Basics Of Traditional Drawing

Basics of Traditional & Computer Animation By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com Guide to Animation Animation has progressed from painstaking labors with cels and paint to the digital animation, with dozens of hybrid techniques in between. Whether you'd like to learn the basics of traditional animation or get started with digital 2D and 3D animation, we've got the information that you need to get started.

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Principles of Animation Flash 2D Animation Basics 3D Animation Basics FAQ and Glossary

Principles of Animation

Whether you're animating by hand or using digital techniques, there are some basic principles that remain universal. Lip-synching, squash and stretch, walk cycles - all are familiar hallmarks of animation, and should be mastered no matter how you prefer to animate. • •

Building an Animation-Ready Character Animation Character Sheet/Character Breakdown Basics

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Lip-Synching For Animation: Basic Phonemes Keyframe and In-Between Basics

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8-Frame Basic Walk Cycle Pencil Animation: Rough Motion Sketches

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Pencil Animation: Rough Detail Sketches Pencil Animation: Retracing & Line Weight

Flash 2D Animation Basics

Animating in Flash can be fun, and can be as easy as just a few clicks. You can use Flash to create detailed frame-by-frame animations, or to automate animations using Flash's tweening processes. •

Flash Basics: Tweening

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Flash Basics: Program Tools Flash Traditional Animation

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Understanding Flash Symbols Masking

3D Animation Basics 3D animation is used in video games, in movies, even in everyday television. It can be used to create wholly 3D productions as short as an advertisement or as long as a feature film, or can be layered with live action for special effects. •

Understanding Computer Animation

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Understanding Video Game and Movie Animation 3D Studio Max Introduction

FAQ and Glossary Have questions? Need to learn the basics of animation terminology? Check out the FAQ and glossary, where many of your most frequently asked questions and definitions of simple animation terms are covered.

Building an Animation-Ready Character from the Ground Up

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You may be an amazing detail artist, but how good are you at creating effective animation-ready art? Cartoon art is different from illustration in that it focuses not only on style, but on efficiency. When you’re drawing a character fifteen times for one second of motion, every additional level of unnecessary detail can add hours of work and more than double the level of difficulty. While that’s fine for a team of animators splitting the work on a feature-length film, what about independent animators or studios that have to produce an entire season’s worth of 20-60 minute episodes in a very short period of time? Once you have your character concept in mind, it can be hard to break it down to the necessary minimum – especially when working in reverse from complex art. Instead let’s look at how to build an animation-ready character from the ground up, starting at the simplest level and working with basic shapes to construct the body. Whether you’re fully traditional or combine in traditional with 2D computer animation, this tutorial should still be of use to you.

I like to start off with a stick-figure to capture the pose and flow. The important thing to look at here is the central line of the body, the arc and flow of it, and the positioning of the lines marking the shoulders and hips. The body counterbalances its planes to maintain equilibrium, so if one plane of the body tilts in one direction, another plane will tilt in the opposite direction to maintain balance. 2 of 8

From the stick sketch, add bulk using plain shapes. Visualize the body, and try to break it down into rectangles, triangles, cylinders, and circles. Try to think in three dimensions; for instance, my head isn’t just a circle with a triangle tacked on to it. It’s a curving sphere with a pyramid appended to the bottom, which means that I need to think about the dimensions that aren’t visible as well as the dimensions that are. The neck is a cylinder, set atop a pyramid for the slope down to the circles of the shoulders and then perched atop the tapering box of the chest. Don’t get too detailed here; you’re not trying to capture accuracy. You just want to get a basic idea of bulk and form, captured in simple shapes. Look at it as building an old-style wooden marionette, before they’re carved in detail. 3 of 8

So far the body form is very generic; start adding in other small details, like a few rectangular blocks to represent the connected mass of the fingers, a solid and generic shape for the hair, and any other body features that are necessary to the character. Remember – shapes only. The only thing that I tend to use an amorphous shape for from the start is the hair, but some people prefer to break even that down to interconnected blocks and circles. 4 of 8

Let’s get to the actual detail work. Start drawing on top of your sketched forms – you can’t see my block forms underneath because I retraced on a separate sheet, layering using a light table. Try to see how much you can add proper shape and form without deviating too far from your base shapes. Add in a few more details – individual fingers and more individual sections on the hair, but not too many, as hair is a pain to animate and the more complicated that you make it, the more you’ll be kicking yourself later. This is a good time to correct any issues with proportions and positions, as once you start drawing the actual defined shapes of the body you’ll notice where things don’t work. You can see that I had to correct the right leg, because I placed the knee lower than that of the leg on the left, when it should have been higher due to the angle of her hips. The important thing to remember as you’re working on this is that you aren’t illustrating, and everything that you’re sketching now, you’ll be sketching hundreds of times over in the future. If you find yourself spending too much time focusing on any one area, then you’re putting too much detail into it. Try to think of what’s effective to capture the body flow – challenge yourself to convey the most with the fewest lines. Animation generally stays within enclosed shapes for each color, so that the cel painters (or digital colorists) have guidelines for where solid fills go and don’t have to estimate. 5 of 8

