven't finished "Kagemusha" either but if there's more good stuff to share I'll post it soon.

Inspiration from Steve Jobs

2011-09-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

With Apple CEO Steve Jobs being in the news this week, I read a few articles about him. He had a couple of quotes that I really thought were interesting. Here's the first one:

"When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there," he told Newsweek in 2006. "But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions."

This is amazingly perceptive and truthful to me. It applies to story and it applies to drawing. Your first instinct when trying to solve a drawing problem or a hole in your story is to add layers of complexity. Oftentimes the best solution is really rather simple and involves removing complexity instead of adding it. And it's worth remembering that often the first solution we think of is the most complicated, but if we keep at it, examining the problem from different angles and trying different solutions, we can come up with a better solution that would have been impossible for us to see at the start.

As someone once said, "writing is re-writing". I have always found this to be absolutely true. I have always found that "drawing is re-drawing" as well.

I think Hemmingway once said "The first draft of anything is shit." This has also always been true in my experience.

Okay, the second quote that struck me was this:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," he once told Stanford grads. "If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."

"Loving what you do" has a unique meaning in the animation business. To me, there are three parts to consider about the job we do when talking about "loving what we do":

The first component of "what we do" is the artistic struggle of (and satisfaction you get from) producing your own work and judging it against your own taste and artistic standards. This part would be the storyboards you draw, the scenes you animate, the backgrounds you paint, etc. The artwork you are personally creating during the making of the film or show.

The second component of "what we do" is submitting our work to the directors, producers and our peers, and working with them as we hone our work, improve it and alter it to fit appropriately within the larger scheme of the project.

The third component of "what we do" is the project as a whole (the entire film, TV show, video game or whatever) and our satisfaction or disappointment with how it turns out.

So there are a lot of aspects that go into our attempt to "love what we do". Some of them are under our control and some are not. All of us lose sleep over what we do and lay awake at night worrying about our jobs and the projects we are working on (at least I do, and I assume everyone else does too). And in my experience, people spend more time agonizing over and lose more sleep over the parts of the project that are out of their control than the parts they do control.

It always saddens me a bit to see how many people on the internet identify themselves as "bitter animators" and the like, and how many people write in an angry and bitter way about animated projects they've worked on (or in some cases haven't worked on but still hate the film with a passion, either because they think it's bad or they hate the people that made it). I completely understand how painful it can be to spend years of your life and countless hours late at night on a project that didn't turn out the way you hoped it would. The majority of films I've worked out haven't turned out as well as I had hoped. A very small number of them actually turned out anywhere near as good as I hoped they might. On all of the films I've worked on, I spent multiple years working on each one and sacrificed plenty on all of them in an effort to try and improve them as much as I could within the scope of my responsibilities.

I think a big part of why I don't look back on those projects with regret about the time I spent on them is that I always spoke up openly about what I thought was wrong and could be better. Most of the time people disagreed with me and didn't see the problems the same way I saw them. They didn't always agree with the solutions I was proposing. Fair enough. But because I spoke up and expressed my honest opinions I was able to sleep at night knowing that at least I had tried to help and I hadn't kept my feelings bottled up inside, festering away.

I think a lot of the time when people become bitter it's because they aren't speaking up about the problems they see. Sometimes it's because they're afraid they'll look like a fool and sometimes they're afraid they'll be fired. Certainly I've worried about both and risked both as well. But I've always found at Disney that if I spoke up in a respectful way - without insulting or belittling the project I was discussing, or the people making it - people didn't get angry at me because they could tell I was just trying to make things better. They haven't always agreed with me but they only rarely got mad at me. And I'm still there after 17 years. So from my limited experience that approach has worked, anyway.

There has always been plenty for me to love and get satisfaction out of in my time at Disney. Even when I didn't agree with the way the film was going I could always throw myself into working on my drawing, boarding my assignments to the best of my ability and learning more about drawing and film making and developing characters and putting all of that into my boards. I can honestly say that I love the job of storyboarding and working with a story crew so I can say that I really am fortunate enough to have a job that I love. And at the very least, even in my worst experiences when everything seemed hopeless and pointless, I was still being paid to draw every day and that's no small thing. I've also been fortunate enough to have always worked with the most amazing people in the world and that's no hyperbole. I've enjoyed every story crew I've ever worked with and I look back on every film I've worked on with fondness for the board artists and amazement of how much fun we had, even when things were at their most frustrating.

Abraham Lincoln said, "If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will". Every job has its ups and downs and, as artists, we are especially prone to getting frustrated and disillusioned. But within all of us there was once a younger, more idealized person who got into this business because we wanted to do good work and learn how to be a better artist. No matter how frustrated you are with your job, those things are still within your control and nobody can keep you from doing your best work or learning to be a better artist: that's entirely within your control.

No matter what, nobody except you can keep yourself from learning, and growing, and finding satisfaction in the work you do, and those things are very important keys to leading a happy life...at least in my experience!

Roy Crane Scrapbook

2011-08-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Roy Crane was an influential comic strip artist that pioneered the adventure strip format. James Gurney, on his blog, recently linked to some pages of a "scrapbook" Crane put together to help other artists assist him in drawing his comic.

It's a great handout, covering such topics as composing for a comic strip, using black, white and grey, and how to draw women. Much as I've tried, I can't find the whole thing in one place. But here are links to some pieces I've found:

From the blog Hairy Green Eyeball 3 - Roy Crane's Art Technique and his Lost World!

From the blog Mike Lynch Cartoons:

Roy Crane and Buz Sawyer

Roy Crane: How to Draw Buz Sawyer

1970: More of Roy Crane's Scrapbook

Roy Crane Scrapbook: How to Draw Women

If anyone knows where to find them all in one place, or knows where there are more of these pages, definitely let me know! This stuff is great and thanks so much to the blogs that have posted this stuff. It's amazing!

They Come for the Frosting but They Remember the Cake

2011-08-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

When I first saw trailers for "Finding Nemo", they showed all the most fun parts of the movie. The cute little octopus that inks herself! The sweet loveable Science Teacher Mr. Ray! The sharks that are trying to give up eating fish and have formed their own 12 step group! The young fish that call a boat a "butt"!!! Hilarious! Sign me up!

Then when you get to the theater, the movie begins with ***SPOILER ALERT*** hundreds of baby fish (and their Mother) being eaten by a vicious barracuda. Hey, what the heck?!? Where's the fun I was promised?!? Where's all the laughs?!?

The film did a great job of promising you a lot of fun and laughs in the trailer. That gets your eager butt in the seat to see the movie. And the film delivers on that promise in spades. But there's another side to the movie, the part that you didn't really see in the trailer. And that's the part that will bring a tear to your eye and the part you will remember when you think about the movie later, and it's the part that gives the movie a great emotional punch, made it the highest-grossing Pixar movie (until "Toy Story 3") and made the film the hands-down favorite to win an Oscar.

That part is the story of a father who suffers a horrible trauma and loses his entire family - except for one son - and the father is so desperate to protect his son from harm that he can't live his life and won't let his son live his life. And how he learns to stop living in fear and become a better father and let his son grow up.

But if you make a trailer that tells the audience that they're in for a heavy movie with those kind of (potentially) dark themes, sometimes they get wary and stay away. If a movie looks too heavy or depressing it can look like it'll be a chore to watch and people look elsewhere. They get nervous that the film is going to be preachy and boring and lecture us. People always like light movies, ones that make them laugh, make them forget their troubles for a couple of hours. If a movie is too dark or depressing it can feel too much like real life. After all, we usually go to the movies to escape reality.

I think the best movies deliver on both fronts: enough laughs to balance out the dark, heavy parts, but enough serious parts to give the movie some weight and make it actually about something. A movie that's all laughs - just a light and fluffy comedy - is okay, but you tend to forget about those ones the minute you leave the theater, and people actually want more from their movies, in my experience. Even when they don't realize it.

Thousands of years ago, why did people start telling stories around the campfire before crawling back to their caves to sleep until morning? What's the point, after all? Why waste the energy doing it? Does it help us survive better?

Personally, I think they told stories for the same reason that we still watch movies, even after most of us have already seen quite a few already (and can usually guess how they'll probably turn out): people need stories. And more than anything, people need and crave stories with substance. They need stories because stories remind us that good can triumph over evil, that there are things like love, hope and faith left in the world, no matter how bad things get, and that there are some things worth fighting (and dying) for. They remind us of these things that are simple and basic, yet so easy to forget as we go through life and realize how complicated it can be.

But nobody perks up eagerly at the campfire (or sleeps in front of a theater overnight) at the prospect of a story that aims to be a lecture on how to live your life.

We want the frosting. That's what we react to in a trailer, that's what we like to see on the poster, that's what gets our butts in the seat. But it's the part we don't know about going in, the part hiding beneath the frosting, that audiences really want on a deeper level. And when the movie's over that's the part they'll find satisfying and will make them feel, afterwards, like they actually had something substantial.

Nobody wants a cake that's all frosting (well, almost nobody - there re always exceptions). If they did, they wouldn't go to all the trouble of baking a cake. They'd just buy a can of frosting and eat it with a spoon.

When it came out, the first "Jurassic Park" movie was an interesting movie to talk about in regards to this "frosting" idea.

The dinosaurs don't show up for quite a while. The first part of the movie is getting to know all the people involved and setting them up. The first part of "Jurassic Park" tells you what these people are all lacking in their life, so we can see them learn and grow and gain these things during the action adventure part of the movie. And also it's supposed to make us care about the people so that, when they're being chased by dinosaurs, we actually care for them and want them to get away. If we don't know anything about them as people - if we aren't aware that they're good people and just like us - we won't care about them then there's no emotion on our part to root for them to escape. We might just as easily root for the dinosaurs to win. They're pretty cool looking, after all, and only following their instincts.

So a lot of people found the first part of the movie dull. They would lament, "Jeez, I just want to see dinosaurs eating people. Why couldn't the movie just be dinosaurs eating people?"

I think that's a good example of thinking you want frosting and frosting only. But a movie without any human emotion or deeper story than just dinosaurs eating people would be about as interesting as watching your dog eat his dinner. There's no stakes, no human drama, no bigger life lesson for the audience to walk away and remember after the movie is over.

I think the real reason people were bored with the fist part of"Jurassic Park" is not necessarily that the structure is flawed, but that the human stories they set up aren't that interesting or compelling. But that's another topic....

When you think about it, there actually are a certain number of films made every year that are just about people being terrorized by monsters/sharks/serial killers (or whatever) without any character development. But they don't really stick with people or last very long in the theater. So there is an audience that just likes the frosting and wants destruction without a lot of emotional stuff to get in the way, but I think it's a pretty small one, and even most of those people probably prefer more substance with their movies, when they can get it.

The thing that compelled me to write about all this was the movie "Sucker Punch" ***SPOILER ALERTS*** which I just saw on DVD. And I honestly don't think I've ever seen a movie that tried harder to be all frosting.

"Sucker Punch" has no story, really, it's just a thread of an idea that exists only to hang several pointless action sequences on. And each action sequence is completely meaningless and arbitrary. You can practically picture the director sitting down and writing on a piece of paper everything he thinks is "cool" and wants to cram into one movie: girls with guns, dragons, killer robots, mechanized zombie WWI soldiers, ten foot tall samurai with machine guns.......but they don't have any larger significance. They don't mean anything more than what you see on the surface. They're never metaphors for a bigger idea, they're just eye candy. There's no larger story that you can take away and apply to your life.

It's just frosting. And totally unsatisfying.

And the weirdest part is that - even though there's nothing beneath the surface of the visuals - it takes itself so seriously! For a flat nothing of a movie it sure seems to think it's weighty and important (which you can tell even from this trailer). There aren't any laughs or moments of lightness in this movie at all. There are some unintentionally laughable bits but that's unintentional. It's just a grim, pointless slog. And there's nothing redeeming to be had at the end.

I always try to be generous and I usually go out of my way to avoid criticizing a film directly, because taste is subjective and I don't like offending people. Also, I always watch films - even those I don't enjoy watching - with an eye towards what I might have done better as well as what worked within the movie, so that each film can be a positive learning experience. Films are a lot of work and difficult to make so I always try to look as positively as I can on the efforts of the actors and the film makers. But "Sucker Punch" was that rare find, a movie that I found unpleasant and uncomfortable to watch, as well as barren of substance.

It did provide me, however, with some confirmation of what I've always believed that audiences really want from a film. For as much as this film seemed to be "all frosting", it didn't find traction with audiences and disappeared quickly from the theaters, and I think that's because people want more than just frosting. Frosting may delight your taste buds but a little goes a long way, and it's the cake underneath that satisfies you and makes you feel full and like you actually ate something of substance. Nobody wants a cake that's all frosting. For that matter, nobody wants a cake that's just the baked cake part found beneath the frosting, either.....any good film (and any good story) has a good balance of both.

Justify Your Villains

2011-07-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

You should always approach your antagonists (or villains, or whatever you want to call them - basically the forces in opposition to your protagonist, or hero) in the same way you do your heroes: you should understand their motives and what they want should make sense. They way they go about trying to get what they want ought to make sense as well.

A film is so much more powerful and compelling if what the antagonist wants is in direct opposition to the what the protagonist wants. In other words: there's no way they can both get what they want. Only one can succeed.

But too many films just have a villain opposing the hero for the sole reason of creating conflict in the story, and if you really dissect the film and try to figure out the logic of the villain's plan, there is none.

I'm not a big fan of movies where the antagonist is just "evil" and wants to "control the world". As much as there are people in the world who crave unlimited power and money, they always have a specific reason why they turned out that way, and they always have a very specific overall goal they're heading for. But usually in movies where the villain "wants to take over the world" there's no thought put into making them like their real-life counterparts. I find it much more interesting and compelling when the villain is a rational person who feels they have every right to get what they are trying to get, no matter how outlandish their desires are. Because it's more true to the way people are: nobody walks around thinking "I'm evil, and I love being evil, how am I going to mess up the world today?" People are great at justifying and rationalizing their own actions so that they're the hero of their own lives and everything that they do is reasonable and even honorable from their point of view. People are really good at talking themselves into thinking they "deserve" to have pretty much whatever they want. People are even good at convincing themselves that when they do selfish things, they're actually doing them to help other people. People are endlessly fascinating and have an amazing capacity to talk themselves into believing things they really want to believe.

SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT from this point on...

Mother Gothel in "Tangled" is a good example to illustrate this point. At the beginning of the movie, she found a magical flower in the middle of a forest that kept her young. When it was stolen from her, she felt justified in stealing it back from the people that had stolen it from her. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? .

