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Raphael
I am still studying Preston Blair's book, page after page in my sketchbook filling with the expressive curves and fluid forms. As I study, sometimes I draw something just a little off model and it's like driving in Tuley fog. It clears for a moment and suddenly I can see Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and many others. Then it disappears into my page again but I realize just how much everyone learned from one another.
Most if not all of the old masters are dead now. There are some new animators that give me a little hope, but by in large, more seem to be going for graceless work and gross-out jokes. Travesties like Baby Looney Tunes particularly sadden me. I've heard recently that Disney is about to retire their drawn animation department and go all CGI. Not that I think CGI is bad. There are some CGI things I like quite a lot... But it's missing something for me. I guess one could take some kind of spiritual view, that in old animation, every stroke of every line of every frame has some tiny fragment of the heart and soul of it's creator. They still tangibly exist inside their works, living and breathing for as long as the projector light flickers. CGI animation lives only in the keyframes.
I'm not a very spiritual person though, and while I can feel that, I try to look at it in a more quantifiable asthetic sense and try to find what it is. So far I think it is the style and grace and elegance of a line. Each cel is a piece of art unto itself with it's own sense of rhythm and balance, making it flow into the next. Repetition of pattern, an elegance of character design that, out of context, doesn't even look vaguely like the living image of the character we hold in our imaginations. It is strange and powerful to me and I'm learning new things as I study. Subtle things that I could never do in CG.
Tonight I studied facial expression. As I drew each expression, I became aware that in trying to faithfully reproduce Blair's work, I drew my starting shapes differently than I would on my own. In my study, I varied the symmetry of my forms. What I mean is... When I draw circles, I usually start at the top and make several short sweeps counterclockwise until I have something roughly circular. When I study Preston Blair's characters, I started my circle at varying points, depending on the mood I was trying to capture. Nor did my circles always move counterclockwise. In fact, they tended to follow the direction of the expression in the character. It's a subtle difference but at the foundation level of the character. The results are sharply different and even drawing from memory, I am now finding my work a bit closer to what I want.
The last thing of importance tonight in my study was this: The old masters didn't know everything. I am seeing in Blair's work that there are things that animators since have learned that he had not incorporated stongly into his designs. In his examples, the ears of the anthropomorphic characters are surprising unexpressive and often seem to break the rhythm and harmony that exists in the rest of the character. The same is true (though to a lesser degree) for eyebrows. I have also experiemented ever so slightly with incorperating expressions of mood from manga into my studies and observed the change in asthetic between cartoons of their time and of ours (Most notably, jowls and eye sizes) After such a long time of feeling static and stuck, I am now feeling unmired and as if I am contributing something again.
It's funny. My personal role model in life has always been Leonardo DaVinci, but now, as I study the old masters, of my time, I've found my asthetics drifting towards Raphael. I am certainly not he, but as I study, I can see some of his mistakes, triumphs, and additions to the works of the old masters he studied, and feel a bit of comradiery in the playfulness of his brush and florish of line. In some ways, he was the greatest of them all for his ambition and ability to take what he had learned and push it just that little bit further and make it his own. Perhaps it's time I began to consider a new role-model or at least adopting a strong second.
-Samantha
Most if not all of the old masters are dead now. There are some new animators that give me a little hope, but by in large, more seem to be going for graceless work and gross-out jokes. Travesties like Baby Looney Tunes particularly sadden me. I've heard recently that Disney is about to retire their drawn animation department and go all CGI. Not that I think CGI is bad. There are some CGI things I like quite a lot... But it's missing something for me. I guess one could take some kind of spiritual view, that in old animation, every stroke of every line of every frame has some tiny fragment of the heart and soul of it's creator. They still tangibly exist inside their works, living and breathing for as long as the projector light flickers. CGI animation lives only in the keyframes.
I'm not a very spiritual person though, and while I can feel that, I try to look at it in a more quantifiable asthetic sense and try to find what it is. So far I think it is the style and grace and elegance of a line. Each cel is a piece of art unto itself with it's own sense of rhythm and balance, making it flow into the next. Repetition of pattern, an elegance of character design that, out of context, doesn't even look vaguely like the living image of the character we hold in our imaginations. It is strange and powerful to me and I'm learning new things as I study. Subtle things that I could never do in CG.
Tonight I studied facial expression. As I drew each expression, I became aware that in trying to faithfully reproduce Blair's work, I drew my starting shapes differently than I would on my own. In my study, I varied the symmetry of my forms. What I mean is... When I draw circles, I usually start at the top and make several short sweeps counterclockwise until I have something roughly circular. When I study Preston Blair's characters, I started my circle at varying points, depending on the mood I was trying to capture. Nor did my circles always move counterclockwise. In fact, they tended to follow the direction of the expression in the character. It's a subtle difference but at the foundation level of the character. The results are sharply different and even drawing from memory, I am now finding my work a bit closer to what I want.
The last thing of importance tonight in my study was this: The old masters didn't know everything. I am seeing in Blair's work that there are things that animators since have learned that he had not incorporated stongly into his designs. In his examples, the ears of the anthropomorphic characters are surprising unexpressive and often seem to break the rhythm and harmony that exists in the rest of the character. The same is true (though to a lesser degree) for eyebrows. I have also experiemented ever so slightly with incorperating expressions of mood from manga into my studies and observed the change in asthetic between cartoons of their time and of ours (Most notably, jowls and eye sizes) After such a long time of feeling static and stuck, I am now feeling unmired and as if I am contributing something again.
It's funny. My personal role model in life has always been Leonardo DaVinci, but now, as I study the old masters, of my time, I've found my asthetics drifting towards Raphael. I am certainly not he, but as I study, I can see some of his mistakes, triumphs, and additions to the works of the old masters he studied, and feel a bit of comradiery in the playfulness of his brush and florish of line. In some ways, he was the greatest of them all for his ambition and ability to take what he had learned and push it just that little bit further and make it his own. Perhaps it's time I began to consider a new role-model or at least adopting a strong second.
-Samantha
CGI
Also, Jane Classical can put deformations due to weight and subtlelty in every single frame. Joe CGI doesn't have that luxury. Either Joe doesn't know how to do deformations, or Joe can't add deformations to an already bound skin, or he doesn't have the time to do all this stuff and add deformations, or he doesn't have memory to have deformations and all the other stuff. Well, unless he works for Pixar or ILM and has lots of knowledge and computing power.
The last reason I think is the way character design in CGI doesn't usually match up to the memory allocated. Years ago classical animators figured out that their character designs need to be simple and iconic to be believable frame after frame after frame. I kinda feel like the way to animate, especially up close and personal, is to go more cartoony in style, but people are still figuring this one out. So Final Fantasy doesn't work, but Monsters Inc. does. That kind of thing.
End o' rant. Sorry, Sammi.