Here’s where I usually stop to draw in the features, starting with the eyes. I’ll usually draw a perfectly round pupil, then draw the shape of the eye around it, using sharply angled lines that I’ll soften and round out later. Those extra sketched lines are guidelines:  First, draw a vertical line bisecting the head from the point of the chin to the crown of the head; it’s going to arc a little, but it’s supposed to. If the head is tilted instead of looking straight forward, you’ll have to estimate a little – but it won’t take you long to develop an eye for it.  The head is basically composed of a circle with a triangle appended to the lower half; in order to draw the guideline for the eyes, look at the circle composing the upper half of the head, and sketch a line that would divide the circle into equal hemispheres, following the circle’s arc. Your eyes should be centered so that the arc bisects them.  The generic way to position the nose is to draw another arcing horizontal guideline at a point halfway between the guideline for the eyes, and the point of the chin. Where the horizontal guideline bisects the vertical guideline is where the center point of the nose will rest.  The positioning of the mouth is similar: draw another bisecting line halfway between the nose’s guideline and the chin. This line is the crease/part of the lips, with upper lip above, lower lip below, while the vertical line neatly divides the mouth into two halves. 6 of 8

After retracing with clean lines, you have a basic body form with minimal lines, detailing only the what’s absolutely necessary while still maintaining proportion, balance, and style. As you’re retracing, choose which lines you do or don’t need carefully. The fewer, the better. The only problem is…she’s naked. Some people prefer to draw everything all at once - body, clothing, etc. I prefer to start with the base body – for the sake of decency we’ll say she’s a mannequin, or wearing a body stocking – as a reference; drawing a clothed body freehand can often result in incorrect proportions and awkward drapery, even if you’re drawing simplified cartoon clothing that almost directly follows the lines of the body. It’s rather like buying new clothing; even though you know your sizes (as long as you haven’t gone off your diet), you don’t know how an outfit is going to look on you until you actually try it on, and while you may have imagined that the blue shirt you’ve been eyeing would drape one way, the image in the mirror tells you something entirely different once you’ve got it on. All right, that analogy deviated a bit far off the beaten path. To sum it up, you need the base body underneath as a guideline so that you can draw clothing to follow the position and angle of each portion of the body. So, let’s move on to give her a little cover. 7 of 8

With the body base drawn, it’s easy to fit clothing over it. You may notice in many made-for-television cartoons that clothing is often skin-tight, distinguished from the body only by some extra bounding lines and different colors. This is a common trick for animators with a great deal of content to produce in very little time; adding extra detail to the clothing adds extra hours to the work. Just by drawing seven arcing lines, I’ve given her a turtleneck. However, I’m not a big fan of the “tights as fashion” look, so I gave her khakis, using a great many straight lines and trying to keep to angles rather than curves – following the lines of the legs to determine the drape and flow of the pants, and drawing some small detail, but not too much. Just in one leg I can count at least eleven key points that I would have to match up from one frame to the next, though currently these shapes are easier to work with than the shapes of her bare legs. Now…I have issues with hands and feet; some days I can draw them, some days I can’t. So I cheated – I gave her immensely long pants that completely conceal her feet. We’re going to say that I did that to make her easier to animate, because that means that I would rarely have to worry about her feet. But if you do draw shoes, remember that you’re only hurting yourself if you have to draw every single lace and tread. Also don’t forget, when adding clothing, that you should still try to keep your shapes entirely enclosed. 8 of 8

Retraced, this is the finished result: clean artwork with simple lines and easily identifiable key points that can be used to estimate from one frame to the next. It’s not fine art, but it’s a valued one nonetheless; simplicity in design doesn’t always have to be childish or bland, and some of the best cartoons use extremely simple lines in a very effective style to create unique characters with more implied detail than actual visibly drawn detail. Varied line width has a great deal to do with that, and it’s something that I try to use often once I get to the final line stages of a piece. If you’d like to learn more about actual art techniques such as line weight, Guide Helen South has a plethora of articles and lessons on drawing and sketching. Creating a character this way also makes adding color very easy, whether you’re painting cels or coloring digitally. I filled in plain, solid color without highlights – you’ll find that your average Saturday morning cartoon still doesn’t use many highlights and shadows save for in exceptional situations – for this in Photoshop in less than ten minutes using nothing but bucket fills, if you’d like to take a look.

Animation Character Sheet/Character Breakdown Basics

Meet Vin. Vin is a character that I intend to animate, and as a result I’ve done a character sheet/character breakdown for him. Character sheets let you create a reference for your character, covering the basic views and making sure that your proportions match from drawing to drawing. It’s good practice for keeping things in proportion (even if your proportions include a tendency to freakishly long limbs, like mine) and getting used to drawing your character’s facial expressions. This character sheet is a simplified breakdown of more detailed character concept art; you need to reduce your character to as few lines as possible. For an idea of how to do that and why it’s necessary, take a look at the lesson on building an animationready character from the ground up. This is just a basic example character sheet, with the very minimum for the sake of demonstration. Before animating, you should try to build a larger sheet with more detail for your character. In the next few steps, we’ll take a closer look at the various breakdown poses.

more detailed character concept art

The side view is the easiest to draw – for me, anyway. You only have to worry about one of each limb, and the side view usually lets me get down the positions of the facial features relative to each other. If your character has distinguishing markings on one side or another that causes him or her to look different from either side, you’ll want to do two side views to illustrate the difference. While we’re looking at this, take a look at those lines that I’ve drawn behind each view. You’ll notice that save for minute shifts due to pose, those lines join corresponding places on each pose: the top of the head, the waist/elbows, fingertips, pelvis, knees, shoulders. After drawing the first view, it’s usually a good idea to pick your major points and use a ruler to draw lines from those major points and across the entire sheet, before sketching over them for the other views. This way you’ll have reference to make sure that you’re drawing everything to scale.