She was a tricky character to work on, when it came to motivation. There were versions of the story when her "ownership" of the flower was much more legitimate. In early versions of the movie that we storyboarded, she actually owned the flower and kept it in her garden, behind a wall of her house (which she had built around the flower when she first found it hundreds of years ago). In that version, everyone knew about the magical flower. The King, when his pregnant wife fell ill, came begging for help in curing his sick wife. He offered Gothel anything for the flower, or even a piece of the flower, but being selfish, she refused him.

The King walked away empty handed and heartbroken. Unbeknownst to the King, later one of his men broke into Gothel's garden and stole the flower. The King used it to heal his sick wife, and the baby is born.

In retrospect, this may seem like a silly thing to have tried out. You don't like the King much for using a flower that was stolen, even if it wasn't done explicitly on his orders. But we thought it might work and still enable the audience to see Gothel as the villain of the story, because her reaction to the theft of her flower is to kidnap the King and Queen's baby. Kidnapping a baby is so much worse of a crime than stealing a flower and we thought that would make her seem much more evil than the King (or his men) in the audience's eyes. Also, the King's motives for his theft seemed more altruistic: Gothel was using the flower to stay young and alive in an unnatural way, whereas the King wanted the flower to save an unborn innocent. So what the King was doing seemed ultimately more noble and honorable than what Gothel was up to. So we thought it might work, and the audience will still like the King and root against Gothel.

But when we screened that version of the movie in storyboard form for the studio, a lot of people had sympathy for Gothel and the fact that she was the victim of a theft, especially because the first crime - the one that started the whole thing - wasn't committed by her, it was committed against her. Many viewers sent us notes saying that they had so much sympathy for Gothel and they felt so bad for her having her property stolen that they never had any empathy for the King or Rapunzel. To them, Gothel was in the right and was, in some ways, the hero of the story, which was throwing everything off.

Although this wasn't what we intended, I wasn't totally discouraged by this happening to the audience; I liked that people had some understanding of Gothel's motives and some measure of sympathy for her, because it meant that we were creating a very real antagonist, with real humanity and with real reason for doing the awful things she was doing, and not just an evil witch who was doing horrible things for evil's sake. But at the same time the audience has to feel more for the King and Rapunzel than they do for Gothel, so we were going too far. We had to tip the scales somehow.

So we carefully adjusted things to make the King less complicit in a crime against Gothel. We took the flower out of her garden and put it out in the middle of the forest, where it can't be considered anyone's "property". Even though Gothel took pains to keep it hidden, when the villagers who are looking for it come upon it, we orchestrated events so that there's no sign that anyone has been using it. And we didn't have Gothel confront them or try to stop them from stealing it. So they couldn't have known that anyone else had ever discovered the flower. All that helped to make it feel less like a theft of private property, and just a case of people finding an herb growing wild in the forest and taking it home to use for medicinal purposes.

Also having all the guards and villagers go to look for it helped put over the point we were trying to make - instead of the King and his guards going to get it, if the whole kingdom goes to look for it, it feels like the entire population of the Kingdom loves their King and Queen and by extension the audience likes them and has empathy for them. They must be good rulers and kind to their people, after all, if their people are willing to go to all that trouble for them. So that helps in making the viewer root for them.

But there were always some people that felt that we were making Gothel too human and understandable in her motives. While the film was being made (and even after it was released) there were people that told me that they felt we should have made Gothel more of an "evil witch". They felt that Gothel should have not been nice to Rapunzel and not bothered to masquerade as the girl's mother. After all, they would say, shouldn't she just chain Rapunzel to the wall, throw her bread and water once in a while, and use the hair whenever she wants?

There are a few reasons why I don't think that was the way to go, and why we went the way we did.

First and foremost, that approach is very dark and unappealing. It basically becomes a "Saw" movie. We were already telling a story about a kidnapping and a girl locked in a prison for eighteen years. No matter how you handle it, that's a dark and terrifying concept, especially in a movie that we wanted to appeal to all ages. So we thought it would be more palatable to the audience to make the prison a "gilded cage" - a place where the surroundings are really nice and the girl has everything she could ever need. It becomes a nicer place to look at visually on screen, and makes Gothel smarter - she's given the girl everything she could ever want, hoping to keep the girl stuck there and never wanting to leave.

(Also it's interesting to note that it's true to the concept in the original fairy tale, where the evil fairy gave Rapunzel everything she ever wanted, including a magical wardrobe that created whatever dresses where in style at the moment).

We also considered that Gothel might relate to the girl in the same way that she related to the flower originally. In order to encourage flowers to grow, people make sure they have all the water, sunlight and nutrients they need. People even talk to and play music for flowers to help them grow.

If we had created a situation where Rapunzel is kept like a prisoner in a dark and horrible tower, then it's an entirely different movie. She would already be set in her mind to escape from the beginning - there's no internal struggle between whether she should go or not, which I think is emotional and entertaining. And in that type of scenario, when she gets her chance to escape her imprisonment, she will run and never look back. There's not a lot of emotion to that type of movie - it's more like a prison escape story - and that's not the movie we wanted to make. Also our approach made our characters a lot smarter, in my mind: Gothel knows any normal person will have questions about the outside world and want to see it at some point. So why not create a wonderful home that's comfortable and will be that much harder to leave? And when the real world isn't as nice, won't Rapunzel be more likely to want to return? Also, we wanted Gothel to always be undercutting the girl's confidence in subtle ways, and filling her with fear about the world, so that she's doing all she can to keep the girl in the tower while appearing to be a nice, caring mother who's concerned for her daughter's well-being.

We wanted Rapunzel to be a very smart person, first and foremost. If her home had seemed like as prison in any way we figured she would have run away at the first opportunity, or else she would have seemed pretty dumb. The same thing if her mother had been mean to her constantly...a smart person would run from that and never look back. So we thought it would be better, more interesting (and more appealing to watch) if Gothel pretends to love the girl, but in reality she doesn't care at all about her and everything Gothel is doing is meant to keep the girl right where she is.

Anyway, the point being that I much prefer to have villains (as well as heroes) that are grounded in reality and remind of us the people we meet and read about in the news every day: people with real motivation for what they do and not some cartoony unrealistic plot to take over the world. If you can make your antagonists seem like real people who have been pushed a bit too far by their sense that they've been wronged, or convinced themselves that they deserve something, and are going just a bit over the line in their pursuit of what they feel they are owed, you can create a great memorable villain that feels real, and grounded, and all the more scary because they remind us of real people that actually do that kind of thing in our world every day.

Two Sides of an Argument

2011-07-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

I was watching "High Noon" the other day and it reminded me of a concept that people don't talk about very often.

Many times a good film presents two sides of an argument and the film's hero is caught between the two viewpoints, trying to navigate their way through and choose between the two competing philosophies.

"High Noon" (SPOILER ALERT) starts with the Sheriff of a small western town (Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper) getting married to Grace Kelly on a Sunday morning. She's a Quaker (a religion that, at least as the movie explains it, prohibits violence against others) so Will is going to "hang up his guns", give up being a lawman and move away to another town to open a store. The town's new sheriff is set to arrive tomorrow.

However, just at that moment, three criminals ride into town and go to the train station to wait for the noon train to arrive. It turns out that they are the gang mates of Frank Miller, a notorious criminal who used to run the town until Will Kane cleaned up the town and sent Frank to prison. Frank was supposed to be hanged, but was pardoned instead. Now he's headed back to town on the train (set to arrive at noon, hence the film's title) to take his revenge on Kane for sending him to jail.

So Will has about an hour and a half before the train arrives and the four gunman ride into town to kill him. He's caught between two bad choices (which brings to mind the old expression "caught between the horns of a dilemma").

On the one hand, he could ride out of town with his wife (which is what she wants him to do). But Will can't bring himself to do that, because he knows that the gunmen will chase him wherever he goes, and he'd rather fight them here, in town, where he knows the townspeople. Will figures the townspeople will give him a hand in his fight.

The downside of this choice is that his wife has made him promise never to use violence again (because of her strongly held religious beliefs) and she threatens to leave him if he doesn't go away with her immediately.

Against her wishes, he chooses to stay. But as he tries to gather townspeople to help him defend the town, he has more trouble than expected. The townspeople are terrified of the Miller gang, and they know Miller's vendetta is against Kane. Why should they put their lives on the line when this is Kane's problem? When Kane asks them to help, they encourage him to run (so they can have a clear conscience) and they ask him questions he can't answer, like "If I get gunned down in this fight, who will take care of my wife? My kids?"

So what gives the film its powerful intensity is this tension between different points of view (and the tangible, pressing deadline of the arrival of the noon train). The brilliance of the film is that it gives equal weight to both sides - Will has really good reasons why he's convinced he has to stay and fight, his wife has good reasons why she won't stay if he does, and the townspeople have good reasons why they can't really help him and why he should run away.

The key is that you have to present both sides as honestly and attractively as you can. That way, it's very hard for your character to choose between them and this creates a lot of conflict, tension and emotion.

This is where many films fall down (in my opinion): they make one side obviously "good" and one side obviously "evil", so that there's no real tension about which way the hero will jump. You know they'll never pick the "evil" path so you're just waiting for the hero to figure out what the audience already knows.

To really make your hero caught between "the horns of a dilemma", the two sides should seem equally valid possible choices for your hero.

"Toy Story 2" is an animated film that does it very well. Woody is caught between the choice of going back to be with Andy until he gets too old to play with Woody anymore, and then facing an uncertain future, or going to be preserved in a Museum forever, but never being played with again.

Even when making a film that's a fairy tale, or one that is set in the past, I think it's really important to make the choices in the movie ones that are universal and relateable to everyone and reflect problems and issues faced by all people, not just people who lived in the past (or princes and princesses, for that matter).

As we were making "Tangled", I always saw the two viewpoints that Rapunzel had to choose between as either staying at home with her Mother, where life is safe and predictable, or going out into the world and making her own way, where she runs the risk of being hurt and having her heart broken.

Both are valid viewpoints and you see people who have to choose between those two options every day. It's one of the biggest choices we face in life.

Anyway, the point is: as the film maker, you have to look at both sides and make them as valid as you can for your hero. The goal is to make the audience sit on the edge of their seat, stressed about which one the hero will pick, wondering which way the hero will jump. If you do it right, they'll be fascinated by watching it all unfold, but relieved that it's your characters (and not them) having to make the excruciating choice.

Detailed Areas vs. Blank Areas

2011-06-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

I have sometimes heard people say that they like certain artists because those artists cover their drawings with lots of detail. There' nothing wrong with that opinion, taste is totally subjective and I don't believe there's a "right and wrong" with art. Personally I tend to disagree with the idea that blanket detail is a good thing, though, because I think smart artists make choices....and covering everything evenly with detail is not really making a choice.

It seems that as a general rule, contrast is a key to creating works of art that are interesting to look at, and of course a contrast is created when you have blank spaces against areas of detail, as opposed to a piece of art that is all detail, or a piece that is all blank open areas.

I always hate to pick on artists, especially really good ones, and it always gets me hate mail, but as an example of what I mean, sometimes I feel the great Jack Davis uses too much detail. At least for my taste.

If it wasn't for the colors applied to this drawing, you wouldn't know where to look. The level of detail is really high (and evenly distributed) on every inch of the piece.

I can only imagine that the reason some people love a high level of detail is that some people like to look at a drawing and really spend some time with it, absorbing every detail and finding little jokes hidden by the artist. Personally, I don't. I really like art that makes a strong statement and one is which each area has an order of importance...I like it when an artist is clear about where to look first, and then where your eye should go secondarily, etc. I like it when artists make strong choices and direct your eye through their choices. To me, this Davis cover below is a mess. The values and levels of detail are all the same.

Here's a much better Jack Davis, in my opinion. The figure in the foreground has the most detail and the most black-on-white contrast, so my eye goes there first. Then the figure at the top left has the second highest level of detail and some black-on-white, but less than the central character. The rest of the piece has no areas of black-on-white and has thinner line work so it doesn't draw your eye until you've seen the other two more important figures that tell the story. The pile of bodies and street scene are just background that contribute to the idea, but don't overwhelm the more important figures.

That last piece leads nicely into another thought about detail...detail can be very helpful at getting your viewer to look where you want them to look.

It's always a challenge to get the viewer's eye to go to the part of a drawing (or painting) that is exactly where we want them to look. And putting detail where you want to attract the eye is a good, foolproof trick. And so, for that to work, the areas where you don't want the audience to look need to be blank, or at least have less detail than the areas where you want them to look.

Detail can also be helpful for indicating scale....things with a lot of detail tend to look bigger, if they're placed next to objects with less detail for contrast.

Detail also makes things seem closer to the viewer. Blank areas, by contrast, feel farther away.

Another thing I've heard people say is that drawings look more "realistic" to them when there's more detail on every bit of the drawing...but again, I don't see it that way. I've often read that our eyes don't even work that way. When we look at things in real life, our eyes (supposedly) see whatever we're focusing on in great detail, but the rest of our field of vision is slightly blurred and out of focus (and it increases more on the edges of our vision). If we saw everything in stark detail all the time we'd probably have a headache all the time (our eyes seem to work like our ears - we filter out most of the sound we hear and just focus on what's important).

To me, what makes a drawing look "realistic" to me has more to do with proportions. Personally I always found, for example, Milt Caniff's drawings to be very "realistic" because the proportions are pretty "straight": not only are the figures a realistic height, but the features of the face are realistically small, not really caricatured (although he does have some cartoonier characters from time to time). I like Caniff's level of detail, it feels right and not like he's trying to overdo it in an attempt to be "realistic". He lets the proportions do that for him. Also, he uses silhouette in a smart way to minimize areas of detail. It feels like he's making choices and using design to caricature reality, not try to capture it verbatim.

Usually when artists draw pretty girls they don't put a lot of detail on their faces to keep them looking young and pretty. Too many lines on the face can start to read like wrinkles, or blemishes, or sweat, etc. So usually it's proportions that artists have to use to get that "realistic" feeling.

In this Bernet drawing below, you can see the difference between how many lines he uses on the men's faces and how many he uses on the girl's: hers has much less detail. But he uses a lot of lines on her hair and clothes to balance it out and so they both feel like they belong in the same drawing.

These Alex Toth pages have a great balance of blank black areas, blank white areas and areas of controlled detail. As an overall design, they're very easy to follow and pleasing to the eye because they have a good balance of blank areas and detailed areas.

Some more good examples, by Quentin Blake and N.C. Wyeth.

Design and Drawing: Simple vs. Complex

2011-05-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

I was looking at a news story about this Frank Miller drawing from "The Dark Knight". It just sold for a record amount of money.

If you click on this thumbnail you can see a giant version of the panel.

The first thing that struck me when I glanced at it was the area of Robin's cape. It's so simply drawn - just an empty and interesting shape. There's no interior lines defining the fabric of her cape, which at first glance, might seem strange - especially when you look at all the lines on the inside of Batman's cape.

