Classwork | Exaggerated Drawing

Exaggerated drawing for animation. Emphasising line of motion to express character and emotion in my drawings and therefore animations.

Also, the exercise helped with trying to create a sense of three dimensional form. One of the fall-backs of being weak in this area is that an artist will use the same, 2 dimensional angles, or they will use the same angles in all their work.

This creates a lack of dynamics and a lack of movement and fluidity and weight and gesture in your poses. Namely because you're treating whatever you're drawing as a solid 2D object rather than trying to think about how that object is moving in three dimensional space.

The core of being an animator is the ability to manipulate and move a pose and change angles e.g being able to lift the head, rotate the head. So mastering three dimensional form is absolutely key when it comes to animation and this exercise helped with developing that core skill.

In this exercise, I struggled most with balancing a sense of my characters weight with the line of motion. I got so caught up in the expression of the line that I forgot to ground the character's body weight which ended up creating some odd, float-y drawings.

After I went home, I spent the afternoon re-rendering my line of motion class drawings trying to balance the line of motion with a more realistic, polished sense of weight and detail. I do think they actually came out quite well. (Except for the crouched one, which was very hard for me to draw because of the curled in pose being very unfamiliar, and confusing, to me due to all the limbs being crunched together.) I definitely came out with more varied and dynamic poses than I usually draw so the exercise was definitely a success in making me think more about three dimensional space.