For your front view, try to draw your character standing straight, legs together or at least not too far apart, hands hanging at his or her sides with little deviation, face turned straight forward. You can save the attitude poses for later; right now you just want to get the basic details down and clearly in sight, and the front view generally proves the best view of the major character points.

There’s nothing wrong with cheating a little for the rear view and just retracing your front view with a few details changed. Don’t forget that if anything is oriented to a specific side, it’s going to reverse on the rear view. (Example above: the part in Vin’s hair, the slant of his belt.)

Most of the time you won’t be drawing your character straight-on, either from the front or from the side. A 3/4 view is one of the most common angles that you’ll draw your character at, so you’ll definitely need to include one of these in your character sheet. You can be a bit more free with the pose here; try to capture your character’s expression and attitude. Along with the 3/4 shot, you should also draw some action shots – various poses caught mid-motion, detailing how clothing or hair might move. You’ll see that the various key reference points don’t perfectly line up with the guidelines anymore, because of the angle. Instead they should cross right at the midsection of the point being measured - for instance, the one shoulder would be above the line marking the default height for them, while the other shoulder would be below. The hollow of the throat, a midpoint for the shoulders, should rest almost exactly on the guideline. I like to color my 3/4 view, just to get a look at how my character will look in color – and so I’ll have those colors available later, as I prefer to color my animations digitally and my character sheet now has all the default character colors I need, just an eyedropper selection away. I try to keep my colors to as few as possible - mostly just a solid color and a shadow color for each section, although in some cases I will include a highlight color. Shadows and highlights can be difficult to animate because they don't have solidly drawn boundaries that carry over to the final artwork, so they should be done as simply as possible.

Lastly, you should try to draw a detailed close-up of your character’s face, as it can tend to get minimized and a little sloppy in full-body shots. (You should draw closeups of any other important parts, too – like perhaps an engraved pendant, tattoo, or other marking that might normally be drawn without details in full-body shots. Don’t forget to draw ears. Ears get overlooked quite often. See above. I’m guessing Vin looks so aghast because he’s missing an ear; that looks painful.) I only have two facial expressions drawn here for example, but you should draw at least ten of the most common expressions for your character – whether he or she is generally smug, fearful, excited, happy, angry, etc. Keep drawing until you think you’ve covered their entire range of emotions.

Lip-Synching For Animation: Basic Phonemes

Animating speech can be one of the most difficult tasks in animation; the process of matching the mouth-movements of your animation to the phonemes of your audio track is most commonly known as lip-synching. For a quick fix, it's no problem to just animate the mouth opening and closing, and it's a simple shortcut, especially when animating for the web. But if you want to add actual expression and realistic mouth-movements, it helps to study how the shape of the mouth changes with each sound. There are dozens upon dozens of variations, but my sketches are renderings from the basic ten shapes of the Preston Blair phoneme series. (They're also an example of what happens when Adri dashes off ten-minute sketches from memory rather than detailed artwork.) These ten basic phoneme shapes (click the image thumbnail in the right-hand column of this page, orclick here for a full-size version) can match almost any sound of speech, in varying degrees of expression--and with the in-between frames moving

from one to the other, are remarkably accurate. You may want to keep this for reference. •

A and I: For the A and I vowel sounds, the lips are generally pulled a bit wider, teeth open, tongue visible and flat against the floor of the mouth.

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E: The E phoneme is similar to the A and I, but the lips are stretched a bit wider, the corners uplifted more, and the mouth and teeth closed a bit more.

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U: For the U sound, the lips are pursed outwards, drawn into a pucker but still somewhat open; the teeth open, and the tongue somewhat lifted.

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O: Again the mouth is drawn to a pucker, but the lips don't purse outwards, and the mouth is rounder, the tongue flat against the floor of the mouth.

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C, D, G, K, N, R, S, Th, Y, and Z: Long list, wasn't it? This configuration pretty much covers all the major hard consonants: lips mostly closed,

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stretched wide, teeth closed or nearly closed. F and V: Mouth at about standard width, but teeth pressed down into the

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lower lip. At times there can be variations closer to the D/Th configuration. L: The mouth is open and stretched apart much like the A/I configuration, but

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M, B, and P: These sounds are made with the lips pressed together; it's the duration that matters. "M" is a long hold, "mmm"; "B" is a shorter hold then

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part, almost a "buh" sound; P is a quick hold, puff of air. W and Q: These two sounds purse the mouth the most, almost closing it over the teeth, with just the bottoms of the upper teeth visible, sometimes not even that. Think of a "rosebud mouth".