I know when I first started drawing, I learned how to draw things and then always drew them the same way each time...I struggled so much with learning anatomy and the overwhelming task of learning how to draw everything that if I found a way to draw something that worked, I stuck with it whenever I could.

When I first started drawing I read everything I could about how things were built and put together (especially the human body). When I went to life drawing I worked hard to draw everything so it was "put together right".

These are great things to work on and very important for making a good drawing. But there are other things that go into making a good drawing, and using design principles as you draw is very important. Once you start down the path of doing anything visual - anything at all - design comes into play, whether the person creating the visual is aware of it or not. So the best artists keep design elements in mind and use them to their advantage at all times.

Life drawing by Glen Keane. A good example that a knowledge of anatomy plus use of design elements to create a beautiful drawing, instead of just a record of what's in front of you.

So when I looked at the Dark Knight illustration, the blank cape seemed like a really good example of (what I like to think of as) simple vs. complex.

I'm sure there's a better name for it, but that's how I think of it.

So, logically, you might think Frank Miller would fill in lines in the cape so that it looked just like Batman's cape. Logically, isn't it strange that two capes within the same drawing - presumably even made of the same material - would look pretty much the same and have the same line treatment? (These are the type of things I used to wonder all the time when I first started drawing). But it makes a lot of sense if you look at it with design in mind - you always want to lay simple areas next to complex ones.

In other words, put areas with a lot more detail next to areas with a lot less detail.

In the Frank Miller drawing, he uses lots of detail on Batman and Robin's forms to describe them. Therefore, since the cape overlaps Batman, it looks far better to have it create a clean swath of blank area laid over his areas of detail. It works really well to create the illusion that it's really overlapping his forms and that there's a three-dimensional, solid figure lying behind that cape.

Also, detail tends to draw our eye to it so Miller kept the detail isolated to the more important and interesting areas...the places he wanted your eyes to be attracted and to linger.

And then, since Batman's cape overlaps an empty night sky, it would have made no sense to keep his cape blank and free of interior lines. So Miller laid in some lines there to describe the form (and keep from having an empty space overlapping an empty space....that wouldn't be interesting and creates no sense of depth).

There's another good example of this in the background. Where the background skyscraper overlaps the skyscraper behind it in the distance, he left little blank "cushions" of white like a halo around the foreground skyscraper, so he wouldn't be creating a complicated area of detail right next to another. The little blank areas create a little breathing room between the two areas of detail.

Like most aspects of design, this concept is absurdly obvious. It wouldn't make any sense to put two complicated areas next to each other - that would be a confusing mess. It would be hard to tell where one area ended and the other began. For example, compare the two versions of the same sketch below:

You can see how the drawing with detail on every inch of the drawing is a mess and creates a ton of visual confusion.

Likewise, putting two blank areas next to each other is pretty meaningless. Neither space has more emphasis or weight and there's no statement being made. A page from a coloring book is a good example of why this looks pretty uninteresting.

Some more examples of simple vs. complex used well. Rembrandt:

Bill Watterson uses alternating areas of detail and empty space to suggest depth in the bottom panel:

Mignola (using a similar background treatment):

Jordi Bernet:

Blank doesn't always meant white...in this Bernet drawing, he uses both white and black shapes for his empty spaces. Throwing things into silhouette is a great way to minimize excessive detail and simplify your composition (the Mignola drawing above does this well too).

And here's a look at the final color version of the Frank Miller drawing. There's a subtle color variation within Robin's yellow cape, to keep it from becoming a flat lifeless shape, but not enough contrast to kill Miller's original concept of it as an empty space within the composition.

A Few More Tips for Drawing Ages

2011-04-25T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here are five drawings of the same character, using a few different factors to create a feeling of aging.

It's a generic, uninteresting design, but that's good for our purposes...it's easier to see how each little change makes a difference, I think.

So here are the factors I used to change the appearance of each drawing:

1. The size and angularity of the neck and shoulders: Babies start out with thick necks, but then by the time we're 5 or 6 our necks seem to look pretty skinny (at least I've found it seems to look that way in drawings). Our shoulders, obviously, start out small and get broader and broader as we get older (this is more apparent in men than in women, of course). Also I made a conscious effort to make his shoulders start out rounded and get more angular as he ages. If I'd kept going, drawing this guy into old age, I would have made the shoulders start to shrink (and get more rounded again) as he aged.

2. The relation of the mouth to the chin: I simply made the mouth get further away from the chin as he ages, to give a feeling of a jaw that develops as he gets older. Also I made the jawline stronger and more angular with each successive age.

3. The amount of upturn in the nose: I made it turned up more in the younger drawings, and made it less so over time.

4. The size of the forehead: We have a bigger forehead when we're young, and it diminishes proportionally over time.

5. The chubbiness of the cheeks: most of us have less fat in our cheeks as we age.

These aren't the best drawings, admittedly, but hopefully all this makes sense and people will find it helpful. I don't have much experience at drawing people at different ages and it's something I'm trying to get better at doing.

When I was a younger artist, I always assumed that great artists with lots of experience sat down and told young artists just starting out how to do things like draw people of different ages. It's funny, that's not at all how things work and I can't say I've ever been told any of this stuff, it's all just observations I've made (and of course I've appreciated the other stuff people have written down in other drawing books...see below). If you're lucky enough to have been given some other pearls of wisdom (or observed other things you'd like to share), by all means leave us a comment and let us all know!

"How to Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon

2011-04-22T21:04:00.000-07:00

I know, I'm late to the party, and it's already viral and stuff, but for those who haven't seen it yet, here's Austin Kleon's post about being an artist. A great read, and perfect inspiration for me and where I'm at right now, artistically. Check it out if you're so inclined.

"Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." - Joshua Reynolds

Scale

2011-04-19T22:15:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post on a basic concept that I sometimes see people forget (and I have been known to forget too).

Whenever you're drawing an environment or a layout, it can be easy to forget to give the viewer a sense of scale. If your drawing or painting doesn't contain any people, animals, or other objects that have a consistent size, it can be very confusing as to how big or small the spaces and elements are in your artwork.

This is the Great Hall in the Palace of Westminster in London. In this photo, it's very hard to tell just how big the space is.

For several reasons, this isn't the best example...after all, when we see a photo like this we usually assume it was taken at typical human height (somewhere between 5 or 6 feet) so it's not all that ambiguous. But hopefully you get my overall point. It's hard to tell from the photo above just how big or small this space is.

The problem can be compounded by the fact that many times when artists paint imaginary scenes to explore how an imaginary place might look, they put the camera up high so we can see more of the landscape. This can add further confusion because we don't have the vantage point of being about 5 - 6 feet off the ground (which is how we normally view the world every day, of course). Once we're up high looking down on a landscape it can start to feel like we're looking down at a toy landscape or a model train layout or something. Scale gets even more muddled.

So here are two historic paintings of the Great Hall at the Palace of Westminster. Compare them to the photo above (which lacks people or any other scale clue). Notice how the addition of people instantly gives the space context. You immediately know how large the space is because we all know exactly how tall people are so they make a great yardstick for our eyes.

Didn't the space look smaller in the photo at top?

So really this is just a reminder to always include some type of object to give the viewer a sense of scale. It's a simple thing...but very easy to forget. And the more fantastic and otherworldly the landscape, the more important it is.

Many things come in a standard shape and size that can help to give a painting scale; people (obviously), animals, cars, houses, airplanes, boats (anything from sailboats to cruise ships), trees, etc.

Sometime I'll take some paintings and Photoshop out the elements that give it scale to illustrate this further...but right now hopefully you find this reminder helpful!

Thoughts On Drawing Different Ages (part two)

2011-03-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

A few more things I find useful to keep in mind when you're trying to draw characters at different ages.

Babies have a very distinctive profile, particularly the way their nose turns up and the way the upper lip sticks out and up. The reason our noses stick up this way when we're born is so we can breastfeed and still breathe (or so I read somewhere). So these two qualities tend to give any character a more youthful quality, and are helpful features to emphasize when you're drawing people and you want them to look young.

As we all know, full lips and an upturned nose are considered classic beautiful attributes on women. I assume it's because (in our minds) those things equate youthfulness. It seems to me that many people (especially females) retain the upturned nose and full lips well into their teens and even into their twenties, thirties and beyond, depending on the genetics of the person.

There seems to be some debate about whether our noses and ears continue to grow as we age. Read both opinions for yourself here and here.

The overall consensus seems to be that, yes, our noses and ears (which are cartilage) keep growing our whole lives (unlike bones, which stop at some point).

So drawing larger ears and noses definitely make a character look older.

Also, gravity begins to have an effect on our noses as well. At some point, the upturned nose begins to droop downward and the upturned cute nose disappears, replaced by the lower hanging, larger nose of an adult or older person.

Another thing that happens as we age is that our lips pull inward and lose their plumpness. They don't jut out so far anymore. If anything, the opposite happens, and the line of our mouth becomes more concave...

...particularly as we lose teeth and there's nothing to push them outwards anymore. And we lose that baby fat that made our cheeks so chubby. We can begin to look gaunt, with our cheeks sucking in instead of expanding out like they did when we were younger. They can sink in so far that you can see the cheekbones and other planes of the skull underneath.

All images from corbis.com

Resources for Drawing Different Ages

2011-03-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

One thing I always find tricky is drawing people at different ages. So I've collected a few resources here - selected pages from books about the subject - and let me know if you are aware of any other good ones I've missed.

Also in a future post I will jot down a few I have observed myself over the years and that I find helpful.

WARNING - there are drawings of naked people (at different ages) below! If you are offended by such things, you've been warned...

This one is from The Famous Artists Course and it's a good breakdown of how the head changes at different ages.

This page is from Andrew Loomis's "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth".

And here's another page from Loomis's book where he talks specifically about baby heads.

These are from "Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist" by Stephen Rogers Peck.

Both Loomis and Peck make the point that the "center line" (where the midpoint of our bodies lies) changes as we grow older. Loomis represents it in his drawing with a cross at the midpoint; in Peck's drawings it is represented by a dotted line.

Here's one by Peck that's a map to where wrinkles form.

Popularity and Critical Approval

2011-03-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

I don't know anything about Art History, but I always find it interesting to read about how artists were popular (or unpopular) during their lifetimes, and how many of them are more (or less) popular today than they were in their lifetimes. I guess I find it comforting to know that we never really have a sense, while we're alive, of whether the work we are doing is truly good work that will stand the test of time or poor work that will fail to connect with future generations. I find it freeing because it reminds me that we should, above all, rely on our own instincts to tell us when our work is good and what we could do to improve our work.

My favorite quote about being an artist is what Bo Bartlett, a friend of Andrew Wyeth, once said was Wyeth's opinion on criticism:

"People only make you swerve. I won’t show anybody anything I’m working on. If they hate it, it’s a bad thing, and if they like it, it’s a bad thing. An artist has to be ingrown to be any good."

Robert Fawcett is one of my favorite illustrators of the 40s and 50s and I was glad to see his work recently collected in a book. As I was reading through it, I came across the passage below and it reminded me, once again, how difficult it can be for us to tell how our work will be regarded by our audience, and how more difficult still it is to know how history will judge our work. So we might as well work to please ourselves. After all, that's hard enough.

[Fawcett] urged young artists not to satisfy popular taste. "Young illustrators will not find guidance by studying the currently popular. The popular is usually just on its way out...

Contrast Fawcett's warning with this opposite advice offered by the successful and prosperous Jon Whitcomb, whose pictures were wildly popular: "I don't think of myself as an artist. I'm a manufacturer, supplying something editors want to buy. Somewhere I discovered what these people want and through a fortunate chain of circumstances I find myself able to produce it." To guide young artists who wished to follow in his footsteps, Whitcomb urged young artist to come up with a gimmick, saying "If you can come up with a new gimmick, clients are waiting for it". The best way to achieve that, according to Whitcomb, was to focus on the latest trends: "You have to guess the trend that's coming up. Since magazines work four to six months ahead of publication, anything can happen to public taste between the time you turn in your illustration and when the magazine hits the newsstands. You try to spot future trends by looking at what is popular in the magazines."

Whitcomb's glamorous illustrations appeared on the cover of Collier's while Fawcett's only illustrated the stories inside. Whitcomb earned more money n became something of a celebrity; his face was featured in cigarette advertisements and he was called upon to judge beauty contests. Yet, Fawcett seemed quite comfortable with the path he had chosen. His illustrations were not designed to grab the attention of the casual viewer from a crowded magazine rack. He insisted that an excellent picture is "Much more likely to be characterized by the restraint of self-confidence. The artist who has resources does not need to announce this fact from the housetops - it will be apparent." Fawcett urged young artists to avoid fashionable gimmicks and hold fast to what their own eyes and artistic integrity told them: "To anyone for whom drawing is a passion, and whose eyes are constantly searching and evaluating even when he has no pencil in hand - to that man tricks and techniques have no appeal...he seems them for the superficialities they are...[I]f we had been content...polishing simple figure studies they might now be blinding in their degree of finish, dazzling as exercises of virtuosity, but we ourselves would be neatly trapped in that comfortable corner from which so many students fail to find the exit.

There could be little doubt which types of illustrators Fawcett was talking about.

As the 1950s ended, so did the demand for Whitcomb's stylized glamour girls and Whitcomb exited the stage.

Five Years

2011-03-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

It just hit me that, as of today, I've been writing this blog for five years.

There have been 314 posts and there are 147 that I've written (or partially written) but not published for whatever reason.

More to come soon.....thanks for reading.

The Animation Guild Blog Interview with Ed Gombert

2011-02-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

Steve Hulett did a great audio interview with Story artist Ed Gombert that's posted on The Animation Guild website. Ed is very honest and direct and gives a very good sense of what it's actually like to work as a Story Artist. It can be downloaded in two parts, part one is here and part two is here.

It's all great stuff, but in particular I liked hearing about what he learned working with legendary Disney animator Frank Thomas, and how, more than anything, Frank placed an emphasis on artists thinking for themselves and not looking to other people to supply answers for them and tell them what to do. I think that's an essential attribute for any successful artist. One of the biggest challenges of working in a big animation studio on a project with hundreds of other artists is to make your work dovetail with and compliment the work of all those other artists, without copying what they're doing or following their direction blindly and/or literally.

Walt Disney famously said that "Artists are a dime a dozen". The way Joe Grant used to explain that quote was that Walt was saying that there are an abundance of people who can produce pretty pictures. But the really useful artists are much rarer, and they are the ones who can think. These are the ones who can produce artwork that has character and personality to it and can use their talents to tell a story well.

Anyway, definitely give it a listen.

