Thursday, May 18, 2006

John K.'s Animation Lessons: Lesson 1

Hi I'm back and brought stuff to show ya! I've been meaning to show these off for quite some time, especially now that John has posted lesson 4 on his blog.

John Kricfalusi's animation lessons that he gives from the original Preston Blair book, which has some original MGM characters, is such a great oppurtinity for me to take advantage of as a a cartoonist and as an artist. With this type of practice, I can improve my skills in drawing animated cartoons.

First off, I've paid close attention to what this book says and copied all of lesson 1's head constructions with some slight differences that I've added.

Okay here in this fisrt one I've noticed I can never get something symmetrical. For some reason I have the tendency to make my drawings lean a bit more to the right. You can somewhat see this in the egg-shaped guy next to the bear head.

You'll notice that these four heads on top lean slighlty to the right, especially that last one. To improve myself with this, I added a line in the middle to one of the heads to make sure the symmetry of the head works out fine.
Here I'm getting a little bit better, especially with symmetry. I also knew that I had to catch the personality and character of these heads, which I think was the most important thing I needed to copy. I tried being careful with all the forms and shapes within these heads to try to make them look exactly like how they are in the book. I tried drawing these cute heads as fast as I could to see how well I could capture them in a faster-pace. The dog heads were kinda tricky so I might need to compare those with the originals in Photoshop.
Here I think is where I improved alot. This wolf was the most fun for me to draw. He has such an interesting and cartoony look to him. I love that! Droopy's head was somewhat hard to do as well as the goat's head and the fox's head.

I've learned sooo much from doing this lesson. It was real fun and informative for me. Such great lessons! I never took the chance to take advantage from this book until now and It's great!

Well that's all I have for now. I'll probably work on all lesson's this weekend (HOPEFULLY!) and keep posting as much stuff as I can.