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Rest Position: Think of this as the "slack" position, when the mouth is at rest--only with the thread of drool distinctly absent.

When you're drawing or modeling your animation, by listening to each word and the syllable combinations inherent you can usually break them down into a variation of these ten phoneme sets. Note that my drawings aren't perfectly symmetrical; that wasn't just shoddy sketching. No two people express themselves in an identical fashion, and each has individual facial quirks that make their speech and expressions asymmetrical.

Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Keyframe and In-Between Basics Animation Basics: Getting Started

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Flash is a fun tool for quick and easy automated animation, allowing you to create shapes and then move them about without having to draw every frame of the animation. But you can also animate in the traditional style--drawing every frame of animation, describing motion frame by frame in exquisite detail. Flash lets you mimic cel-style animation, but with so much more freedom; no more light tables, no more plastic sheets, pencils, inks, flip books, paints, cameras. It's all in the code--brushes in binary, sketches in subroutines. But in order to accomplish this, you still need to understand the principles of animation and how to use those basics in Flash. So for this lesson, we're going to learn how to choosekeyframe points and a few techniques for in-betweening. Although as we get deeper into these lessons we're going to discuss how to draw complex motion and detailed shapes, for this lesson we'll stay simple: a bouncing ball against a backdrop of a single horizon line. Create a new document with a frame rate of 12 and a 320w x240h size (4:3 aspect ratio) ; that's more than enough for web animation, though typical TV animation uses a 15 fps (4:3 ratio) with repeated frames, and film animation uses 30 (16:9 ratio).

Key Frame Definition: An animation key frame is a single still image in an animated sequence that occurs at an important point in that sequence; key frames are defined throughout an animated sequence, in order to define pivotal points of motion before the frames in between are drawn or otherwise created to "tween" the motion between the two key frames. One example of key frames could be an animation of a swinging baseball bat; the bat at rest would be one key frame, and the bat at the end of of its swing would be another. All other frames would be "tweened" frames.

Frame Rate Definition: The measure of the number of frames displayed sequentially per second of animation in order to create the illusion of motion. The higher the frame rate, the smoother the motion, because there are more frames per second to display the transition from point A to point B. Also Known As: frame frequency

Aspect Ratio

Definition: Refers to the ratio of width to height; in animation, the term "aspect ratio" is most commonly used when discussing standards of sizes for screen productions, such as a 4:3 aspect ratio for web or television, or 16:9 for widescreen. (An example of a 4:3 ratio is a 320x240 Flash document.)

Starting Point: First Key

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The best place to start animating is, naturally, the beginning. This animation is meant to be a ball bouncing into the scene and then out of it again, striking the ground line. So my first drawing--which will also be my first keyframe--will take place above the ground, and to the side of the stage, outside of the viewable area of my movie. I use a graphics tablet to draw directly in Flash, using the Pencil Tool set to smooth my lines as I draw them. You may wonder why my ball isn't exactly circular; in fact, it's a rather stretched ovoid, and that's one of the principles of animation that you want to keep in mind. A normal ball, when it bounces, shifts shape if it has any pliancy to it at all, as forces act upon it: gravity pulling, its own velocity creating pressure from the air, the ground pushing on it to deform it with impact.

Animation takes these minute shifts and exaggerates them so that they're larger than life. We covered this somewhat with the bouncing snowman in Lesson 14; it's called squash and stretch. I'm drawing my ball at the apex of its arc of ascent and descent, so it should be stretched the most at this point--though if I really wanted to be accurate, it would stretch on ascent, snap back to a squashed shape at apex, then stretch again on descent.

Flash Tip: Program Tools: Pencil Tool

Using The Pencil Tool, you can draw lines (remember, lines and fills aren't the same) on your stage the same way that you would with a pencil on paper. This can be a little difficult with your mouse, but if you have a graphics tablet it can afford you a great deal of freedom. Even if you're using a mouse, however, you can use the Pencil Tool's options to smooth your drawings out a bit. By selecting any of the following options, you can: •

Ink: draw freeform with no corrections/adjustments (From left to right, the first in the set of...ah....green squiggles, for lack of a better term.)

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Smooth: have Flash take your freeform lines as you draw them and smooth them into less "wrinkly" flows and curves. (The second in the image depicted

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above.) Straighten: have Flash take your freeform lines as you draw them and adjust them into interconnected straight lines of any length, for a bit of a "jagged" look. (The third in the depicted "squiggles".)

Flash Tip: Tools of the Trade: Drawing in Flash With a Graphics Tablet Taking the Hassle Out of On-Screen Artwork

If you've been working in Flash for any period of time, by now you've probably realized that mouse-drawing anything beyond a basic pre-defined shape can be pretty time-consuming, and pretty difficult, if not downright impossible (and maddening). It may not be so difficult to deal with if you're just drawing a series of shapes and then animating them using tweens, but for frame-by-frame animation, a little assistance may be in order. True, you can always go for the tried-and-true method of hand-drawn keyframe animation, using a light table, pencil, and paper before scanning to your computer.

