Monday, 29 February 2016

Visual Language - Life Drawing in an animation context


Joanna Quinn is one of my great inspirations. The vigor, spirit and soul you feel in just her drawings before they even begin to move and ooze in life, it captures me. 

I believe one of the main reasons why there is so much soul within her characters is because of how importance she considers life drawing to be in the process of animation.

This extract from The Fundamentals of Animation by Paul Wells (2006) details;



In this book, Quinn makes the interesting interpretation of when things are observed from life, they can often turn out to be more exaggerated than our own minds would of abstracted. "we may think our imaginations are far more adventurous than real life, but for me the truth is always stranger than fiction".

This is really pronouncing the great details, the little details of life that you can get and capture, just by observing closely.

Joanna Quinn also exaggerates the importance of drawing what you see rather than drawing thinking about how 'good' a drawing it is. 


With life drawing you have a connection with what your drawing, a connection with the real instead of the fantasy, it is tangible. With Quinns sketches, you can feel this connection that she has with the subject and her pen. Models bring an energy and life force which has the potential to ooze out onto the spectators if captured effectively. 

Its not just animation where life drawing is important, but with film too. When we consider storyboard artists, drawing poses and certain movements of actors to pan out a scene, some concept of human anatomy knowledge is needed in order to pan out your ideas to be easily understood by others.



No comments:

Post a Comment