A great book Creature Animators or Artists

As you all should know I dream of being a Creature Animator and recently I came across a book that is great for anyone looking for advice or tips on drawing, posing and animating animals. This book is The Art of Animal Drawing: Construction, Action, Analysis, Caricature by Ken Hultgen. It was originally published in 1951 and reminds me of the old Disney cartoon animals and the drawings that are in the example portfolio for applying to Disney. Next time I'm in Chester I'm planning on taking it with me and heading to the world famous Chester Zoo to use some of the stuff I've learned from it by drawing the animals there.

Below is a link to Amazon UK where you can buy it. It's cheap and well worth the money :) I will try and do a flick through video and post it on here too so you can get an idea what the books is like.

Film Review of How to Train your Dragon in Q&A

At the end of this weeks second Q&A, Said went on to do a film review of 'How to Train your Dragon' but not like a normal review, this was a frame-by-frame look at parts of the movie to show arcs and not using symmetry, anticipation and staging.

Some of the comments Said made: -

• Hiccup would move his eyes and then his head would follow to look at Toothless.


• 'Keep it simple, keep it stupid'. What he means by this is to keep backgrounds unbusy so the characters are the main focus.
  


• Characters move in nice arcs. Whether its their arms, tail or head. A good example of this was near the beginning where Gobber is having a drink and he slams it down and turns. Or how Toothless moves and swishes his tail.
  


• Don't keep things symmetrical unless your looking for seriousness. Like when Toothless is staring at Hiccup in a serious manner to make him eat the fish but when he bites into it, Toothless relaxes and sits back and his pose is not symmetrical at all. Like one ear was higher than the other and even his eyes were different sizes!


• Said also explained how Hiccups father, Stoick is all powerful, big and manly so when he was sat in the dark in his house in front of the fire and Hiccup tries to sneak in he was filling most of the screen (the animator had also nicely posed him in an arc but still not symmetrical). Hiccup is small and weak so when he comes in he is small in the background to represent him. It's easier to explain when you see it, sorry I should of taken more screen shots.

I love How to Train your Dragon and it is one of my favourite movies! If you love it too or even just love dragons or concept art then I recommend this book. The Art of How to Train Your Dragon (How to Train Your Dragon Film)

Wacom Inkling

Came across this today and wow! I have been hoping for ages something like this would come out but Wacom took it further than I had thought. Like the button so your sketches and designs can be on separate layers! Pure genius!

This new Wacom system combines a digital sketch pen (it makes like a pen or pencil) with a clip-on receiver, which digitally records each stroke of the pen. Your drawings can then be rasterized or vectorised, uploaded to your computer and imported to either Photoshop or Illustrator or saved as an image file!

Basically this is how it works:

• You take the stylus and receiver out of the cool little box.
• Clip the receiver on the top of any paper, notebook.etc and start drawing. According to Wacom the receiver can store thousands of pages so very handy.
• Press the button on the receiver to create new layers.
• When you are done, connect the receiver to a computer via USB and you can see all your drawings. Export the one you want to use to Photoshop or Illustrator or any typical graphic format. ie. TIFF, JPG, BMP.

The Inkling will cost around £125 +VAT and comes with a pen, receiver, rechargeable batteries, four spare pen ink cartridges, charging case and the Inkling Sketch Manager Application, which is neatly stored in the Inkling receiver. It will be available from October 2011. When it does get released I will post a link on here for where you can buy it.

Book Recommendations

Here is a list of books that I have found helpful or have been recommended to me by AM, Mentors, friends and other students.

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Wait before buying 'Acting for Animators'
as a new version is coming out soon_

• Figure Drawing for All it's Worth


• The Art of Animal Drawing


• Simplified drawing for planning animation