Solid Drawing

In the beginning at the birth of animation they stated that you needed to be a true expert artist, whom could understand anatomical movement almost as much as Leonardo de Vinci. This is still true today, although not to as much of an extent. It is useful to know such things in order to demonstrate weight, depth and balance (the basics of solid, 3 dimensional drawing,) within your work, and other smaller issues such as tone, shadows and colour palette. This is why life drawing lessons and constant practice of sketchbook drawing should be of great importance in an animator’s life, so that they can truly study outside movement first hand with a pencil as their mentor. Even so no object or figure in animation will ever truly resemble that object, no matter how beautifully drawn if it doesn’t move how it is supposed to.
Constant practice of such analysis will prohibit an animator from accidentally drawing “twins” which is the unfortunate situation where arms and legs are moving in exactly the same way completely parallel to each other with no change this would not occur in real time. Solid drawing’s will help animators not only discover this mistake far more quickly (as the majority of the time they do not realise they have done it,) but also aid them in how to correct it afterwards. Solid drawing eventually will help an artist loosen up and establish that all animated forms even though have mass; it is not a dense mass and therefore has a level of flexibility that it must ascertain. ‘We used the term “plastic” (antonym: Static,) and just the definition of the word seemed to convey the feeling of potential activity in the drawing,’ (F. Thomas and O. Johnston, 1981 p.68)

Life drawing: 1min16 from Karl Armen on Vimeo.