It's difficult for anyone to take a storyboard drawing and turn it into a layout. When I draw a storyboard I just scribble it out fast and don't worry about it being perfect or totally constructed or functional. But a layout artist has to take that scribble and give it function and sense- while maintaining the spontaneous feel that the storyboard panel has. It's hard to make something
look spontaneous when it isn't, but that's what a layout should aim for.


Here's Anne's adaptation of my sketch. It does look spontaneous and cute but could be more solidly constructed.

Here's a stage I know that lots of artists skip when drawing characters. After drawing the line of action, you should construct the charcter on top of it. Draw each form all the way around-the whole body, the whole head - not just parts you will see in the final drawing.
There are other things you have to look for while doing this - like maintaining the guts, negative spaces, silhouettes etc... but let's just take this step first.
I would like to see some cartoonists here make some soldidly constructed rough drawings of the poses they are copying from my storyboards or from old cartoons and comics. This is the step no one seems to want to do. Maybe it's boring.
If I was to construct the other character now, I'd first analyze what I'm looking at:
She is on more of an angle than Roxy
Her head is tilted up and back
Therefore when I construct her, I have to construct her head as if we are looking slightly up at it - her eyes will be higher on her head, we will see more of her jaw than we would at a normal 3/4 angle etc.
http://unlearningartschool.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-tried-to-think-about-that-shan-needs.html
ReplyDeleteI started doing this one! I wasn't sure how to separate the characters, though-- I wanted to put some space between the two, but I think in the process I convoluted lines of action.
It isn't a boring step at all, and I want to do it. Thanks for always being so helpful, John, I wanna make you proud some day.
dang it, here's a clickable link:
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