The same concepts that apply to individual drawings can also be used in actions - the differences between separate poses. Some differences are subtle, others are more dramatic. You need a variety of differences between successive poses in order to give focus and pacing to the different ideas you want to convey through the characters.

BTW, look how little space in the head that the face actually occupies. Most of your head is empty space. Mine too.

BTW, all these theories and techniques are merely tools

Learning control of contrasts will make your drawings more alive, interesting and appealing.

I did this drawing the other day in a private lesson as an example of exaggerating what you see by using the principle of contrast.My student had copied this Preston Blair drawing above and had drawn the proportions too conservatively. The baby's head was too small in comparison to his body. I'll ask him if I can use the drawing to show you, but basically he undertured it.

He was actually trying to measure the proportions and get the drawing to be exactly like Preston's original. In all my experience in the assembly line process of animation I have found that the vast majority of cartoonists -when they try to copy a drawing, automatically tone it down. They lose the contrasts and I always have to push them to go farther and overshoot what they think they are copying.

Here Preston describes what makes a baby look like a baby. His adjectives could just as well describe a real baby as a cartoon baby. The words are very general and don't give a precise description of the proportions and details.
Babies have big heads, right? Well not really. What does "big" mean precisely? It means relative to what we think is small. A baby's head is big in comparison to its body- when you again compare the size relationship of an adult's head and body.

So the difference between drawing realistically and drawing cartoony is that when you draw a real person, you are trying to draw fairly acurate measurements and when you draw a cartoon you are trying to draw the emotional essense. You are drawing opinions rather than reality.

You can use the same adjecties to describe a person in real life as you can to describe a cartoon character, but in your cartoon you exaggerate the contrasts. "Big" becomes "bigger". "Sickly" becomes "sicklier". The relative contrasts are heightened.

There are all different types of contrasts, not just contrasts of size.
You can have contrasts of:


Other Principles Depend On Contrasts
Silhouettes and lines of action depend upon contrasts. The greater the contrasts, the easier it is to see the point of the drawing and what the artist means. Great cartoonists instinctively use contrast and therefore make stronger visual statements. Bob Clampett and Tex Avery are the masters of contrasts in animation. Weaker cartoonists are timid and conservative. They don't like strong contrasts and think they are in bad taste. In my opinion that makes their statements less forceful, less entertaining and less committed to their own ideas.

I was using "Uncle Tom's Cabana" to explain a variety of animation principles and techniques to my student and started drawing the poses and compositions to show how Tex and his animators used very strong contrasts to make every point in the story. We also noted that Tex liked to experiemnt with graphic styles throughout his career. He used different designers and layout men, yet all the cartoons have the strong pointed visual statements, a confident certainty in every idea Tex wanted to present. There is nothing vague or mushy in Tex' best work from about the mid 1940s on.

Other Cartoony Principles:

There are generally known (well known at one time) principles of animation as explained by Preston Blair and Frank and Ollie, but they don't cover what makes something "cartoony" or not.

I thought maybe I'd start compiling the tools, techniques and qualities that separate cartooniness from blandness and do my own set of cartoony principles.
Some others off the top of my head are:

Simplicity: Real life is full of busy details. Cartoons boil them down to the essential ingredients that make a visual statement clear. Simplicity by itself is not enough to make something cartoony. There are a lot of simple cartoons on TV today that are positively moronic from a visual standpoint. Kids draw simple, but without control or understanding. It doesn't make their drawings cartoony.

Puposeful Impossibility: Cartoons can do what you can't do in real life and it's what really separates itself from other media. For some reason most people in animation (and still cartoons and comics too) are ashamed of this and won't take advantage of this great gift.
Visually Funny: A good cartoon can make you laugh at the visual alone. Dialogue, story, appeal and other attributes are gravy, but not essential or exclusive to cartoons.

There are more principles I'm sure and when I think of them I'll add them. Giving private lessons makes me think even more analytically about things as I witness what concepts are easy to learn and which are more difficult.