The Three Magic Questions

2011-02-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

If you've ever spent any time reading this blog before, you know I basically spend most of my time writing about two disciplines: drawing (and/or painting, etc) and story telling. The older I get and the more time I spend working at improving at these two things, the more things I think they have in common.

Both are incredibly difficult and both are constantly humbling. In order to do well at either you need to fail constantly and learn from each failure. Every story is different and every drawing is different.

In both areas, people are constantly looking for easy answers, formulas and short cuts.

And in both areas there are none to be had. And trying to find them will lead to cliched and unsatisfying drawings and stories.

The only way I know for sure to make good drawings or good stories is to constantly work at them and rework them and rework them and rework them and rework them until they are as good as you can make them. That's why good stories and good drawings are rare and both are things of great value. Because very few people have the patience, discipline and humility to create great ones.

Here is some simple advice about storytelling from David Mamet's "Bambi vs. Godzilla". He makes the point that storytelling isn't really complicated but it's very hard to do.

This chapter is entitled "Secret Bonus Chapter: The Three Magic Questions". And I have found that storyboarding is, in many ways, constantly answering these three questions in every panel. Sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I mean it. This is the single greatest thing I have ever read about writing and I con only say that, based on my twenty years of storyboarding, all that he says is absolutely true. Anyway, enjoy:

Secret Bonus Chapter: The Three Magic Questions

Here is the long-lost secret of the Incas. Anyone who wants to know how to write drama must learn to apply these questions to to all difficulties. It is not only unnecessary but also impossible to know the answers before setting out on the individual project in question, as there are no stock answers.

The secret of the Incas, then, is like the Torah, beloved of my people, the Jews. We read the Torah, the five books of Moses, every year, in the same order. Every year the meaning of the Torah changes, though the text remains unchanged.

As the writer changes, year to year, his or her perceptions and interests change. At twenty he is interested only in sex, at thirty in sex and money, at forty in money and sex, at sixty in money and validation, et cetera.

No one can write drama without being immersed in the drama. Here's what that means: the writer will and must go through exactly the same process as the antagonist (for what is the antagonist but a creation of the writer?).

The writer may choose to supply stock, genre, or predictable answers to the magic questions, and the drama will be predictable and boring. The writer will have saved himself the agony of indecision, self-doubt - of work, in short - and so, of course, will the protagonist. The audience will view this pseudo-drama much as the graduate views a liberal arts education: "I don't think anything happened, but I'm told I went to college, so, perhaps, I somehow got an education".

All right, you may complain, get to the fairy dust portion of the entertainment and vouchsafe to me the secret of the Incas.

Here it is.

The filmed drama (as any drama) is a succession of scenes. Each scene must end so that the hero is thwarted in pursuit of his goal - so that he, as discussed elsewhere, is forced to go on to the next scene to get what he wants.

If he is forced, the audience, watching his progress, wonders with him, how he will fare in the upcoming scene, as the film is essentially a progression of scenes. To write a successful scene, one must stringently apply and stringently answer the following three questions:

1. Who wants what from whom?
2. What happens if they don't get it?
3. Why now?

That's it. As a writer, your yetzer ha'ra (evil inclination) will do everything in its vast power to dissuade you from asking these questions of your work. You will tell yourself the questions are irrelevant as the scene is "interesting," "meaningful," "revelatory of character," "deeply felt'" and so on; all of these are synonyms for "it stinks on ice".

You may be able to dissuade your yetzer ha'ra by insisting that you were and are a viewer before you were a writer, and that as a writer, these three questions are all you want to know of a scene. (You come late to a film and ask your friend there before you, "What's going on? Who is this guy? What does he want?" and your friend will, as a good dramaturge, explain that the subject of your inquiry (the hero) is the vice president of Bolivia, and he wants to determine where his boss is, as the bad guys are going to ambush him, and if he, our hero vice president, does not extract the info from the reluctant mistress, whom the president has just thrown over, the bad guys will kill his boss and bring down the country.)

1. Who wants what from whom?
2. What happens if they don't get it?
3. Why now?

As one becomes more adept in the use of these invaluable ancient tools, one may, in fact, extend their utility to the level of the actual spoken line and ask of the speech, no doubt beginning, "Jim, when I was young I had a puppy...." "Wait a second, how does this speech help Hernando find out where his boss, the president of Bolivia, is?" And you may, then, be so happy - not with the process but with the results of your assiduous application of these magic questions - that finding the puppy speech wanting in their light, you will throw it to the floor and out of the scene it was just about to ruin.

These magic questions and their worth are not known to any script reader, executive, or producer. They are known and used by few writers. They are, however, part of the unconscious and perpetual understanding of that group who will be judging you and by whose say-so your work will stand or fall: the audience.

A Picture is Worth...Well, You Know

2011-02-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

One of the most basic (and most important precepts) about film making is that the story most be told entirely by the visuals. Meaning that you should be able to watch a movie with the sound turned off and still get everything that's happening on screen and understand the whole film. The great film makers of the past knew this and that's what made their films so great.

Like any basic and irrefutable truth, I find that people often reject it and question why it's important. And it's always hard to articulate why it's important because (to me) the answer is obvious.

People will say "well, we're making a movie with sound. We have dialogue at our disposal. We can just use words to convey our meaning".

What I would answer is that whoever said "A picture is worth a thousand words" had it right.

The problem with words are that words can be cheap and disposable. We don't always pay them a lot of heed. When you're talking to people in your everyday life, do you always catch every single word they say? No, we're frequently distracted by our own thoughts and we don't catch 100% of what people say. The same is true of movies, and if the audience misses a bit of dialogue because the person behind them is coughing or opening a noisy bag of Skittles, you don't want them to be lost for the rest of the movie.

Also words aren't always the truth. When we listen to people talk in real life we run it through our filter, trying to figure out what is the underlying truth about the words they are sharing with us. We know that sometimes people lie to us, and sometimes they are telling the truth from their point of view but they may not know the whole story. There are a million reasons why their words may not be truthful - deliberately and otherwise - but the point is that we never take what people say as the absolute truth because we know it's not.

On the other hand, visuals don't lie. With a picture what you see is what you get.

Sometimes film makers will lie to us with their visuals, based on showing us a false image, or leaving out a key image that makes us interpret the ones before and after it differently, and then revealing the truth to us later with an additional image. And that's always more powerful than just finding out someone used false words with us.

We can remember an image that we saw with perfect clarity for the rest of our lives. But how often do we remember exactly what someone said?

So when I try to explain this concept to people I just say that a story that's told through images has a deep, visceral impact on the psyche of the people watching it because images operate on a much deeper level than words. Obviously, the best movies use both in concert to convey their story. But images are always, always, always more powerful and supercede what the dialogue is telling us.

The biggest reason why people seem to reject the wisdom of this concept is that - like most basic concepts - it's really hard to do. It requires discipline, knowledge and hard work to tell a story through images. And in my experience people will (ironically) go to great lengths to avoid having to use discipline, knowledge and hard work.

Usually if I've gotten this far in my explanation they're still not convinced. So maybe the words of author David Mamet will convince you, instead. From "Bambi vs. Godzilla", page 152:

"The perfect film is the silent film, just as the perfect sequence is the silent sequence. Dialogue is inferior to picture in telling a film story. A picture, first, as we know, is worth a thousand words; the juxtaposition of pictures is geometrically more effective. If a director or writer wants to find out if a scene works, he may remove the dialogue and see if he can still communicate the idea to the audience.

Ancient theological wisdom put it thus: 'Preach Christ constantly - use words if you must.'"

To be honest I'm not really a fan of Mamet's films, but he's written several great books on film and acting that I definitely recommend.

Bill Peet's "Mickey Mouse Club" Articles

2011-02-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

Back in the 50s, Disney published called "Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club Magazine". Disney story artist Bill Peet wrote and illustrated these articles about the history of train travel for the magazine.

They are interesting because they may be the first published version of his writing, because they were published in 1957 and his first children's book was released in 1959.

Thumbnailing from Movies

2011-01-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

One of the best tools for learning all about cutting and staging film is to draw thumbnails while watching a section of a film.

So whenever I do this I put a DVD into my computer (or DVD player) and then "step through" a sequence or section of a film. I usually have a reason why I've picked that particular clip, and it usually relates to something I'm working on.

Then I'll draw a small thumbnail to represent each scene. If it's a short scene I'll usually pick a "key" frame from the scene - an image that best describes what the scene is about. Or is it's a long scene, I'll draw more images - whatever is necessary to get the idea of what the director has done with the staging and the camera work (if there is any).

Studying film this way forces you to really grasp what is happening in minute detail. Having to "transcribe" what is happening onto paper forces you to really notice every little thing about each scene, and you can learn a lot more about filmmaking than you can if you spent the same amount of time just watching films.

Recently I picked something rather unusual to thumbnail - this trailer from the video game "Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood". I picked it for a couple of reasons - I'm working on an action scene at work (and this is defintiely full of action), and also because it's in a widescreen ratio instead of the regular screen ratio I'm more used to working in (as is the film I'm working on). So I was hoping to get some inspiration for staging dramatic action as well as some inspiration in composing shots for a widescreen format.

Now usually I would never thumbnail from a trailer because normally trailers aren't continuity....they're snippets from all over the film, not meant to work in context with each other. But this is different...this trailer is built like a piece of film and all the scenes are in continuity. First off, I have to say that it's done in a really over-dramatic style. It's super pushed, doing things I consider over-the-top....like, for example, the push in on the villain at 0:38 where he goes into slow motion (pretty cheesy!) and the moment where he draws his sword at 2:09 and then kisses it. At least I think he kissed it. His lips seemed to pucker a tiny bit. Anyway, again, pretty cheesy...but hey, that's just my opinion. I like it when people push the boundaries and go over-the-top, it helps you figure out where your own personal tastes lay, and makes you realize what you think is too much. Other than that, I really like the dynamic staging of this piece and I got a lot out of thumbnailing it.

For example, I really like how they don't over-explain a lot of things...you see guards falling down out of Ezio's path (Ezio is the assassin, the guy in white) but you don't really get a good look at exactly what's taking them out (you can see arrows in a few shots, but the filmmaker doesn't feel the need to make it hyper clear that they are being shot by arrows by an offscreen presence). I like that approach, and you clearly get the meaning of what's happening: they're being taken out by some unseen force, and I like the way it comes across visually: they seem to be falling out of Ezio's path through no effort of his own, which makes him seem almost God-like. That's a cool effect, I think. (the audio is used to explain most of those actions. If you watch it with the sound off, you'll see how little of the arrow impacts and sword cuts you actually see. Most of it is carried by the sound of swishing arrows, sword swishes and meaty impact sounds). When I board, I tend to have an impulse to over-explain everything so that the audience doesn't get confused. But sometimes the details aren't important, just the overall effect of what is happening. And the meaning at the end is very clear, when you see the other assassins come out and stand next to Ezio - clearly, they are his companions and they have been helping him all along. So even if, somehow, you were confused about who was taking out all those guards earlier, by this point, you'd get the idea.

Another thing: I think in animation we tend (at least I know I do) to think of shots that start, then an action begins, that action finishes and then you cut to the next shot where the next action begins. That way of thinking can be beneficial for animators because it gives them a scene with an entire action in it. It can be frustrating for animators to try and divide the same action over several different scenes. But I like how in this clip, the actions begin in one scene and then finish in the next shot (or the one after that), or that sometimes you never see the action actually finish, you move onto the next beat when it's clear that a beat is over. I like that, and when I was boarding my most recent assignment I tried to do that more. It creates more excitement, if you do it right. Then the rhythm of the cuts can be surprising and unexpected instead of plodding and predictable. But you have to do it judiciously.

Also the camera never stops moving in this clip, which can add a lot of excitement to a scene when it's done with restraint and reason, to compliment the action that's happening. Too many times people just move the camera to move it and the effect becomes tedious or makes you seasick. But I liked the restraint in this clip and I thought the camera was always moving in a way that added to the impact of each moment.

One more thing: for the most part, Ezio and his nemesis are placed in the center of the screen which gives them a place of power. In scenes where Ezio is not in the center, you don't see his face, or only parts of him, and he's usually bigger onscreen than anybody else. All of these things are great devices to make a character feel powerful on screen.

A couple more words of advice about doing this exercise:

Don't worry about doing perfect sketches. They're just for you, and it's just a learning tool. But don't just scribble them out, either, put enough into them that you are actually getting enough down that you are seeing the patterns and getting down how the staging and cutting is working. Be precise, but don't spend too much time on each individual drawing. You want to do them fast enough that you can see the cutting patterns over several scenes, and if you spend an hour making each sketch perfect, you won't ever get the feel of how several scenes are linking together in a row.

Pick good filmmakers, of course, and pick good scenes. At least in the beginning, stick with filmmakers that are known for preparing in advance and being meticulous about controlling what you see on screen. I would suggest directors like Hitchcock, Spielberg, Lucas, James Cameron, Kurosawa, etc. I spent many hours thumbnailing sections of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when I was first learning about boarding. The truck chase is a particular favorite of mine because there are many changes of screen direction at the beginning that are handled well.

Here are some from my recent session, if you're interested....this is about the first 2/3rds of it and admittedly they're not very beautiful to look at, but like I said, they were for my own benefit and not really to show anyone (check out the scribbled out mistakes). A grey marker is always helpful too for throwing in a bit of tone, but not necessary (and I didn't have one handy).

The important thing is to get something out of it and learn!

And one more piece of advice...if you're a student of film but not an artist; and you absolutely don't want to try to draw your way through a scene, try watching the clip without sound. this will allow you to focus on the visuals and concentrate on the cutting and staging without the distraction of the audio.

Lastly, for fun, here's Toby Turner's "literal" version, which is very funny. He thinks the villain is actually smelling his sword, which makes even less sense than kissing it. I think I see his lips puckering a tiny bit so I vote for kissing it. Either way, it's weird, right? Anyway, enjoy!

Story, in Fifteen Minutes

2011-01-08T11:11:00.000-08:00

So at work I volunteered to help a group of seventh graders with their animated films. They get two weeks (!) to make a thirty to ninety second film, and they asked me (and fellow board artist Raymond Persi) to sit with them and help them with their storyboards, as well as talk for fifteen minutes about the basics of story.

So how do you boil down "story" into fifteen minutes?!? Also I only had an hour or so to prepare. So here's what I said to them, some of you might find it interesting (but also familiar).

I boiled story down to three "C's" for them. The first C I talked about is "CLARITY".

This one is particularly important for them because they are working within a very small box, in both the length of their film and their "production schedule". When making a short film clarity is of the utmost importance because you don't have time to explain a lot. If you're trying to make a film about an exotic planet where all the rules are different from Earth, by the time you've acclimated the viewer to your world and explained all the rules, your film is over.