But if you'd rather stay purely digital, then I'd recommend getting a graphics tablet. Graphics tablets are nifty little devices, and you can draw your animation right on the screen usingonion-skinning in lieu of light-table-induced transparency. Tablets aren't even that expensive anymore, although the premiere of the industry, WACOM, still charges a hefty amount for their top-of-the-line tablets. You don't need a WACOM tablet to get started, though. For years I've been using theSuperPen tablet, available for only $49.99 at most retailers (I bought mine at ThinkGeek). It's a sturdy little tablet with a fair-sized drawing area, digital pen, and electronic wireless mouse. My SuperPen's stood up to some pretty harsh treatment, and it's got a high level of pressure sensitivity with drivers that interact well with most programs. For something a little larger, though, I've recently graduated to theAdesso 12x9 CyberTablet, which ranges in price from $126-$156, depending on where you buy it. Other tablets with a drawing area as large as 12x9 tend to run close to $500. Upgrading to a tablet can save you a lot of time and trouble, and can make working with frame-by-frame animation in Flash as much as ten times easier. When you can draw directly on the screen it saves you the trouble of scanning, sequencing, and vector-tracing your bitmaps. And last I checked, the most sophisticated "undo" function available with any pencil is an eraser.

Graphics Tablet Definition: Graphics tablets, also known as digitizing tablets, are computer peripheral devices that allow "hand-drawn" tablet-to-screen input. Using a pen/stylus rather than a mouse, the graphics tablet allows the control of "drawing" on the screen with the same hand control that a pencil allows, by drawing pen-strokes on the tablet and having them mirrored by the cursor on-screen. Some tablets also have a screen of their own that allows a more accurate "drawing" experience.

Flash Tip: Onion-Skinning Animation

Frame-by-frame animation can be difficult when you're working on one frame at a time with no reference for the previous or next frames. In traditional animation, this problem is solved by the use of light desks or light tables, which let you see through multiple layers of paper as though they were transparencies, with the ink/pencil lines standing out clearly laid atop one another. Thankfully, Flash has an equivalent of this effect--known as onion-skinning, an option that you can turn on that shows a range of frames both before and after your current frame, progressively fading them out as if they're layered on translucent paper on top of each other, or "onion-skinned". By dragging the edges of the greyed

out block in your timeline you can expand or reduce the number of frames displayed in onion-skin mode, to let you better follow and track your animation. The buttons for onion-skin mode can be found at the bottom of the timeline, to the far left before the division marking the layer control area. There are two buttons-one for onion skin, and to the right of that, one for onion skin outlines. Onion skin mode displays the solid images layered on top of each other (see the left-hand side of the image to the right of this page for an example), while onion skin outlines (on the right side of the image) only shows the outlines of the objects on each layer. Outline mode is recommended for long or detailed animations, as it's easier to render and scrub in realtime.

Adesso 12x9 CyberTablet

Creating More Keys

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We need to set our primary keyframes. Keyframes are just that: key points in a sequence of motion that define pivotal points in that motion. The beginning and ending positions are always going to be your first keyframes, and most important, but equally important is defining other pivotal points inside that sequence. You may have one secondary keyframe, or ten; for example, if you're animating a character turning in a circle, you might define a secondary keyframe for facing left, facing

right, and facing away, while your first and last keyframes would be the same (facing the viewer). For this animation the primary points are the apex of the first arch, the point of impact, and the apex of the next arch, for a full cycle. (Tip: turn on OnionSkinning so that you can see previous and future frames in outline while you work.) I started by copying my first frame to the very end of my cycle; I chose 13 frames, as an odd number makes it easier to divide at key points with the same number of frames to either side--and this lets me set it at one frame over a second. Once I copied that frame I moved it to the point that the ball would bounce to on its next cycle.

At my midpoint, Frame 7, I drew another circle--flattened from impact, resting to the ground at a point halfway between the two arc apexes. This is my midpoint, and the point where the ball strikes the ground.

In-Betweening

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With our key frames in place, we need to draw our in-betweens. In-betweens are exactly what they sound like: frames filling in the motion in between our primary points. Although keyframes are important, in-betweens are, to me, more difficult-because you can't just pick a point and draw. You have to accurately represent the transition between frames by drawing the state that the object/character is in at a point halfway between keyframes, and then halfway between again, and halfway between again--and that can take a great deal of time, concentration, and educated guesswork. I'm going to show you a trick that I use when drawing frame-by-frame animation, whether by hand or in Flash. I tend to treat it a bit like geometry: I pick important points on my shape--four points on a circle, top, bottom, left and right, or say on an arm you may pick shoulder, outer elbow, inner elbow, wrist, fingertips--and then match those points on the next keyframe, before creating a new layer and drawing lines on that layer to connect those points. Then I just brush little dots or tic-marks

to the halfway point of each line, eyeballing to estimate where those points would have traveled on a straight line on that in-between frame.

In-Betweening II

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With those points in place I can then place my cursor on that in-between frame (since it's halfway between, it would be on frame 4, between my keys at 1 and 7) and then use those points as guidelines to draw. Because I'm also keeping squash and stretch in mind and want to show the shape growing closer to flattening, I don't stick perfectly to the guides, but they do still help me keep everything positioned correctly. Once I'm done I can just set the guide layer to invisible so that it isn't showing over the animation.