Caricatures Are About Contrasts:

Caricatures are not about making everything bigger as some people think. If everything is big, then nothing is big. Caricatues are about finding the actual contrasts in a subject and then making the contrasts more extreme. A big nose becomes a bigger nose, but a little mouth (like Simon Cowell's) becomes littler. Again these are all relative to the other features surrounding them.

Not all caricatures however, are "cartoony". The caricatures that I have been doing are not all that cartoony. I am exaggerating the contrasts for sure, but not to the extent I'd like to, and I'm not really simplifying the features. There are plenty of much better caricaturists than me. I think I am too hung up on figuring out how the anatomy works and what the features really look like, so when I exaggerate them, I am held back by the struggle of trying to learn things that I am not confident of yet.

I do know that the more I draw a certain person, the more cartoony the caricatures get.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-2012-world-will-end-according-to.html

TJ is a very talented student and he has asked me to critique some of his studies.Here's one that perfectly illustrates a point I was making the other day.

This copy is well done, and I only have one critique:

It has been toned down. The original is more exaggerated. Where?

Especially in the eyes:
Let's analyze the expression in the original.


The open eye is wide open and big or tall -taller even, than the left eyebrow. The closed eye is small and the eyebrow that goes with it is also small.


If you wanted to caricature this, then you would take the descriptive adjectives and add "er"

I would make the open eye TALLER. The closed eye SMALLER. MORE white space than pupil.

I haven't yet asked anyone to take a drawing and caricature it, but that's coming.


But I have cautioned about toning down drawings - or "maintaining the guts" when copying. When you draw a pose or expression less specific or exaggerated than the original, you are underturing.

This is something that seems to happen with a lot of us naturally and something we should resist. Analyzing the contrasts (in words) in a drawing helps you avoid underturing them.

Thanks TJ for the example and I will critique more of your drawings in the next week if you like. This particular one just happened to illustrate this:

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-is-exaggeration.html

It's important for contrast and naturalness to not use the same exact antic and timing for every accent in your animation.

Cute generic Disney design VS cute specific Jones design
This Disney style is the culmination of their search for perfect mathematical design balance, inoffensive cuteness and lack of specificity. Once they found this balance, they stuck with it until it eventually deteriorated with the passage of time.
Pete sent me this email and his theory: (I added the headings)

Hi John,

I have a theory. (See, not only Eddie has them.) The more I read of your thoughts on "Specific" vs. "Generic" characters and the examples you use to illustrate each type, it seems like there's a pattern developing here. Most of the characters that you seem to respond to more viscerally as "Specific" types in terms of both personality and visual design, also tend to be rather ungainly in their design (with some notable exceptions.)

For instance, you love the work of print cartoonists like Milt Gross, Basil Wolverton and Don Martin for their skewering of human types and ability to make truly funny drawings. You've also recently been lauding, as you so aptly described it, the "Rat Pack" brand of humour that you see in "BC" and "The Wizard of Id", where there's less politeness and a more rugged, freewheeling approach to being funny.

Yet one thing that all of these print cartoonists seem to have in common is a flair for creating humour out of designs that are actually rather ungainly. Even your favourite animated cartoon character,"Popeye", who of course originated in the newspaper funnies, has an unusual appeal in that he looks like he's been Frankensteined out of various spare parts!

Now don't misunderstand what I'm saying here, as I'm not suggesting that any of these designs are amateurish or unappealing, but I do find that there is a spontaneity and visual clunkiness to them that maybe allows better for that broader type of belly-laugh humour that you enjoy.

I guess I kind of find it ironic in that, for all of your high regard for good solid construction in animation design, it is really these characters that don't seem to slavishly follow those rules that really get a gut response from you. I'm actually wondering if all of the animated film characters that you praise for having good solid construction, yet also tend to dismiss as being "Generic" (likely because of their solid construction whether you realize it or not,) are maybe fighting a losing battle in trying to appeal to the John K sensibilities.