So I always suggest that short film directors look at TV commercials for inspiration as how to tell a thirty-second story clearly and succinctly. Great commercials are made with a ton of economy, discipline and smart choices. Also, many times they start in a very familiar situation so that the audience gets oriented quickly and knows exactly where we are....then you can take a leap into "the fantastic", if that's what you want to do, or turn the everyday on it's head for comedic effect.

These four Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee commercials are good examples (I only showed the first two to the students). There are some great commercials out there, and admittedly these aren't necessarily the most amazing mind-blowing examples, but then again I didn't want to show anything inappropriate to the seventh grade audience so I went for the safe subject matter.

Clarity is tougher than most people realize I think, even us "professionals" have a hard time with this. It's easy, once you've thought through your idea, to think that your drawings are explaining what's inside your head, but the viewer doesn't have the benefit of hearing your thoughts. The drawings (and eventually, the animation) have to carry it all. That's a very tough limitation, and you need to keep your "objective eye" s that you can step back and look at your work once in a while and see it the way fresh eyes will see it. Or find someone you trust and bounce it off them once in a while.

Okay, the next two "C's" are CHARACTER and CONFLICT. You've probably heard all this before, but it's all vitally important, and it's basically what we spend all our time talking about in the story room while we craft movies at Disney.

Basically, the "CHARACTERS" part means that you should always strive to create characters that are original, entertaining, appealing, and that the audience can empathize with...meaning that they like the characters and are willing to root for them to get what they want. Then the audience will care when your characters end up in....

...CONFLICT, which of course is the heart of all storytelling. Without conflict you don't really have a story. In general, the bigger the conflict, the more that is at stake in your movie, the bigger the odds against your characters, the more interesting the story.

So if you have characters that the audience is actually rooting for, and conflict that seems almost insurmountable that they have to resolve to get what they want, then you have a great story.

Also, one last thing: a great story is one that ends by resolving the conflict in an unexpected way that the audience doesn't see coming. But I don't know how to make that idea start with a "C" so I'll just tack it on.

Easy, right? Two weeks should be plenty of time, right?

In all seriousness, I had a great time working with the students and hopefully they will enjoy making their films and be happy with their end results. Whether a film takes two weeks or five years to make, the elements that make the film great remain basically the same.

Four-Legged Animal Anatomy (part one)

2010-12-29T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've never really talked much about animals so maybe I ought to start.

The first thing to think about when drawing animals is to think about why they're built the way they're built. This informs everything about how to draw them. It influences how they're put together and how much flexibility they have, all of which affects the drawing of them very much.

Animators at Disney frequently talk about the lectures of Dr. Stuart Sumida, who is an expert on animal anatomy. Unfortunately I've never heard Dr. Sumida speak, for the simple reason that story people are never invited to these type of lectures! Only animators (and riggers, who build the characters) seem to be invited to them.

But that's okay, there are a number of tremendous books about animal anatomy that contain the same type of information*.

Anyway, the reason we ended up riding around on horses for transportation is because of how they evolved. They are plant eaters and eating plants requires a lot of intestines to digest. Eating meat takes a lot less in the way of intestines so that's why cows and horses have those big giant bellies and cats and dogs don't. Horses and cows have to carry around all those guts. So in order to carry around all that weight, horses and cows have thick solid spines. That's why we can sit on their backs without snapping their spines!

Also, it's easier on us to ride them because of this reason. Those big heavy thick spines that horses (and similar animals) have don't have a lot of flexibility. When you look at a horse running, the spines stays relatively level and straight. That makes for a much smoother and comfier ride for the passenger.

Whereas animals like cats and dogs don't need to carry around those big piles of guts because it's a lot more efficient to digest meat. Also they have to hunt prey in order to eat. So they developed springier, lighter spines that help them crouch and pounce (in cats) and run fast to take down their prey (both cats and dogs).

If you compare the two running sequences you'll see how much up-and-down movement there is in the cat spine as opposed to the horse spine. Also the cat spine changes shape a lot more dramatically than the horse spine. Cats and dogs have spines that curl and uncurl (or squash and stretch if you prefer) as they run.

So whenever I see a fantasy painting or something like that were someone's riding a jaguar or a lion or something I wonder what that must be like...it must be a bumpy ride!

If you don't have a collection of Muybridge's photos of animal locomotion (both series above are from his work) you ought to get one. Much of what there is to know about animals can be gleaned from looking at how animals move and asking yourself why they move the way they do. This is far more valuable than any book about drawing animals can ever be. That's pretty much how I learned all that I know about animals and I'd say it's served me okay. Looking at an animal and figuring out why they evolved the way they did based on their behavior is a great exercise and there are very few books that bother to do this (if you know of one, let me know).

* Speaking of which, some of my favorite animal books are:

"Animal Anatomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger

"The Artist's Guide to Animal Anatomy" by Gottfried Bammes

"Draw Horses with Sam Savitt" by Sam Savitt

The Rest of Flynn and Rapunzel Meet, About the Development of Rapunzel's Character and Why We Needed Pascal

2010-12-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

Some more selected bits from the scene where Rapunzel and Flynn meet.

I'm not above squishing the character's face on the floor if it works. In this case I squashed Flynn's face so he could talk in the "pinched nose" voice. It's obvious, I know, but it got a laugh in this case....so it stayed.

These drawings are on tiny 3x5 inch story pads and I did them a long, long time ago - somehow they survived the entire run of the making of the film. Part of why I put Flynn flat on the floor and put Rapunzel up high on the fireplace mantle was because I was trying to make her seem as powerful as possible and make Flynn seem as weak and powerless as possible as she forces him to make a deal with her. Putting her in this powerful position, placing the camera low to look up at her as well as making the camera look down on Flynn and making him look as small as possible and drawing her in such strong poses all made her seem powerful and strong and made him seem weaker and no match for her.

This may seem unnecessary - after all, he's tied to a chair and can't really put up a fight - but those of us on the story team spent many, many, many hours debating how strong and determined to make Rapunzel, and whenever we would screen the film to the studio we would get a lot of notes about that topic. We talked about whether a girl trapped in a tower and isolated from the world her whole life would ever be strong, confident or capable enough to handle (and get the better of) a worldly, experienced guy like Flynn. We wanted the audience to really believe that Rapunzel had spent her whole life locked away without much experience with other people but also that she was a strong, forceful person with a strong will. It was a constant topic for the story team and we talked a lot about Rapunzel and how she would have grown up and developed and how that would have affected her character, as well as how much her personality had come from her real parents (who she'd never met).

We knew we had to strike a delicate balance with Rapunzel because she spends the first eighteen years of her life as a prisoner, locked away in a tower. That could easily have been a grim situation. There were always people who would say that they felt Rapunzel should feel more like her spirit has been broken by her years of imprisonment - that they didn't believe she would still have her strong spirit intact. But we were always conscious that we were making a comedy and we didn't want a grim opening that would make it hard to laugh at the lighter parts to come later in the film. And we didn't want her to feel like a victim. She's already been a prisoner for eighteen years....if she seemed sad or depressed about her predicament you might feel pity for her, and that's not what we wanted. We wanted the audience to like her and root for her, which you don't really feel for people you pity. But at the same time we wanted to be true to the fact that she's a prisoner and that she's trapped in a serious and potentially very dangerous situation, and that if she doesn't take action she will be trapped in a tower forever. So we worked hard and talked things over and over to make sure we were finding the right balance with her.

Which is where Pascal (her chameleon) came into play.

It makes me smile when I see criticisms of "Tangled" that the film has sidekicks thrown in because all Disney movies have them, because our original intention was to not give her a "sidekick" at all. We boarded the film for quite a while without any sidekick for her at all and back then we hoped we would never have to give her one.

On "Tangled" we never did things just because they had been done in Disney films before. We only did things if they were the right things for our movie. And so we didn't want to give her a sidekick just to arbitrarily repeat what had been done before.

Also we wanted her to feel as isolated and alone in the tower as possible. And we wondered whether giving her a sidekick could undercut that feeling and hurt the feeling of empty loneliness we wanted at the beginning.

But in the end we decided we needed him for two reasons:

Number one, because Rapunzel was totally alone in the tower, she had nobody that she could talk to about her feelings, which meant that it would be hard for the audience to know exactly what she was thinking and feeling. That would make it hard for us to get the audience to know her personality and feel for her and root for her. So in the end we realized she needed someone to talk to so we knew what was going on in her head.

There were earlier versions of the film where we considered having her paint faces on all the objects in the tower and talking to those "friends", but it seemed to us that that makes her feel crazy and like she's lost touch with reality. We felt that you would think she's damaged emotionally and that goes to a darker place that makes the film feel less fun.

And number two, Pascal was a big help because, as I mentioned, we didn't want her to feel too strong and capable. We felt that, since she's never been out of her tower or had dealings with people before, she shouldn't always be confident. We wanted her to have occasional moments where she lost her confidence and questioned her capabilities, because her Mother has been filling her head with doubts and undermining her confidence for eighteen years. So we wanted her to have flashes of doubt once in a while to be true to her history, and that's where Pascal came in handy: when her doubts creep in, Pascal is helpful for bucking her confidence back up. After all, nobody else in the film is on her side and nobody else would do it: both Flynn and Mother Gothel want her to lose confidence and return to her imprisonment in the tower.

Anyway, when people ask me why it takes so long for us to get it "right" in story, and why story takes so long when our drawings don't look like we spend much time on them, it's because we spend a lot of our time debating these types of things, arguing with each other and working out the best way to tell the story and the best way to develop the characters. And when we do draw, it's to try out these things and see how they work, and experiment and find the right way to tell the story and how to create the types of characters that people will fall in love with, root for and remember long after they've left the theater.

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-24T07:49:00.001-08:00

Hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year!

Tangled: Rapunzel and Flynn Meet, and the Evolution of Flynn

2010-12-12T22:13:00.000-08:00

It's strange to look back at "Tangled" storyboards now after seeing the finished product. The storyboards are done before there are any designs of the characters or environments. All you have as a storyboard artist is the ideas that have been talked about and (if you're lucky) script pages.

So looking back on these is odd. At the time when us storyboard artists were doing these rough quick sketches they were the only version of the characters and their personalities that existed anywhere. But now seeing the finished film, and the layers that the art department, layout, animation and everyone else added later, these look like crude cave paintings. Especially because they were done quickly and roughly and in a big hurry....because of all those departments waiting to get to work on the film!

So in this case I had script pages, and luckily they were good script pages by the great Dan Fogelman. After Dan, the Directors and us Story Artists spent weeks talking and talking and talking about the characters and who they would be and what made them tick, Dan went off and very quickly wrote script pages. He was the first to try and nail down their voices in script form. And he did a great job.

Here's a few selected sketches from when Rapunzel and Flynn meet.

Rapunzel: "Who are you-"

Rapunzel: "and how did you find me?"

Flynn: "Okay, uh, so let me assure you..."

Flynn: "I know not who you are, nor how I came to find you, but may I just say..."

Flynn: "Hi."

This last drawing of Flynn really represents our original concept of Flynn. In the beginning, we were really focused on making sure he was funny. We wanted to avoid making a film where the side characters provide all the humor and the main characters are straight and unfunny and feel like they're in a different movie than the side characters. So in our efforts to give Flynn a comedic conceit, we conceived him as a ladies man, self-centered because he's good looking and knows it. He even used to brag about all his "conquests" in that version.

He was very funny, but we quickly realized how unlikeable that type of guy can be, and how he was too one-dimensional to work in the larger sense of our movie. That guy was so shallow and obnoxious that you didn't want Rapunzel to end up with him. So we fleshed him out, give him vulnerability and a more sensitive side that made him warmer and more bearable to spend time with and made him the kind of guy who would deserve to be loved by a girl like Rapunzel. But we always tried to hang onto what made him funny too.

But this early drawing stayed in the story reels because it always got a laugh and it was clear, but as my conception of Flynn changed I never would have drawn him this way later on in the film's production. It's an extremely aggressive pose, with the neck thrust out toward Rapunzel and the chin stuck forward in an arrogant and aggressive manner. I would have drawn it differently if I had boarded it later, and when it was animated it was done in a more restrained and charming way, and not nearly as obnoxiously. Also, for speed I did all these drawings in pen on very small pads of paper (they're 3 inches by 5 inches) and I think the small size made me caricature things quite a bit and made the drawings extra expressive.

In the beginning days of drawing Flynn, I thought sometimes for inspiration about a cameo Clive Owen did on the show "Extras", where he played himself. In the scene, he's on a movie set, and the director is trying to find an extra to play a woman Clive has spent the night with. Clive is unhappy about the situation because, in his opinion, none of the extras is attractive enough for him to have actually slept with. This clip is definitely NSFW (language).

The girl that's standing there taking all the abuse through the scene is one of the main characters in the show, and the fact that you know her and like her makes the scene work within the context of the show. It's a great example of how point of view makes something work sometimes. The fact that you see her reactions to be talked about like a piece of meat is what makes it funny and painful (instead of just painful).

Another funny thing to point out is how, in the finished film, Pascal doesn't jump away to hide from Flynn, he just changes color. That's the type of thing I see in the finished film and it makes me wonder why I never thought of that in all the hundreds of times I watched that scene in the story room and in editorial and even as I drew it. It's so simple and obvious that I just never thought of it. It's a stroke of obvious genius.

As a storyboard artist you want to get as many things right as you can: nail down the characters and their relationships and their personalities, of course, as well as all the story events, but also the staging, the layout and the look of everything as best you can. The more you can give the departments that come after you, the less time they have to spend inventing things out of thin air and the more time they can spend adding those great layers to what we've given them and turn our initial thoughts into the beautiful and nuanced end product.

For Your Holiday Gift List

2010-12-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Cartoon Brew has published a phenomenal Holiday Gift Guide and that reminded me that I was going to do the same.

I've only read the first ten pages of "Color and Light" by James Gurney, but it's already great reading. He's a great teacher and writes in a very clear way. If you're interested in color or painting definitely give it a look.

I don't have the "Design" book from the Disney Feature Animation Book series yet, but by all accounts it's as great as the first two editions in the collection ("Animation" and "Story").

And lastly, "The Art of Tangled" is a beautiful book, featuring tons and tons and tons of beautiful visual development and storyboards from the film. It's really a great-looking book and worth checking out.

Plugs!

2010-12-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow night is the opening of the Super Big Micro Gallery Show at Gallery Nucleus!

And tonight I will be speaking at CalArts to the Character Animation Department about the making of "Tangled". I am looking forward to it but I have a bit of a cold so I may sound even more disoriented and confused than I usually sound!

MicroGallery Update: Persistence vs. Obsessiveness, and Perfectionism

2010-11-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

A few posts ago, I posted a couple of watercolors that I did for the upcoming Micro Gallery Show at Gallery Nucleus.

