Tight Pencil

Here I have added a little more detail and discipline to the drawing, putting in some architectural elements to the room, changing a few minor proportions, trueing-up the ellipse of the animation disk.  These are things that are hard to change at a later stage in painting so are best done now.

Ready to Paint

Now the drawing has been uploaded to a Photoshop file, the background copied onto a new layer, and the layer set to Multiply (Layer/Layer Style/Blending Options/Multiply).  This action with a gray-scale layer causes the white areas to become transparent, thus making my drawing  useful as an overlay which I will keep above the painting layers throughout the painting process, turning it on anytime I want to check the painting against the drawing for accuracy.  But the goal is to eventually make this drawing layer redundant as the painting becomes in itself fully detailed and complete.

The sepia color you see now is from a new layer added beneath the drawing layer.  This is a mid-value tone that I will now paint over and is equivalent to the wet media painting technique of laying in a mid-value brownish wash as a starting point before applying color.

Next: Establishing the Palette

Early Concept

I did this drawing many years ago, probably in the late 70s (before I grew my 'stache).*

I like the new one much better, but this does show the idea of the glow from the backlight of the animation board shining up into the animator's face as if he were some wizard enraptured by the aura of his crystal ball or magic spell.

By the way, I have a long history of self portraits that spans my entire career.  In future posts I will publish some of them.  I think you may find them entertaining, as most of them are more in the nature of cartoons or caricature than these.

*And for anyone who is a stickler for English stylebook rules, I know perfectly well that the books say that the period should be inside the closing parenthesis; I just have never liked the look of that, and I don't find it logical.

Maybe Not Such An Original Idea

After getting quite well along with the detailed drawing posted last, I began to get a nagging notion that I had seen it somewhere before.  But where? 

There are many known examples among writers of inadvertent plagiarism.  We are not talking about the cases of blatant lifting of whole pages of copy that have made the news recently, but actual unknowing, unintended use of someone else's idea.  You saw it or read it, you then forgot about it, but then at some point it bubbled up into your consciousness again, whereupon you thought it was your own.

At any rate, I realized that if I had seen this idea somewhere before, because of the arcane nature of the subject it would have to have been in one of my books on animation technique.  And sure enough, I found it:

It's a little drawing by Richard Williams from his book "The Animator's Survival Kit".  Still, I think my version is a justifiable re-imagining of the idea of extra fingers on the animator's  non-dominant hand.

But that's not all I turned up!  I also recalled an unpublished gag cartoon I had done years ago, circa  the year 2000, and though I haven't been able to find the original, here is a recreation:

Richard Williams excellent book was first published in 2001, so perhaps I am vindicated, at least in my own mind. 

An Original Idea..maybe.

Here's a concept sketch I did two or three months ago, an idea to show myself flipping animation drawings bottom-peg style, but showing extra fingers on the left hand.  Just a quick scribble to jog my memory, and I filed it away.

Now I intend to start a second blog about animation only, and I got this out to work up as the illustration for the main page.  Here is the resulting pencil sketch:

This shows more clearly what I am talking about.  The flipping of drawings is specifically a Disney studio invention.  Turns out that Disney animators were trained to work on bottom pegs--that is, with the drawings secured in registration by means of pegs at the bottom of the paper rather than at the top.  Other studios like Warner Brothers used top pegs, and it has gotten to be like some sort of Swiftian divide among animators now.  Yes, the pegs at the bottom get in the way of your drawing hand, but the defense is that you can interleave drawings between your fingers, as you see here, and sort of roll them back and forth to see a simulation of animated motion.  Well, I once thought everyone did it this way, and so I trained myself to do it and now I prefer it.  Anyhow, if you had extra fingers, you could roll more drawings, right?  So there it is: the insanely happy animator.

I will be doing this as a full scale digital painting, so stay tuned.

But Next:  Maybe Not So Original An Idea?

Illustration Friday: Bottled--the painting

Executed in Corel Painter 11,  this was done in the style of the old pulp magazine covers, as perhaps  for an issue of Weird Tales.  Tons of fun!

Illustration Friday: Bottled

No sooner did I decide to participate in Illustration Friday submissions--an interactive website that gives you a week to do an illustration on a stated theme--than I got too busy to finish on time.  Nevertheless, I have kept on with it and finished.  The theme was "bottled", and here is the sketch for my digital painting to be executed in Corel Painter.  It's just a twist on the old djinn in the bottle story, showing that the djinn has gotten out and imprisoned the man in his place.  I will post the final painting in a day or two.

I really do want to post quite regularly here and will try harder now.

The Two Roosters Final

I'll call this done now.  It was all painted in Photoshop over the imported rough sketch of post one.  I changed the Jeff Bridges proportions quite a bit in the process as I saw I had made his face too long and it was not reading well.

Caricature is an intriguing but sometimes frustrating field.  There have been people I thought would be easy to do, who turned out to be elusive, and there have been some that came to me more easily than I expected.  In a future post I will talk about favorite caricaturists, including some whose art astounds me with its ability to create stunning "likenesses" with abstract or geometric shapes.  For now I will just say that my great hero of caricature has always been Mort Drucker.