Even the Warners characters that, on the surface may seem to disprove my theory, perhaps appeal to you because of the rather ungainly poses and expressions they take which requires the cartoonist to radically cheat the rules of construction to pull off effectively. Am I making sense? Maybe not, but read on...

You see, the way I see it is that print cartoonists have a huge advantage generally over those in the animation biz, in that they don't have to be nearly so accountable with their drawings. You can read a comic strip like "BC" or anything Milt Gross drew and not have to see whether or not all of the details are matching up perfectly from panel to panel. Nobody cares how Wiley's face goes from a front view to a profile or whether he's got exactly the same number of facial hairs on his ugly mug as he turns. The mind's eye fills in the missing movement and doesn't notice any inconsistencies like that. Because of this freedom from absolute consistency of design, print cartoonists can be extremely spontaneous in their drawings, potentially creating wilder, broader character personalities and actions if they so choose to.

This struck me the other day when a friend had lent me the latest book of political caricatures by British cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe. As I was looking through it and admiring his audacity, it also occurred to me that one probably couldn't successfully translate that type of drawing to consistently drawn animated characters. I'm not even referring to just the sheer amount of pen strokes (which would be impossible), but rather, the overall approach that Scarfe takes in his design. Frankly, I'm not so sure that Don Martin or Johnny Hart would fare much better either.

As you know, I happen to also share your admiration for Ed Benedict's designs for the earlier Hanna-Barbera characters. Yet I wonder if it's precisely because of the limited animation and more graphic, shape-based designs that allowed the animators to do cartoons that maybe had more in common with the work of print cartoonists than their predecessors in the theatrical animated shorts. Because of all of the visual cheats they could get away with by not having to adhere to the rules of full animation, I suspect this also allowed the H-B cartoonists to pull off broader humour in their drawings, as well as create what you yourself seem to consider more "Specific" visual designs and personality types.

I must admit, even in my own work, I was happier doing my own natural style of cartooning prior to when I first went to work for Disney. For all of the training and honing my craft through working for Disney, I suspect that something was also sacrificed in the bargain. For when I look back at the stuff I used to do in "The Ottawa Citizen" circa 1978 to 1984, there was a gutsier, more spontaneous quality to my cartooning, most likely due to the lesser emphasis on polished construction that I seem to strive for in my post-Disney efforts. The resulting images were, in my opinion, funnier because of their rawness and spontaneity. Heck, I might even post some up on my blog just so people can see how I started out.

Anyway, just some food for thought there for you. You can shoot down my theory now, ya' rascal.... :)



Hi Pete

very clever thoughts...

I have been wanting to do a post on this very thing for the longest time: the difference between perfectly balanced mathematical design (like Bambi) VS slightly awkward out of balance, more natural design - like Clampett. Friz on the other hand is afraid of contrasts in his work, so evens everything out like Disney - except without the gloss.


Both approaches share the same fundamental knowledge and skills, but the result I like better is the one that takes nature into consideration. Nature has an ideal plan for everything, but no part in nature fits the plan perfectly and that's what makes things interesting. The variety and deviations from the perfect plan.

Disney has no variety or humanity. It aims for a Platonic ideal of attainable perfection and the result is stagnation. It's all just a simple formula that can never make a funny face or stand out from the purely ordinary. It all has to obey their limited design and motion rules. Disney artists are entirely too afraid (and unimaginative) to do anything nearly as interesting as what surrounds them in real life. Great cartoonists draw from real life and then bend what they observe with unafraid bold imagination.

Real live humans are constructed, but they have much more variety, caricature, natural imbalance and pliability than any Disney character - so there I disagree with you. You don't have to draw flat to draw interesting as you seem to infer is my theory. Look at your favorite old time stars (and mine) and how interesting and unbalanced they are. What is remotely polite about Frank Sinatra? He is much more like Clampett than Disney.

As a caricaturist yourself, I would think that you especially would be repulsed by anything generic and evenly proportioned or middle of the road.

Your pal,

John