Coming to Life

It's easy to draw cartoon characters as they are seen. It's harder to draw the character AS that character. What I mean is that there is more than just the physical look of the characters. There's their mannerisms, personality traits, and a personal story about them. Animators focus on who their characters are and what makes them special. Life drawing helps with becoming familiar of the human anatomy and how each body part functions. Life drawing is one thing, but adding animation into that is something completely different.
Life drawing was very hard for me. I've gotten a lot better, but making one part look exactly as I see it was challenging and made me want to chew my fingers off. When I was finally became comfortable enough drawing models and duplicate what I see, I had it all flushed down the toilet once I entered my current Life Drawing for Animation class. I had to stop thinking about drawing nouns and instead begin drawing verbs (Walt Stanchfield's book really opened my eyes to this). Each drawing had to look as if it were still in movement, which was a whole another challenge to overcome. Still, I really enjoyed loosely sketching figures and adding a story to them by having them bend and twist to a more cartoonish style.
These angular bends and twists really separate life drawing from animation. Knowing the anatomy of a figure is very important for knowing how your character is going to move and express itself. These movements are then exaggerated to where it becomes a more cartoony feel. Animators want their characters to have a living quality to them and not like a stiff cardboard. The drawing has to feel real or else the audience won't connect with either the characters or the story. I'm really interested in character development and animation so getting to learn all of this really makes me excited.
You can't animate without knowing what you're animating. Figure and gesture drawing really helps with placing down different personalities for each figure. Getting the movements down for a character that explains the specific type of person that character is will make animating it a success and worth it in the long run.
The next topic will link with this in more ways than one: Character Designing!