Viewing Motion Sequence

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With onion-skinning on and these four frames in place, you can start to see the sequence of motion as well as the slight shifts in deformation in the quickly-sketched circles.

Repeating and Adjusting the Timeline

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Now the next step would be to repeat the steps again, this time between frames 7 and 13, on frame 10--though you may want to tighten your frames. After finishing the first five frames--your primary and secondary keys, and your primary inbetweens--you'll be able to play your timeline and see--albeit somewhat flickery-how the motion progresses. The great thing about Flash is that you don't have to do much work to adjust the timeline on your animation (while drawing it by hand might require redrawing many frames, which is why when drawing by hand it's usually best to do stick figures first to get the motion down before starting on detail) ; you can drag keyframes around as you wish to shorten or expand motion. Mine was looking a bit slow, so I cut a few frames--bringing it down to nine with my keys at 1, 5, and 9, primary in-betweens at 3 and 7, leaving secondary in-betweens at 2, 4, 6, and 8. Each time you go down a level in in-betweens to fill in more of your timeline and add more detail, you'll have even more drawings--almost like a pyramid hierarchy, in expanding tiers of detail.

Cleaning up the Line Art

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Before moving any further, I took a little time to smooth our and adjust my drawings a bit. This isn't meant to be perfect; it's a sketched animation to demonstrate the techniques, and when I'm not taking screenshots in between I can finish something like this in about ten minutes. Making this smooth and fluid would require hours more of tweaking, though some would actually prefer to leave it in this rough style, as it has a quirky appeal all its own and some professional animations have been deliberately produced with the "sketchy" look. Still, I do want to tighten this up a little bit. I've used the Smooth function to iron out my shapes a bit with just a few clicks, and then the Subselection tool to adjust individual vertices and their curves.

Flash Tip: Program Tools: Smooth and Straighten Details

Drawing in Flash is messy--especially with a mouse. Your lines wobble, your shapes squiggle, and everything's just a mess. There are settings on some of the drawing tools that will smooth them as you go--but if you've already spent ages working on a drawing and want to just smooth it out without having to redraw it, that's just too much trouble.

Flash does have tools to help. You can select an object and then use two little nifty tools that are part of the options for the Arrow Tool: the Smooth tool (left), and the Straighten tool (right). They...well, they do pretty much what you'd think, but let's demonstrate a little, using the quickly-scribbled squiggle above.

Smooth

The Smooth tool works in gradual increments, and just one or two clicks will only show subtle differences--but after about four or five, the squiggle is rounded out into a more smoothly ovular shape.

Straighten

Just like the Smooth tool, the Straighten tool works in gradual increments--but rather than rounding out, the end results are instead more sharp-edged, involving straighter lines and connecting corners.

Flash Tip: Program Tools: Arrow Tool and Subselection Tool Arrow Tool

If you've wondered why we really need two arrow tools in Flash when the only difference between them seems to be the color of the icon, well, you're about to find out. One is theArrow Tool (the black one), while the other is the Subselection Tool (the white one), and each has its own individual purpose and its own options. The Arrow Tool (depicted above) is for selecting lines and fills (or parts of them), individual objects, or groups of objects. You can click or double-click on something to select it using this; select a fill and drag it free of its outline or vice-versa, or click and drag to draw a square outline to select portions of any line or fill.

The options for the Arrow Tool include Snap to Objects (which...well...snaps it to objects),Smooth (which will smooth the curves of a selected shape/line for one iteration), andStraighten (which will straighten the outlines of a selected shape/line for one iteration).

Subselection Tool

The Subselection Tool doesn't have any extraneous options, but it's still one of the most useful tools for drawing and editing your shapes. When you select a shape, line, or fill with the Subselection Tool, it allows you to see and edit the paths that make them up, including the individual vector points and their "handles". You can select one or more vector points and drag them about, or you can select a single vector point and by dragging the "handles" about, adjust the curves to either side of the point to change your shape.

Filling in Remaining Frames, Adjusting

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You can fill in the remaining frames one at a time using the same technique to find the appropriate midpoints and then draw with those guidelines; with onion-skinning turned on you can actually see your entire path of motion, and use that to adjust accordingly. I've squashed mine a bit more in some areas, and adjusted the actual position of each stage of the circle's motion so that instead of zig-zagging along straight paths, it follows bouncing arcs.

Finished Result

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And here's my finished animation--crude, but it demonstrates the techniques appropriately, and to repeat the cycle all I had to do was copy the keyframes and then paste them, before moving their positions to reflect the advancing motion. Now that you've got the basic technique out of the way, get used to using it and spend some time just drawing in Flash to get accustomed to the feel of it so that you'll be more comfortable with the next lesson, where we'll start the basis for a more complex character drawing that we'll take through several stages: rough motion, detailed rough motion, smooth line work, solid color, and highlights and shadows. Just a short animation will take several weeks of progressive steps, though the amount of actual working time that we'll put in will be negligible compared to the amount of time spend hand-drawing full-length feature films, and the workload will be much lighter. Working in Flash, we can single-handedly accomplish what normally requires a full team of animators.

Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: 8-Frame Basic Walk Cycle About Walk Cycles

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Preston Blair Walk Cycle

The walk cycle is one of the most important learning concepts in animation--and also one of the most technically difficult, because it requires so much attention to the movement of opposing limbs. However difficult, though, if you can learn to master a walk cycle then you can animate just about anything. There are many types of walk cycles, and you can vary the motion to match your character or his/her mood; you can do bouncy walks, shuffling walks, casual slouches. But the first and simplest is the standard upright walk, viewed from the side--and that's what we're going to attack in simplified form today. You can cover the cycle of a full stride in 8 frames, as demonstrated by the above walk cycle--the Preston Blair walk cycle, one of the most common reference images in cartoon animation. Many Preston Blair examples are great learning references, and I'd advise you to save that image and use it as a reference throughout the entire lesson if you get lost--because we're going to go fairly quickly, to crunch this down to 10 steps with room to show the finished results. My first 2D animation instructor gave us a reference and a little advice and left us to discover our own individual rhythm and stride, and to learn by trial and error. I won't be quite so cruel, but I do think that you'll learn this best if I don't do every tiny step for you and let you work some things out for yourself. So grab a flotation device, and get ready to dive in.

Starting Point

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For your first walk cycle, it's best to try a stick figure. It's good practice, anyway, as a great way to build your animations is to start by drawing stick figures to get the motion down before building actual solid shapes on top of those stick figures; it can save you a lot of time, and a lot of correction work, as it's much easier to work out timelines and difficult motion issues in stick figures than in detailed forms. To start off, set up a scene with a groundline, as we don't want our stick-man walking in empty space. Then build your stick figure (you can draw it freehand or use the Line and Oval tools; I did a combination of both), referencing the first pose in the Preston Blair cycle to position his limbs. To save some trouble redrawing things, we're going to cut a corner that we couldn't do if we were doing this by hand using paper, pencils, paint, and cels: we're going to duplicate the body and head across different frames, so build your stick-man on different layers. I put my head and body on one layer, my arms on another layer, and my legs on a third layer. A common trick in animation is to make the limbs on the "far" side of the body a slightly darker color so that 1.you can distinguish between them, especially in cases such as this with a simple shape, and 2.so that the shadow makes them seem to recede into the distance.

Arranging Sequential Frames in a Path of Motion

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Once you've finished drawing your stick-man, copy the keyframe for the body/head and paste it across the next seven frames. Then you're going to turn on onion-skinning, so that you can see where your frames are in reference to each other, and space out your duplicate bodies across the keyframes so that they seem to move in an up-and-down wave, following the path of motion demonstrated by the dotted line in the Preston-Blair example. The reason for this is because when we--or any creatures--walk, we don't travel exactly in a straight path. As our legs bend and straighten, and our feet extend, flatten, and push off from the ground, we're going to be propelled upwards only to sink down again. When walking we're never the exact same height as we might be in a resting position, save for in a single instant of motion as we pass through that particular plane of space.

On my first frame, my stick-man is near a mid-point; he's not as tall as he might be when his supporting leg is almost fully straight, but he's not as short as he would be with his supporting leg fully bent, either.

Animating the Legs

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Now we're going to move on to start adding limbs to our bodies. One thing that makes a walk cycle so difficult is that it's harder to pick keyframes, especially in a simplified 8-frame cycle; almost all of the frames are keys, and you can't interpolate half-distances between key points in exactly the same was as we did in the lesson on basic keyframing and in-betweening. A lot of it is just a matter of estimation, and familiarity with the way the form moves in a walk. I picked my fourth frame to start with, however, because it's different enough from my first frame to be a good point of progress, but not so advanced that I can't eyeball the two in between to estimate just how far each segment of limb should have moved between first and second, and third and fourth. Again, I used the Preston-Blair demonstration as a reference, and on my fourth frame (Legs layer) I drew my legs--with the supporting leg almost fully straight, and the traveling leg slightly upraised. I didn't completely straighten the supporting leg, although some choose to; this is just a personal preference, as I don't know about you but I can't completely thrust my leg out in a straight piston while walking without locking my knees rather painfully. For exaggerated marches and other flamboyant walk cycles, however, emphasizing a straightened leg can add to the effect.

Animating the Legs II

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With those two frames drawn, you should be able to add the legs to your second and third frames easily enough. The second frame is where the forward-thrust leg begins to bend to catch weight transferred from the back leg as the back leg pushes off of the ground, and the entire body dips to its lowest point--which means that in order to keep balance and keep the frame stable around its center of gravity, the backwards-bending leg has to bend more and come a bit further down, as well. Thinking of balance is a good way to judge by eye whether your figure looks right in its current frame of motion; if it looks like it couldn't possibly hold that position for a second at the momentum depicted in the scene, then there's probably something a bit wrong with it. In the third frame the balance shifts a bit--the forward leg straightening a bit more and thus capable of supporting more weight, while the backward leg begins to lift off the ground and come forward. Here you can use the second and fourth frames to help you estimate that position, by looking at halfway points between the knees, the joining of the upper legs, the heels of the feet. One thing you'll want to remember is that the knees, etc. won't be at the same elevation for each frame, because the body is dipping up and down and the legs are bending.