I've since painted new versions of both of those paintings to fix problems that were bugging me....here's the new version of the first one:

Once again, these pictures are only 3 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches, so they're small. If you click on them you get a much bigger version then the real thing. Here's the previous version:

Every time I looked at the original painting, I felt like the purple on the boy was too dark for such a small figure and "grounded" him...he just felt too heavy, like the dark purple was weighing him down. So in the new version I painted less coats of purple so the color would be less saturated and dark - also, I mixed a warmer version of the purple, with more red in it, and kept all of his colors fairly warm, to contrast with the cool shadow color. Both versions are based on a yellow background to accentuate the purple of his robes, and in both I greyed down the yellow by adding purple, but in the original, the background looks more green than yellow, so I changed the mix in the new version to be more yellow.

With the leopard picture, here's the new one:

And the old one.

Again, this one has a simple scheme: it's all based on red and green. The green of the foliage is meant to contrast with the red tint of the leopard's coat, the leopard's red spots, the red/brown of the hunter's book and the red/brown on the gun's stock. In the original I added a shadow pass over the top which I felt dulled down the green trees too much and killed the nice vibration between the reds and greens. So in the new version I made the greens more bright and I covered them less with the shadow color. It feels better to me.

Also I added a little bit of white smoke coming from the hunter's pipe. This helps make it clear that the shape is a pipe. And the extra added detail helps draw your eye towards the hunter because detail always attracts the eye.

It's funny, the more paintings I did, the more monochromatic they got. You'd think I would get more complicated with color as I got more experienced, but instead I got simpler. The last two paintings I did have less complicated color schemes. The first one is based entirely on (once again) the contrast between red and green:

And my final painting is simply based on a dark blue wash, set against the color orange (which is the complement of blue, of course).

They will be exhibited at the Micro Gallery Show and they will be for sale along with the work of many, many other talented artists.

I painted many, many versions of my first painting as I experimented and learned about watercolor (and I'll be the first to admit that I still don't know anything about the subject). All told I probably painted 40 versions of the first one.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to re-doing artwork. Many people don't like to re-do the same piece over and over. Many people have the philosophy that you should just do a piece once and then move on, applying what you've learned to the next one you do. And on the other hand, there are people who believe you should re-work a piece as many times as you can until you get it as good as you can and, when you've learned all that you can from that work, move onto the next one.

I guess a lot of it comes down to your personality and how you work. I've always enjoyed the process of re-working my animation and my storyboards because I'm never happy with my results and always restless to make everything I do as good as I can. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. But being a perfectionist can be very, very dangerous and can make you very miserable, for the simple reason that "perfection" is unattainable. Perfection is an ideal but nothing in life is ever truly "perfect". And striving for something that's unattainable, and feeling like you're falling short, can make you very discouraged.

Also, when we talk about "perfection" in art, we often mean on a technical level: like a life drawing where everything is perfectly constructed and proportioned. But does that make for a great drawing? Any photograph can capture the model's proportions perfectly, but that doesn't make the photographs "art". Usually the life drawings I like have an energy to them, and a sense of caricature where proportions are tweaked to exaggerate the pose and the anatomy of the model. So being technically perfect - to me - doesn't usually make for the most exciting or interesting drawing. So what is "perfection", anyway, when it comes to art? It's different to everyone, I suppose, and therefore meaningless.

So if you find yourself making yourself miserable because you're trying to reach perfection - as I did for many years, and still do - try to catch yourself and approach your work another way. You'll do your best work when you're relaxed and actually enjoying what you're doing, and trying to be perfect will tend to make you tense and frustrated. Learn to embrace the mistakes, the imperfections that give your work character and, at the same time, use your perfectionist eye to examine your work and help you see where you can do better next time.

The only reason I did so many versions of my painting was that I enjoyed the process of doing them. I really had fun seeing how I got different results each time and learning what effects were created by changing my techniques. If I had started to find the process unbearable, or if I found myself repainting it without knowing what I was trying to fix, I would have taken a break and set it aside for a while (which I did a couple of times). That always gives you perspective on what could be better.

As an example of perfectionism, and how it can lead to less interesting results, in all of my paintings, the background color is a wash. It's not easy to get a perfectly even wash of watercolor, especially when you're leaving unpainted spaces in the middle of the wash. In my painting of the boy king, I painted the background yellow but left the figure of the King and the plotting Duke behind him unpainted. You can buy a liquid mask that you can use to block out those areas but I didn't want to mess with them, because I didn't know how they would affect the paper after I removed them. So I taught myself how to do an even wash while skipping over certain areas, which wasn't exactly hard, but took me a while to figure out how to do it consistently and "perfectly" evenly.

And then I was reading "The Twits" to my son before bed tonight, and I realized that Quentin Blake doesn't do even washes for his backgrounds. He embraces the uneven-ness of them and they give his paintings a real sense of life. Check out the uneven washes in the background of these Blake watercolors:

So while I was proud of my perfectly even washes, Blake wasn't worrying about it, he was letting the paint be uneven (which is what it want to do) and letting that feeling give his painting a livelier and more vibrant feel. It simply never occurred to me to do that. Silly, huh?

Oh well, another lesson learned!

If you can make it to the Micro Gallery show on December 11th, I will see you there!

Thanks

2010-11-28T22:41:00.000-08:00

As the opening weekend of "Tangled" comes to a close, I wanted to express my heartfelt thanks to all of you who saw the movie this weekend and gave it the biggest opening of all time for a Disney animated film. Many people have e-mailed me to express their enjoyment for the film and I appreciate all the nice sentiments. Making these things is never easy, but when a film connects with people it makes every trial along the way worthwhile and it helps remind me why I wanted to get into animation in the first place.

More than the box office numbers, though, I am very proud of the CinemaScore rating of "A+" and the Yahoo movie user rating of "A" for the film. It's a great testament to all of the people who worked tirelessly to make the film as great as possible. To all of my co-workers who gave their all for the film I'd also like to offer my thanks and congratulations, as well as for all the other people at the Studio who were busy with other projects but always took the time to offer us criticism and support when it was needed.

Of all the arts, truly the animated film is the most collaborative form, because it takes an army to make one on the scale of "Tangled". The things I will remember the most about the making of the film were the great moments of working with my superbly talented and indefatigable co-conspirators who never stopped to think about whether something was possible or not, they just kept working and working until they got it done.

So, once again, my heartfelt thanks!

Boarding for 2D vs. 3D

2010-11-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

I did a bunch of interviews to promote "Tangled" before it opened, and the number one question (after "what does a 'Head of Story' do?") seemed to be "Is there a difference in how you storyboard a CG movie, as opposed to boarding a hand drawn one?"

Obviously, the big things are the same for both type of movie: you want to create memorable characters and a great story, and that's always the number one priority. But there are a couple of subtle differences:

The biggest difference (to me) is that when you board a CG movie, you have much more freedom to move the camera around and use camera moves to tell the story. When boarding 2D you always have to be conscious of the limitations of the backgrounds as painted stills, whereas in 3D the backgrounds can be built so that the camera can move through them, show them and explore them in their entirety.

I wouldn't say that one version is better than another, they're just different - they have different strengths and different weaknesses, and you have to be aware of them and consider them while you're storyboarding.

I recently watched the film "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" on Netflix and I was struck by the opening, which uses a series of long camera shots to set up the tone of the movie and the main character. It's a good example of the type of thing that you could do in a CG film but would be impossible in 2D.

Here's a version (without subtitles, unfortunately) and take a look at how the opening sets up a certain unique tone for the film (music is used well to do that too).

Once we get on the train, we are following the main character, who is pretending to be a vendor selling food on the train. The film takes place in a unique setting with a strange array of characters and I love how this tracking shot gets us used to the unusual setting quickly. I love how the camera tracks with him but will tilt and adjust the fielding along the way to feature different characters (like the colorful lady and the masked bandit). The film takes place in Manchuria but has elements that concern Korea and the Japanese Army - both of these aspects are introduced in passing (through the man with the Korean flag and the soldier pursuing him in the Japanese uniform) as he goes along, and all the while he's calling out that he is selling food. The fact that some sort of political drama is going on, and yet the person we're following doesn't react to it or get involved in it tells you a lot about his character, as does the moment when someone actually starts to rise up, saying they're interested in buying food - and our character pushes this potential customer back down, rudely - suddenly we realize that he's not really selling food, that it's a ruse and he's up to something else entirely. The technique of following him from behind is a great technique - it makes us intensely curious to see his face, and I love the way this whole shot is staged because all the information we get about him makes us very interested in what he's up to. And when we do finally see his face it has a great impact and punch to it. I also love the end and the casual way he shoots the last person as a sort of period on the whole thing....every one of his movements is very invested with character, personality and entertainment.

I would say the other difference between storyboarding for 2D or 3D is that there's more subtle acting that can be done in CG - it's much easier to do a scene where a character just lifts an eyebrow slightly, or just raises their lower eyelids for a moment as an acting beat. In 2D when the characters have to be drawn, we tend not to board such subtle acting, because it can be too difficult to do in drawings, but when the characters are built and rigged in the computer, the animators have a much easier time creating subtle shifts on the face and body to indicate small acting beats.

Again, neither way is superior, just different, and as a board artist you had better know the limitations and strengths of the medium you're boarding for.

The other small difference that comes to mind is that in 2D you can populate your boards with different characters anytime you want - if you invent a new character for your sequence, it's no problem - an animator can draw that character without much advance work being done (other than a design being worked out for the character). But in 3D, each character needs extensive lead time to be designed, built and rigged, so you can't just add characters as you storyboard. You have to be judicious and careful about that aspect and it influences how you approach things and solve problems.

There are some technical issues as well to think about as you board, depending on what is possible with the technology at the time. Years ago, when I was working on an early CG film, there was a mandate that we couldn't get the characters wet, because that would require building a whole new "wet" model of the character which was prohibitively expensive.

On "Tangled", the directors (Nathan Greno and Byron Howard) were always very careful not to tell us board artists what we could and couldn't do in the CG world. They always said to us, "just board it the best possible way you can, and we'll figure out a way to make it happen". And that's just what we did. The technical people on "Tangled" were amazing and did an awesome job of accomplishing every insane idea we threw at them. I have no idea how they did it but they are spectacular!

I promised to share some more drawings with you but I don't have much stuff on my home computer to choose from. Maybe when I'm back at work next week I can find some better stuff. Anyway, since we're looking at a fun action sequence already, here's some drawings I did of Rapunzel confronting some surly thugs in "Tangled" that I did. Man, those thugs were fun to draw....

Here's another piece I did from later in the film, with Flynn and Maximus punching each other, then getting busted by Pascal, trying to get on their best behavior, and failing. I gotta say, I've never drawn a guy putting a horse in a headlock and getting ready to punch the horse in the face before, but it was fun to do. That's what I love most about my job, you never know what you're going to draw when you go to work each day.

These sketches are all pen on paper with tone added in Photoshop.

I'm very proud of "Tangled" and I feel very gratified that it set a new record for an opening day in November! Also, I'd swear I read somewhere that seeing movies about boy wizards gives you eye cancer. But I could be wrong about that......

"Tangled" Opens Today!

2010-11-24T10:41:00.000-08:00

"Tangled" opens in the US today and you should go see it if you live there. Why? Because it's really, really good. And it was made by a group of the most amazing, dedicated, hardworking and smart people in the world. Making the film was a five-year odyssey that I will never forget. It was the greatest experience of my life but also the hardest and most trying thing I've ever done.

I loved working with the amazing story crew and I hope we can all do it again someday (although, sadly, we're not all in the same place anymore). A special shout out to my friends, comrades and the greatest story crew ever:

Michael LaBash
Joe Mateo
Aurian Redson
John Ripa
Marc Smith
Lissa Treiman
Josie Trinidad
Chris Ure

With special guest help from Paul Briggs and Dean Wellins. And we couldn't have done it without the support and help of our production help from the incomparable Debra Barlow, Heather Blodget and Barbra Pushies.

Some of my selected sketches from the film (not all in continuity): Rapunzel plays hide-and-seek with her friend Pascal in the tower (since he's a chameleon, he blends in really well).

These sketches are all done with pen on paper, then scanned into Photoshop and colored.

Anyway, I hope you all get to see the film and that you enjoy it. More drawings from the film to come over the weekend!

"Comic Obsession"

2010-11-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

This is a portrait of Maximus I did in a meeting once...he's a character from the upcoming film "Tangled", opening November 24th in the U.S.

The story of how the character of Maximus developed is an interesting one. As the directors and the story crew spent time developing the characters, we knew right away that Rapunzel's male counterpart would be a dashing thief, with the local law pursuing him relentlessly for a major theft he just committed. We didn't just want him to always say "I'm in trouble and the authorities are after me", but we wanted a physical embodiment of that pressure so that we could visually show that he was being stalked by the law relentlessly. The first impulse we had was, of course, the most obvious: some determined Captain-of-the-Guard type, a tough soldier that would pursue him with unceasing vigilance.

But since that was our first idea, we knew it was the most obvious and expected. So we challenged ourselves to do better and quickly came up with the idea that the Captain of the Guard's horse should be the most determined and resourceful "soldier" in the whole army.

Like all characters, he took a few passes for us board artists to push his abilities to their fullest extent, to figure out what was possible for him to do, what was funny for him to do and what feel flat and didn't work for him.

The turning point was one day when someone on the story crew said "he should be like Tommy Lee Jones in 'The Fugitive'", and we all laughed at that way of putting it. After that, his character was completely clear to me and I knew just how to draw him and what he should move like and what his expressions and body language should look like. He's a very serious guy who doesn't suffer fools well, and he literally doesn't care that he was born a horse - being an equine is inconsequential to him because no matter what animal he was born as, Law and Order are his obsessions, and he would rather die than let someone get away with any crime, no matter how small. I'm not sure of he sleeps, but if he does, he definitely keeps one eye open.

Robert McKee calls it a "comic obsession": a singular goal that consumes a character completely. Characters who are your main players and have to carry the emotional weight of the film have to have depth and layers and several facets to their personality, so that they can be interesting enough for us to follow and also so they can seem like real people with depth so that they can grow and change by the end of the film, which is where the emotional swing of any movie comes from. But the supporting players can be one-dimensional, completely obsessed with a goal or ideal and pursue it with a single-mindedness that is fun to watch.

