Some people might wonder what the point is in copying the drawings of others. I'll tell you. It's so you can apply what you learned from the copies to your own drawings. It's not just so you can be good at copying.
Geneva has been studying the work of Harvey Eisenberg and copying his original poses and scenes.
She got very good at these straight copies so I suggested she go to the next step. ...to take one of those scenes and make up her own poses of the character within the same scene. Add some poses that suggest a continuity- a bit of story business.

So she used the same construction and line of action techniques from the Preston Blair lessons and created 2 original poses in sequence of the original scene.

HOW TO STAGE AND POSE CHARACTERS
The poses are well constructed, have clear silhouettes and seem to tell a story - even without dialogue. The fox here is listening for the splash of the character he just kicked into the well.
Then he runs off and seems to be saying" I know! Now I'll get some oil and pour it on the little bugger!"

Geneva is now doing what I call "functional drawings" - drawings that have a purpose and tell a story. That's what it's all about. It's the final goal. Once you are at that point you just continue to learn new things and keep adding them to your storytelling functional drawings and you get better and better.

She started her learning process by studying the basics and step by step learned how to use the principles of good cartooning and staging by copying the works of accomplished skilled cartoonists who really knew what they were doing.

Learning how others did stuff is a good way to propel yourself to the point where you can do good stuff.

http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/

LEARN YOUR BASIC CARTOON TOOLS FIRST

I have seen many people become good at copying, but then never think to apply what they learned to their own drawings. Applying something from what you study tests you to see if you actually understood what you copied.

These are some great examples of cartoony drawings in their purest forms.
Otto Messmer is probably the biggest influence on American animation there ever was.
His drawings are boiled down to the very essence of what a cartoon is. He's not even trying to mimic reality. His style is very simple, but also appealing.
Even his props are fun to look at. This quality of being fun to look at is what makes a cartoon different than other forms of illustration.
The simple shapes and symbolic stylized expressions Messmer uses tell the viewer clearly what is happening and what the character is feeling.
Messmer's style owes a lot to early cartoony comic strips like The Katzenjammer Kids, but also reveals graphic innovations that he discovered through trial and error by having to move characters about on screen.
Poses that are moving have to be even more clearly staged than still drawings in a comic strip, because in film, we only have a limited time to look at each pose before it moves into another.
Animators like Messmer and most who followed him quickly learned that clear negative shapes and using only a few lines and details helped make characters communicate faster and more clearly when animated. It also made them easier to animate, which resulted in better movement.

By turning the practical realities of animation into graphic appeal, he solved a lot of problems for the rest of us.

http://comicrazys.com/2010/03/26/felix-the-cat-various-sundays-otto-messmer/

I made this layout setup by looking at the various storyboard panels that all use the same setup.
Here are some storyboard panels from the first chapter of Slab's First Fist. These are all shots that use the same "setup". - In other words, the camera is at the same angle and distance from the same background and characters.
When I draw these storyboard panels, I am drawing fast and straight ahead, not worrying about the drawings being perfect, or the drawings flipping from pose to pose for animation. I am just telling the story. If I had to make perfect clean drawings that flip exactly and with detailed backgrounds, I would not have the time or mental energy to think about telling the story.
http://jkcartoonstories.blogspot.com/2009/12/slabs-first-fist.html


FIND THE FURTHEST POINTS OF ACTION IN THE SCENE: top, bottom, left, right.

You need to plan for your widest actions. The poses above and below use up the most space in the frame. If you can fit these into the paper, you'll be able to fit the rest of the poses that don't take as much space up. (I have a tendency to draw everything too big, and have to go back and resize things)
Side Note: WHY LAYOUT IS SO IMPORTANT

I have to tell you, that this use of layout is the most important ingredient of the so-called "creator-driven" revolution of cartoons that happened in the late 80s and early 90s. It's every bit as important as the creativity of the ideas behind the cartoons, probably even more so.

Without it, all the ideals of cartoons written by cartoonists, directors heading up units, individual artists' styles being recognizable and the input of each creative person's personality and ideas actually appearing on-screen could never have happened. Could never and would never have.

Animation itself, the kernel of what we are supposed to be doing was forever banished to far-away shores, away from the control of the few wanna-be cartoon creators. In television, using layouts to control what you see on screen was the only way possible to give cartoons back to the cartoonists.

It freed the story artists to once again concentrate on story, allowed the top artists, draftsmen and stylists an avenue for their creativity and brought back the job of "director" to cartoons. Not merely a "sheet-timer" as many people think of direction, but a true director who could follow the creativity of the film from beginning to the end of production and make the cartoon unique and filled with original specific ideas and drawings, not just another assembly line product.

The rest of the Spumco production system was built around this fundamental part of the creative process.


BTW, I added an overview of my ideal cartoon college curriculum:

http://johnkcurriculum.blogspot.com/2009/12/cartoon-college.html

I gave Kali a layout lesson yesterday. Here's just the first drawing I did. It came from this rough below. The first thing I did was block everything out real roughly to make sure I had the line of action and big negative spaces between the main parts of the action- between his body foot and dresser.
Like everyone does, I toned it down a bit, but now that it's all constructed I could easily go back and push the foot and eyes a little more like the rough.The Focus of the pose: THE FOOT PUSHING THE DRAWER IN.
The whole pose is made to highlight this action.

His body leans back. I used a line of action to do that.
Second in importance to the physical action in the drawing, is his reaction to it. His feeling. His personality. That takes place mostly in the face.

