Feedback from Expert - James Suhr
James Suhr - Storyboarder at Disney Animation Studios
has reviewed the student work from the class and has given detailed instruction to improve your drawings. Below is a general feedback to the entire class and he has also given individual feeback including draw overs to help you understand how to improve your drawings. Each student received links to extensive individual files for review and to rework and become stronger artists.
James skyped with us on 2/9/15 and did 2 sessions of extremely helpful Draw Overs
which you can see selections through out this site.
James Suhr Action Drawing Round 2
For the Class:
On the whole, this class has improved so much since the the beginning and I’m really, really inspired by the work Susan has done to make this class so successful. I do want to remind students that just because you took a class once doesn’t mean that you’ve mastered the material though, you’ve just become very familiar with what is expected of you. Take what you’ve learned from your teacher and keep practicing.
With that said, here’s four things I noticed across the board that everyone should practice:
When animating, feet don’t magically slide unless there is a reason. If you are pulling a rope or dancing in a circle, when a person plants a foot, it stays there unless you’ve established, or are establishing the opposing force on the rope is stronger and pulling back, or they on some slippery surface like mud. Also, if a character takes a step, you need to show a contact drawing to indicate to the audience that the person took a step. As individual slowwwwwwlly paced illustrations I can figure it out (like say in a comic book), but when things are moving with just frames in between them, it’s very hard to follow and makes the action look ‘muddy’ (difficult to see, and very undefined). I’d show you a drawing here to illustrate, but pretty much everyone got one in their critique.
Apes more than any other creature have muscles very similar to humans (though proportions are different). Please remember this when drawing them. Also, apes are said to walk on their knuckles, but they really walk on their forefingers. They will stop and rest on their knuckles, but please don’t draw them walking like they are punching the ground. Lastly pay particular not to how small ape thumbs are in relation to the rest of their hands. They have little baby thumbs.
3. When dealing with quadrupeds and their legs try to find the shoulder blade. This will help you figure out how the leg works more accurately. Also study how quads. walk on their toes and how this makes their heels point up the the sky. All of you desperately need to study the hind leg around where the knee is.
Lastly, please, please, please don’t draw large cats with short rib cages. Most fourlegged animals have a rib cab 1 and a half times longer than than ours (1/3 the length of the animal on the whole). Here’s a figure skeleton to illustrate my points.
4. My last group critique is about straight vs. curves. Learn to use them more. I started seeing some practice and awareness in this batch of drawings, but one particular model y’all studied, a baby squid with curling tentacles, lended itself perfectly for this but everyone went overly round and it killed any sense of action or movement in the drawing. Sometimes you need to vary from what the model is exactly doing in order to make it work in the 2D world. You aren’t cameras, you’re artists.
KCAD Digital Character Drawing curriculum and site designed by Susan Bonner.