And even though your main characters need to have depth and breadth so that they can have emotional growth during your movie, in any comedy they should always have their own humorous slant as well, so that the movie doesn't feel like the main characters are dull and serious while the sidekicks have to be wacky comedy relief. That's an awkward and uninteresting combination and make it feel like your characters all belong in different movies. I love The Dude in "The Big Lebowski", and how his "comic obsession" to replace his ruined rug drives the whole story. But he has to go through a lot of other emotions in the story and has other things to deal with besides just the rug...so he can't only be about getting his rug replaced. But other characters in the film who aren't the main character and don't have to carry as much story weight get to have their own levels of "comic obsession": Walter, Jesus, Mr. Lebowski, Maude and all the rest get to have great "comic obsessions" that make them fun parts of the ensemble, but they wouldn't be able to go through all the experiences and troubles that the Dude has to go through, because they simply don't have the depth and range of emotion.

Pascal Sexy Time!

2010-11-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

Pascal is a character from the upcoming movie "Tangled". He's a chameleon and Rapunzel's best friend (when you live in a tower, your choice of friends is limited to who can crawl up high enough to hang out with you).

Recently, Disney artist Jin Kim posted a drawing of Pascal smoking on his blog. Then I was going through my old Photoshop files and found this drawing I did of Pascal that I had totally forgotten about. I don't know what it is for, exactly....some of the Production Assistants at work asked me to do it as part of an in-house video and all they told me was that he needed to be "sexy". I never saw the video, though.....so I don't know the context....

I can't say that I ever thought about how to draw a sexy chameleon before, but a challenge is always good for keeping the mind limber.

Pascal is copyright Disney and "Tangled" opens November 24th in the US.

My Second Painting and How I Made It

2010-10-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

I finished another painting...again, the scanned version doesn't really look nearly as good as the actual painting because when you see a watercolor in person, the light passes through the paint, hits the white paper and passes back through the paint to your eye, giving it a vibrant and lustrous look. I tried to tweak it in Photoshop but it's not easy to replicate that radiant quality that a watercolor has when you see the original in person.

Also, like the previous painting, it's 3 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches...so if you click on it you'll get a much bigger version than the actual painting. And it's destined for the "Super Big Micro Show" at Gallery Nucleus this December, just like my previous painting.

Here's a photo I took of it outside that shows the brightness of the colors a little bit better:

I don't know much about painting, so I try to keep it simple. My last painting was based on the complements yellow and violet, while my new painting is based on the complements red and green.

The original inspiration for the painting is sort of a strange one. During the development of Disney's "Tarzan", Disney artist Vance Gerry did a ton of watercolors exploring the characters and environments. He always seemed to put a yellow underpainting under his green jungles and it gave them a very luminous quality and the underpainting tied each painting together well. So my whole impetus for the painting started with just wanting to try a jungle scene with a yellow underpainting.

Of course, like most projects, the whole idea behind it changed along the way and it morphed into something else. The painting has a yellow undertone but the way I added a black wash over the top at the end dulled down the lush green foliage, although the yellow underpainting still gives the whole painting a bright luminous quality. It makes all the colors shine brighter.

Vance is the only real watercolorist that I've known in person and that I have seen a wide range of work in person from. His work is amazing and I can't help but be affected by what he did successfully, but at the same time I don't really work like he did at all.

For example, Vance would draw his original sketch on paper with china marker and then xerox it onto card stock (although china marker is waterproof and you can watercolor right over it). Then he watercolored over the xerox. If he made a mistake, he would make another xerox and start over.

I like drawing in pen and especially for these tiny-sized pieces I found a pen worked well for the original art, then I xerox my sketches onto 140 lb. watercolor paper, which is much heavier and more porous than the cardstock Vance used, but still on the lightweight side for watercolor paper (I use that weight because I'm nervous to try sending anything heavier than that through a xerox machine). I find that the cardstock that Vance used simply doesn't take enough layers of paint for my liking because it's not that absorbent. But because it's on the lighter side for watercolor paper I try to do no more than three layers of paint - more than that and the paint gets so thick that the luminous quality of the paper underneath becomes diminished.

So on this one I knew where I wanted my tones before I painted it, and I debated laying them in with a china marker before I xeroxed it. But I didn't for a couple of reasons...number one, Vance does his whole sketch in china marker so the tones (the grey and black parts) match the line art organically. When you're starting with a pen sketch the china marker isn't going to match the line art well. Also I really like dark blacks and, once you xerox it, the black isn't as intense as when you add it to the final product after it's xeroxed. The xerox process dulls it down a bit. Also I tried adding china marker after I xeroxed it, but the watercolor paper surface is so bumpy that it wouldn't go on evenly and didn't look good at all. Again, I pictured it with dark, dark blacks but my plan changed as I went along. As much as I like black blacks, in the end I also like the radiant quality of the watercolor and really black blacks cover up the luminous feeling of the colors. So I opted for a black wash instead. Believe it or not, the wash is actually black - I made it from an equal mix of Alizarin Crimson and Windsor Green (Blue Shade) - but it laid down more of a purple when I actually added it to the final painting, because of how it interacted with the layers beneath it.

From the beginning, my color plan was all about contrasts: I knew I was going to base it on the complements red and green. I knew that there would be a lot of green space so I purposely kept the green spaces duller, and since I knew I would have very small red spaces I made them very intense. This is all pretty standard color technique: the smaller the space, the more intense and saturated the color can be, while the bigger the area, the more dull or desaturated the color should be. If your painting is all big saturated swatches of bright color it looks too intense and there's no harmony, interest or contrast. The smaller the area, the more intense and bright you can make the color within it.

Watercolorist Jeanne Dobie talks about this kind of approach in her book "Making Color Sing". She suggests using a lot of what she calls "mouse colors" - greys and browns - to fill the big areas of your paintings, and then setting your small areas of color like jewels within a setting. From the book:

The idea is that the big "mousey" washed out areas provide contrast for the brightly colored small pieces. To make the "jewels" stand out to their best possible potential, the greys and browns around them should be contrasting colors to them. For example, if your "jewel" is purple (like in my previous painting) then the greys or browns surrounding the purple should lean towards the color yellow, which is the complement of purple. That way the purple will be shown to its best advantage.

Likewise on my more recent one, I made the accents (or "jewels") red to complement the green foliage. Even though the leopard's skin color is a golden tone, I mixed a lot of red into the golden color. Also the hunter's book and the stock of his rifle have a lot of red in them. Even though these objects aren't sitting right next to the color green they still contrast well and give the picture vibrancy.

If you look at Vance's work, he did this a lot. His paintings tend to have large areas of brown and grey (or greyed out green, or red, etc.) contrasted with small areas of bright color.

Also I like to contrast warm and cool areas, so I did a warm yellow underpainting and then painted cool green and cool brown for the trees, and cool greys for the jungle floor which seems to react well against the yellow underneath. Then I painted the leopard, hunter and gun in warm colors to contrast the cool trees. Then I made the shadows on top cool black to contrast the warm colors of the leopard and hunter. I think the alternating warm and cool layers have a nice contrasting feeling that gives the picture a vibrant feeling (again, much of this is more apparent in person).

Vance also leaves white areas of the paper to great effect, which I don't. Most of the great watercolorists that have inspired me use the white paper very effectively as another color area, but for whatever reason I conceived both of my paintings as mostly color with just little spots of white. I'm enjoying my results so far, but maybe someday I'll have a concept that works better with bigger areas of white....we'll see.

In retrospect, both of my paintings tell similar stories...they both tell the tale of an unwitting "victim" being stalked by a threat that is concealed in the shadows (and on the upper right, no less). I didn't do that intentionally; I actually did a lot of different subjects that didn't turn out well, it just happened that this one was my second "success". Also (unintentionally) both are based on a triangular composition.

Anyway, that's a bit about how I approached the painting and how my technique changed along the way. If there's any overall purpose to this post, I guess it would be that one of the things that's integral to becoming an artist is to learn how to find an initial inspiration for your work, keep it in mind as you work but allow your approach and technique to evolve as your work develops. Vance's work provided a lot of initial guidance and inspiration for me but, in the end, my technique is very different because I adapted it to my own needs and discovered what worked for me and what didn't. And as I continue to paint my technique is sure to evolve and adapt (and get better).

My First Painting, The Micro Gallery Show and Blog, the Artist's Dilemma and Apologies for a Big Barf of a Post

2010-10-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

I apologize for this big mish-mash of a post. Normally I try to keep my posts to just one topic but this one is a jumbled mess of different thoughts....hopefully some of them are interesting. Or just look at the picture.

So I "finished" my first watercolor a few weeks ago. A big part of what makes watercolor color vibrant is your eye seeing the light hit the paper behind the paint and bounce back towards you...that's why watercolors can look so luminous. Scanning a watercolor isn't exactly the best way to reproduce what it looks like in person. That said, here's a scan.

If you click on it, you actually get a version that's much bigger than the original. In person it's pretty small (3 and a half by 5 and a half inches) because it's for the upcoming show at Gallery Nucleus titled "The Super Big Micro Show". All the pieces done for the show need to be less than 6 by 6 inches. Here's a link to the page about the show and there is a blog here about the Micro Gallery and its origins as a fundraising art show amongst the story and VisDev artists at Disney.

I haven't been a very big participant in any of the past Disney shows, because I have been pretty busy working on "Tangled" with minimal free time during most of the Micro show's existence, and also because I didn't know how to use any kind of traditional colored media very well, so that limited my ability to produce any kind of colorful art piece. Most of my contributions have been pen and ink drawings with crayons for color (yep.....crayons). So I've been using this upcoming Gallery show to force myself to learn how to use watercolor.

I have to say I'm not exactly happy with my results but also not totally sure what I would change about it, so I'm going to call it finished (or "finished") and move onto another painting. I painted several different versions of it and learned a lot with each one, but I don't think continuing to repaint new versions will teach me anything else so I guess it's time to call it "done". I am sure that when I look back at it in a few months I will see all sorts of things that should have been done differently and I will be embarrassed that I ever even posted it here...which is the eternal dilemma that I always face, and I assume every artist does: even when I am happy with the end results of my work, I know that I will look at it again in the future and see mistakes that I didn't see before, because I have improved as an artist since I did the piece. It's a double-edged sword because it's always great to know that you are constantly improving. After all, if I always looked at past work and thought it was still as good as I could do, then I wouldn't really be getting better over time. But that also means that when I actually like something I've just finished, I know someday I will look back at it with a more critical eye and find it wanting.

Then again I can't say I've ever really been "satisfied" with anything I've done, period.

The good thing about working at a studio with deadlines and pressure is that it forces you to finish things. They're never as great as you want them to be but if I didn't have deadlines I would never finish anything...I would polish everything and keep re-doing it until it was completely overworked and had no energy or sincerity to it at all.

Deadlines and pressure get a bad rap. Many artists seem to resent them and think that, without them, we would all be sitting around totally relaxed and oozing out beautiful works all the time and be completely happy, fulfilled and stress-free beings...I think some people believe that in a perfect world, we would all just relax and focus on our "art" rather than being bothered and distracted by pressure and schedules.

I have to be honest and say that I know myself well enough to say that I would probably never produce much of anything without deadlines. I need goals and deadlines to get motivated most of the time. For example, I've wanted to learn how to watercolor for years, but it wasn't until this upcoming show that I actually got myself to make it a priority. Another good thing about deadlines forcing you to work at high speed is that it can give your work an energy and spontaneity that it wouldn't have otherwise.

One of the best and worst things about being a story artist is that you have to churn out a high volume of drawings constantly and they are forever being thrown out and replaced as fast as you can do them - all in the service of finding the best story, the best characters and the best ideas that you can find. It teaches you to not be married to ideas or drawings and to constantly search and reach for a better idea or drawing, and no matter how much you might like a drawing or idea today, you know there will always be a better solution to be found tomorrow, or next week, or next month.

I find also, in picking subjects to paint, that I don't really gravitate towards landscapes or environments which seem to be the traditional subject you might think of when someone says "watercolor". For some reason I like characters and I like paintings that "tell a story" - that have some sense of tension, of something that just happened or is about to happen or will happen someday. I like unresolved tension and characters that have plans that haven't come to fruition yet and the conflict you can get from those type of situations. I really like and admire the way some watercolor artists can capture a certain landscape or a certain sense of light and shadow but I just don't have any interest in painting those kinds of subjects. And with all the difficulties and frustrations we face as artists trying to learn our craft, it's always smart to at least pick a subject to draw or illustrate or write about that we actually have interest in and that we find entertaining. If it's something that we'll stay interested in then we'll have a better chance of sticking with it when that first burst of enthusiasm and excitement wears off and it gets frustrating (which it always does).

Anyway, I know it's not a very spectacular example of a painting, but the real point of even doing it was to learn something, and in that sense it was a success. I learned a lot painting my first watercolor, and sometime I will talk about that more in depth.

There are a lot of amazing artists contributing to the upcoming Gallery Nucleus Show and I can't wait to see what they all do. If you live in the LA area maybe I'll see you at the Dec. 11th opening!

CalArts Talk pdf

2010-10-04T23:16:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Fixed the link (I think) this morning...let me know if it's still not working.

So I gave a talk tonight to Jim Hull's CalArts story class. Normally when I give talks I print out a giant handout for each student of all my talking points but I didn't this time in an effort to go green and save paper. But I promised the students I would upload a pdf file containing my handout so they could look at it digitally or print it out for themselves. So if you were there last night you can download the pdf here.

Also if you weren't there feel free to download the file...but it may not be as clear or as entertaining as watching me stumble through each topic and expand on each point with long, loopy and pointless stories, asides and anecdotes. Mostly this material is stuff I've posted and blogged about before, so it's nothing that new - it covers some basic staging stuff and "The First Things You Forget" (formerly known as "A Kick In the Head"). Also it contains Glen Keane's handout on drawing three dimensionally.

I talked a bit to the class about how the Feature Story Process actually works so I'll share that stuff soon too.

Let me know if the pdf link doesn't work!

Color (and Watercolor) Nuts and Bolts: Primaries, Complements, Split Primaries and Picking a Palette

2010-09-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned, I have been trying to learn everything I can about painting and color over the last couple of months. I have found a lot of great resources and made a ton of mistakes and learned much along the way. I still have an incredible amount to learn, but this post is my effort to condense all the relevant information that I have discovered up to this point: giving you a broad overview, touching on what I have found to be useful and letting you know what I have found to be confusing or unhelpful to help guide you if you are traveling the same path these days. I will break it into "chapters" with headings to help make it less overwhelming. I have struggled mightily to write this as clearly as I can but I have no idea if it's clear or understandable at all.....if not, forgive me. I am trying to keep it simple here and I will expand on all these topics as I go, so if there's something that's confusing I will flesh it out in a future post.

Color Wheel Basics

So I'm going to assume that everyone has a basic understanding of the color wheel, primary and secondary colors, and complementary colors.

If not, not to worry! There are many great, easy-to-read articles about the topic on the web. There's a good one right here at colormatters.com. It's only a page long and it's great. Go on, go read it, I'll wait.