Note how I left space between all the important major elements of his face:
The eyes.
The nose
The mouth
Some people tend to push all the features together where they get cramped and hard to read.

Looking at the lucky accident in the rough-where the eye that is further away from us is bigger (which is wrong perspective) I used that to enhance the expression.

I made sure the rest of his head and face were in solid construction and perspective, and then gave the eyes cartoon license. I overlapped the farther away eye over the close eye. This exaggerates the impression that the eyes are looking back at us, opposite to his body pose which is facing the dresser.

If I broke the rules all over the drawing and made nothing logical, you wouldn't be drawn to the eyes because nothing would make sense.

To help read the face against the arm I made sure that there was a clear silhouette to the edge of the face. Some shapes push out (muzzle and nose), some indent in - the eye mask area. This indented eye mask area helps him look smug. It helps pull his eye brows up.

Note that the smile line and cheek line above create a shape (in yellow). The smile is pushing the meat of his cheek up, squeezing the area between. Note also the soft angles curving around the cheek/face area. It isn't a simple circular curve or half oval.

His fingers are not doing anything so I keep them contained within the shape of the hand.
For organic pseudo-realism, I made the fingers converge towards each other at bottom, rather than be parallel sausages.
The other hand is just hanging back and those fingers "splay". They aim very slightly apart, also for organicness.
I put weight on the foot on the ground by bending the knee and having the lower part of the leg overlap the top of the foot.
Also, the top of the foot bulges upwards in the middle, while the bottom part is being squashed flat against the ground.

I kept the toenails compressed together so as not to compete for attention with the other foot that is closing the drawer.


Note the shape created by the space between his foot and arm (in red). It's diagonal, which helps draw attention to the fact that the foot is pushing forward of the body. If the hand had been posed right on top of the foot, it would have eaten away at the focus of the whole pose.

All this is logic and control and is what separates functional drawings from elaborate fancy ass sketchbook doodles.

In order to get functional, you have to do lots and lots of thoughtful planned drawings (as opposed to random doodling in your sketchbooks). Not just one every couple weeks. It's not enough to think you understand the concepts. You have to apply them to make them sink in and eventually become second nature.

Later, I will show you Kali's first try at doing a layout from the scene, my corrections and comments and then her 2nd try where she fixes everything and makes the pose stronger.

OK?

Hey, I have a question. How many people who read the blog are here for the drawing tips?

I've done both.

In the mid 8os, after working from horribly bland designs for Saturday Morning cartoon shows, I got a job that was much more fun (for me) - designing characters.

First for Dic's Heathcliff and then for presentation departments at Hanna Barbera and TMS.

Designing characters in the abstract for pay, and not having any responsibility for any of the other departments in a cartoon studio is a fun job.

You don't have to worry if your designs actually work and what problems they might cause for the other artists. This is a selfish profession, and if I wasn't able to sell my own cartoons, I was glad to have it. I hated drawing the boring characters in Saturday Morning cartoons doing the boring things the boring writers would come up with - or not come up with, but just steal from the last 30 scripts they plagiarized.


At least now I could personally have abstract fun creating visuals that might fool an executive or impress my artist friends. The kinds of designs I usually came up with for "development" while sometimes superficially interesting to look at, were in reality usually pretty shallow. They weren't really characters, because no one had bothered to work out entertaining personalities for them - and that wasn't my job as I was told many times.

When I designed my own characters though, I was using a whole different set of rules. These designs couldn't just look superficially interesting; they had to be characters. Real ones with souls, personalities and humor. That made them harder to coordinate the poses and the design. It shocks you to reality when you have to come up with poses that tel a story with your own awkward designs.

I had the lucky break to do layouts on the Jetsons after serving a stint as a "designer" for Iwao at Hanna Barbera on bullshit pitches designed to trick Network executives - shows with catchy names like "Rock Wars".

Having to draw an expert character designer's characters (Ed Benedict) and make them move and act and perform tricky things forced me to look at everything about cartoons in a more mature way.

I discovered that no job at a studio should be completely isolated from another. Each specialism had its role in making the overall cartoon better.

To me, the most important job in a cartoon is animation - the guy who actually has to bring the characters to life on screen. Even a director's job is to create the optimum situations and framework to display animated characters doing things that only animated characters can do.

Unfortunately, no one in America (on TV) did animation anymore, so I used the layouts on the Jetsons to create the poses and acting and life as a substitute for animation.



I came back from Taiwan a much wiser and abler cartoonist, because I now knew the results of good or bad stories, storyboards and designs and how they affected the potential life (or lack of) the characters.


From then on, I never believed in model sheets again, except as a starting point. The people who have to pose and move the characters are the ones who have to come up with the myriads of new expressions, poses and shadings of personality that a mere character designer - abstracted from the visual telling of the stories can't ever do.

That's why many of the best character model sheets are made by animators and directors. They make them functional because they have to use them themselves.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/animation-school-lesson-9-_116873606139658339.html


Modern design is completely abstracted from the process of animation today. TV animation is mostly done in flash - and even when a show theoretically does "traditional" drawn animation, the animators are rigidly forced to trace the model sheets.

Why does everyone today want to be a character designer? Because it's the only potentially creative job left. Unfortunately even that is not very creative anymore because everyone just copies the same designs over and over again and each year they get more primitive. How many times has DeeDee been completely ripped off?


But the design has never been animated as well as when Genndy animated her.


It's now at the point where anybody can be a character designer - as long as you can fool the executive in charge into thinking you're the hip new thing that's already been around for 25 years.

It doesn't matter if the designs are actually animated characters anymore.