In "Making Color Sing", Jeanne Dobie gives a good rule for remembering colors and their complements. Each of the primary colors has a complementary color that is a combination of the other two primaries. For example, the complement of blue is orange (which is red plus yellow), the complement of yellow is violet (which is red plus blue) and the complement of red is green (which is blue plus yellow). That simple piece of information has helped unify the color wheel in my mind and helps me make sense of it all.

There are other color wheels and theories about what colors complement each other, but I've been sticking with the old school color wheel and color theory for now. I find it works for me. I'm sure someday I'll delve into the newer, more advanced color theories but for now I'm sticking with the old ways as I get used to the ways of color and paint.

For this post, there are two important things to know about complements: number one, when you put them next to each other, they "complement" each other and make each other more vibrant and colorful. If you put read against green it makes them both more intense. The same is true of blue and orange, yellow and violet, etc.

And number two, in watercolor when you add complements you get grey. So blue plus orange will give you grey. Add more blue for a cooler grey, or use more orange to get a warmer grey (I apologize, these watercolors didn't scan true to their true colors, hopefully you get my drift anyway).

A Harmonious Palette

Okay, so one of my biggest concerns I've come across whenever I've worked with color is having all of the colors in a picture relate to each other so that the picture feels harmonious. There are a few ways to do this (more on that in a future post) but the simplest method, and one I like is to use as few colors as possible. I like to use a simple palette and mix everything I need from the same small group of colors. That way (I find) that the colors all feel like they relate to each other when they're laid down next to each other in a painting and the work feels unified.

Anyway, that's the method I'm using these days. I'll experiment with (and talk about) other ways of doing it in the future but for now I'm sticking with a simple palette.

So technically you should be able to mix any color you need from the three primaries (red, yellow and blue). You can mix them to get the secondaries (violet, green and orange) and you could paint a perfectly fine picture using only three tubes of paint. Certainly I have done this and it definitely makes the picture feel unified and harmonious.

But it's also just a bit too limiting. Each color of paint comes in many, many varieties so you can't just grab a tube of each primary and get to painting, because there are cool and warm versions of each paint. There are cool yellows and warm yellows as well as cool blues, warm blues, cool reds and warm reds. Also each color of paint has it's own place on the value scale....some pigments are naturally darker or lighter than their neighbors on the color wheel.

Pigment Color Wheels

James Gurney has created a color wheel showing where many of his favorite paints fall on the color wheel. For example the yellows fall at the top of his wheel. The ones that are to the top left (at 11 o'clock) are closer to the greens, so they're the cooler yellows, while the yellows to the right (one o'clock) are closer to the oranges so they're warmer yellows. Also, the closer colors are to the center of the wheel, the darker they are in value.

Also here's a great one from handprint.com, which is an amazing website devoted to color theory and technique.

These may seem very confusing at first. If the color wheel they're using seems different than what you're used to, that's because it's based on the CIECAM color wheel, which is a standardized wheel developed for use in pigment standardization. Here's one painted by James Gurney for reference:

Now all of this can be very overwhelming and confusing, but it's not as bad as it seems at first. But it does illustrate two things: number one, how colors lean towards hot and cool, and number two, how useless the names of different paints are. More on that later...

But first: about the "leaning" part.

Colors Can be Warm or Cool

So take yellow as an example. Some yellow paints are a good approximation of a typical in-the-middle yellow, while others have more blue tint to them and lean towards green so that they are cooler yellows. Warmer yellows, of course, have more red in them and lean towards more of a warm orange-y color.

And this is true of all colors. Each one has a tendency to either: be in the middle, lean towards the cooler side, or lean towards the warmer side.

Pigment Numbers

Now, one of the other things you realize quickly is that paint names are pretty useless. Say for example, you buy a tube of Winsor & Newton "French Ultramarine Blue", and then buy a tube of Grumbacher paint with the same name, you might expect them to be the same color, right?

But they wouldn't be....paints and colors have gotten their names in such romantic (and random) ways over the years that there's very little consistency from manufacturer to manufacturer, and the names of the paints don't give you any hint as to how cool or warm they might be.

The only way to tell if one tube of paint is similar to another is by checking the pigment number on the tube. Here's a good short explanation.

Again, it's easy to get overwhelmed by all of this, but not necessary. I spent weeks delving into all this stuff to try and figure it out but honestly...it's not necessary information.

Basically for me the essential information to know is that each color has a tendency to lean towards a warmer or cooler hue, and that the names of each color is not going to tell you anything about which way it leans, so the best way to learn all of this is to experiment and see how each one works and how it affects other colors when you mix them or paint them side-by-side.

The other important thing to know about pigment numbers (and it took me a while to figure this out) is that the numbers themselves don't have any numerical relevance.

By that I mean that you can't look at two tubes of yellow paint and use the numbers to figure out whether they are cool or warm yellows. For a brief time I thought you could sort this all out by knowing that lower pigment numbers meant one thing and higher numbers another.

Wrong!

The numbers are assigned (I assume) as the pigments are developed and not to reflect their position on the color wheel. So you can't assume that a pigment labeled PY3 is any warmer or cooler than one called PY152. The only thing the numbers are good for is to figure out how similar paints are between manufacturers, based on their numbers. So if - for example - Grumbacher made a color called "Lake Blue" and you wanted to know if a color Winsor & Newton calls "Sky Blue" is the same color....check the pigment number and see. If they both say PB127 then they're the same! That was a total hypothetical with made up names and numbers, by the way.

If you didn't read the article on numbers, here's the minimum you need to know: each pigment number starts with "P" for pigment, and then is followed by one of the following letters for the pigment : B (for Blue), Y (for Yellow), R (for Red), V (for Violet) and so on, and then there's a number.

Also, I think I've come across colors that have an N instead of a B, R, or the like. I was confused, and again, spent a lot of time running down the answer, and I think it means that it's a "natural" pigment. Again, not important, I promise....just mentioning it so you can disregard it.

Sorry if I'm overwhelming anyone with information. I'm trying to distill what I've been trying to understand for the last couple of months and make it so that you can just get the high points and not worry about the stuff that's not important. Or if you're intrigued by a topic I mention you can always go do more research in that area.

Okay, so now we get to the good and useful part: split primaries.

Split Primaries

Basically it comes down to this: create a palette that contains a cool yellow, a warm yellow, a cool blue and a warm blue, and a cool red and a warm red. Then mix all your colors from those six colors, because between those six colors you have an incredible range of possibilities, and yet because you're only using six colors, your colors will still feel harmonious and unified.

There are consequences to how you mix them, though, and that's why it's important to know about complements.

For example, like I said at the top, yellow and violet are complements, right? And when you mix two complements together, they neutralize each other and you get a grey color.

That's where how a color "leans" becomes important.

For example, say you want to mix a really vibrant violet from your basic palette. So you need to mix red and blue together, right? Which ones do you pick? The warmer red and blue? The cooler ones? One of each?

If you try to mix a violet from your warm red and warm blue, you will get a muddier result than if you mix a violet from your cool red and blue.

This is because both the warm red and the warm blue "lean" towards yellow, or have some yellow in them to make them warm. So when you mix them together, you're getting a lot of yellow mixing together, which is the complement of violet, so it's greying down your mix.

If, on the other hand, you're mixing together the cool blue and the cool red, there's not as much yellow in the mix and so it creates a more vibrant violet. There's no complement in the mixture to grey down your color (see below, but again, my scanner didn't reproduce these colors very faithfully):

That's where the term split primary comes from. Once you have your six colors, draw lines separating them into three groups (group 1: warm yellow and warm red, group 2: cool red and warm blue, group 3: cool blue and cool yellow).

If you mix colors across the lines then you're going to get a muddier color. If you stay within the lines you're going to get a brighter and more intense color.

Here's a great illustration from Ellen Fountain's website that explains it well:

You can see how as the lines get crossed, the colors get less vibrant and colorful. She does a great job explaining all of it on this page here. It's a quick read but very clear and she recommends a palette that fits this criteria.

Also Nita Leland has a page that describes it very well (and is also short and easy to read) here. Both of those web pages helped me immensely and I am indebted to them for writing them.

My Palette

When I started to first buy paints I read a few books with the expectation that artists would just tell me what colors to buy. Each book recommended a different approach as well as each artist I asked about this in person. I've tried a few things (again, I'm still pretty new to all this stuff) but whenever I've tried to adopt someone else's method wholesale it hasn't worked for me. Art is such an individual thing (and I imagine we all see colors differently) so I have found no short cut - experimenting and trying new things seem to be the only way to finding your own perfect palette (and it can also be a bit expensive, unfortunately).

My palette will continue to change and evolve but mostly I'm using the one that I found recommended on the Winsor and Newton resources section of their website, which is wonderfully written and has also been very helpful to me.

On this page they recommend different palettes, based on which brand of their paint you are buying, or what subject matter you are pursuing. Also they recommend a couple of extra paints that you may or may not need, depending on your taste. But here are the six that I am using for my basic palette:

Warm yellow: Windsor Yellow
Cool Yellow: Windsor Lemon
Warm Red: Scarlet Lake
Cool Red: Permanent Rose
Warm Blue: French Ultramarine
Cool Blue: Windsor Blue (Green Shade)

Just for complete disclosure, I've also been using Yellow Ochre and Windsor Green (Yellow Shade) in my palette as well as Titanium White for highlights.

Also on that page they explain other factors that affect the appearance and mixing abilities of all these colors, like granulation and Staining ability. Then you can use their Color Chart to find out which colors have what tendency. I like the six above because they are mostly transparent (instead of opaque) and most of them are "staining" colors (which makes them stronger and more intense). Also most of them aren't "granulating" pigments so they don't have a lot of the grainy texture that granulating pigments do. But use your own taste and judgment to find a palette that works for you. If you ask me what my palette is three months from now it will probably have changed and will continue to change, I'm sure.

Also I'll continue to expand to and add to all this stuff. I know people who know a lot about color will think I'm being irresponsible and skipping important stuff but I will continue to talk about this topic and I don't want to cover too much at once. If all of this is confusing or seems incomplete I'm sorry. Please explore the other resources I've linked to to get more information, or leave me a comment and I will address it in a future post.

Make Mistakes

I tried to read all that I could before I started painting in an attempt to make as few mistakes as possible. Of course, I knew that I would make tons of mistakes and that that is the best way to learn. In a lot of ways they're the only way we learn: I found frequently that until I made the right mistake I wasn't able to learn what books and websites were telling me.

The mistakes I made set the context for the instruction that I needed: I would read stuff that didn't make any sense to me, until I created the need for it by making the mistakes I needed. The mistakes I made were like sanding down a piece of wood so that it can be painted....my mistakes and crappy paintings primed my brain so that I could absorb the information I was reading.

So as much as we all try to avoid mistakes and frustration, embrace them and see their worth: they create that desire in you to read and research more and find the answers you need to get better. Mistakes and errors are your friends as long as they don't frustrate you and cause you to quit altogether.

And if this post is confusing, don't worry, it's not you, it's me. I am not the best choice to write about this topic, as I am a useless newbie myself, and hopefully I have done more good than harm with this post....more to come.

James Gurney's blog and Jeanne Dobie's "Making Color Sing"

2010-09-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to be writing more about color but, alas, I don't have as much time to paint as I'd like and I'd like to have at least a few paintings totally done before I write more about color, because although I've read a lot about color and learned a lot, I'd like to be able to know for sure that my advice will lead to a decent result.

In the meantime, there are other people who actually are very knowledgeable painters that share their knowledge, especially James Gurney, creator of "Dinotopia". He has a great blog called "Gurney Journey" where he talks about color, painting and illustration in a very easy-to-understand and straightforward way.

If that weren't enough, he has a book coming out soon called "Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter". He's already written one that is really good that's mostly about how to help yourself visualize and paint things that don't really exist (I think you can see a lot of it at Google books - I checked it out there before I bought it). It's called "Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist".

Anyway I hope to share more soon but, like I said, I'd like to be able to show some tangible results before talking about how I got there. There are a lot of other resources I have found helpful as well, and I will mention them soon, but I am finding that there is no one resource that I find completely helpful one hundred percent. I am learning a lot by trial-and-error and, although it's great to read what works for others, I am finding that what works for me is usually not the same technique that other people find works for them. So as you read anyone's advice about painting (or drawing, or anything) use it as a measure against what you do, and take what you can from them that helps improve your work. But where their method doesn't help you, and seems to hold you back, always retain the ability to experiment and make your own mistakes and discoveries.

For example, I have really gotten a lot out of Jeanne Dobie's book "Making Color Sing", which is wonderfully short and clearly written, full of great advice about watercolor painting. In the book, she recommends a very limited palette of colors, and I was very grateful to have some direction on what colors to use at first. But as I worked with her palette of paint colors, I found they didn't give me the results I was looking for, and I am trying a different approach these days...which I will hopefully share soon, or if I find that that approach doesn't work, I will keep looking until I find one that works! And once I have one that works, I will let you know what I have learned. I just don't want to share until I feel more confident about my method.

But I never would have found my way without Jeanne's book to guide me along and I definitely recommend it and I will talk more about what I got out of it soon. There are other books I have found helpful and I will share more about them as I keep going (and keep discovering more books too).

Color is Value

2010-09-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

Once a long time ago I was trying to pick the brain of a co-worker about color. He seemed to be really good with color and I was trying to get some guidance and help. He didn't really know what to tell me. He just shrugged and said, "All you need to know is that color is value. That's it."

A simple statement, but I found it to be very helpful and insightful.

So....what does it mean? Well, value is a confusing word that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to color. But here I'm using value to mean the black, white and grey tones of a drawing (just like the last post).

So basically it means that, even though you're working with color, the painting should still work if it's converted back into a black, white and grey sketch, and should still follow the general rules about value that I talked about last post. Values in a black and white sketch are really important for clarity and readability, and they remain important when you work with color. They're just a lot harder to judge when you bring color into the equation, and it's hard to remember how important they are when you are juggling all the other aspects that color brings to the table.

Photoshop has the ability to convert any color image into black and white so that you can check your values easily if you're working digitally. Just go to the "Image" dropdown menu, then go to "Mode" and select "Grayscale" (see image below)

and Photoshop will convert your image to black, white and grey so you can check your values. Pretty cool, huh? I used this tool a lot to check my values while I was digitally coloring my comic book stories.

I often felt that the black and white images looked better than the final color.

Then, after you've checked your values, you can just "Undo" and step backwards to your full color file.

Or you can do it the way that artists have been doing it for hundreds of years: if you squint your eyes at a painting it's easier to see the values.

Anyway, here are some paintings converted to black and white so you can see how well the values work (paintings by N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Rembrandt, Earl Oliver Hurst and Norman Rockwell).