Animating the Legs III

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If you've got those first four out of the way, you should be just fine doing the next four as the upright step turns into a mild forward lunge into the next step; use the Preston-Blair reference for the fourth and eighth frames, and then use your own eyes and reasoning to work out the frames in between. Your end result will come out looking like a depiction of the evolution of man, but it should portray a single full step. One thing you need to remember about this sort of motion is that you should never really be thinking in straight lines. If you observe the way the legs move, they don't scissor back and forth on vertical paths of motion; they rotate at the joints. Almost all motion of a bipedal figure, even if it looks vertical, is actually taking place on an arc. Watch as the back leg lifts between frames two and three; it doesn't glide through the air diagonally in a straight line. Instead it pivots from the hip, while the knee traces an invisible arc of motion on the air. Try bending your leg at the knee and then lifting it up from the hip, and trace the path of motion of your knee with your eye; it will form a curve, rather than a straight line.

You can see it more clearly if you raise your forearm straight before your face, with your hand palm inwards and flat; "chop" your hand to the side without twisting it, moving your forearm at the elbow, and the arc of motion that your fingertips trace will be easy to follow.

Adjusting Motion to Reflect Stride Length

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Before we add the arms, let's make a few adjustments to the positioning of each frame. If you scrub your timeline and watch your animation, your stick-man may appear to glide a little bit, covering too much distance for the single step cycle depicted. Let's pull everything together so that the motion is accurate. For a single step, you should only cover one stride length in distance. You can take a simple measure of stride length by drawing a line on a new layer between the heel of the forward foot and the heel of the backwards foot at the point where they're the farthest apart; I have two stride lengths depicted, because the step starts off midstride where the extension is the greatest. The full eight frames, however, only move the figure's body over one stride length. The easiest way to line them up properly is to use the feet. For the first four frames, even as the body travels forward, the forward foot remains planted in the same spot. You can line the heels up--and, as it starts to bend and lift, line the toes up so that although the upraised leg travels and the body moves forward, that single support point remains stable. On the fifth frame, when the moving leg touches ground while the base leg leaves contact, you can switch feet and start lining up opposite foot on your shape. Basically you should always use the foot that's against the ground as your point of reference to make sure your frames overlap properly and your figure travels the correct distance.

Animating the Arms

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Now you should use the same principles to go back to your Arms layer and start filling in those limbs. They work the same way, but the motion isn't quite so complex; they don't bend as much, because they're not meeting resistance in the form of the ground to cause sinew to shift and pull. Mostly the arms swing from the shoulders, and the position of them is up to you; I chose what I call "busy arms" or "walkers' arms", because the constantly-bent arms look like someone in a hurry or else a speedwalker building momentum. One thing you may notice in a walk cycle is that the arms and legs are always in opposing positions; if the left leg is forward, the left arm is back. If the right leg is back, the right arm is forward. This, too, relates to balance and distribution of weight; your body naturally counter-swings your limbs so that your weight is constantly flowing evenly to keep you on balance. You can try walking with your arms and legs moving in even synchronicity, but you'd be a bit uncomfortable and find yourself moving rigidly--and possibly keeling to one side.

Finished Result

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When you finish those eight frames, your animation should look similar to this. Of course it seems a little odd, stopping mid-stride and jerking back--but that, right there, is a single step. It is not, however, a full walk cycle; it's only half of a walk cycle, a single step. In order for a full cycle, you need two steps--fifteen frames, as your first and last frames will be the same (thus the use of "cycle") and so you won't need a sixteenth. Your fifteenth frame would flow right into your first to begin the cycle anew, seamlessly.

Conclusion: Complete the Cycle

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What you should do is take what you learned in that first eight frames, and apply it to the next seven to complete the cycle so that it follows something similar to the above. Consider it a little "homework"--and I'd like to see your results, if you'd like to share; it could be fun. You can e-mail them to me, or post them on the forum. You can also do either if you get stuck and need a little help; I want you to try this on your own, but I'm not so evil as to leave you to flounder without assistance. It shouldn't be that difficult, especially on a stick figure; everything is the same, only reversed in position--what was fore is now aft, etc. Good luck.

Animating from Pencil to PC: Rough Motion Sketches 1 of 9

First off, I’m going to have to apologize for the quality of these photographs. I’ve never been much for photography, so...you guessed it, I don’t have a digital camera, and took these with my cameraphone. They still illustrate the basic premises, although the contrast when the light desk is on can make some issues. For the first in this series of covering animation from pencil drawings to PC art, we’re going to cover basic motion sketches. Before you get started animating, you’ll need basic supplies: A light desk, a non-photo-blue pencil, either some tape or a peg bar, plenty of paper, and a good eraser. If you want, you can print off templates to use to frame your animation, as I did. Later you’ll also need a good 2B pencil. (You can see up there that I have a Bic mechanical pencil laid out. I’m going to tell you what my animation and art instructors told me: mechanical pencils are the root of all that is evil in this world, and a sharpened wood-and-graphite 2B pencil is your best friend. With that in mind,

I work more cleanly and comfortably with a .7mm mechanical pencil. Do as I say, not as I do.)

Animation Tip: Tools of the Trade: Light Tables

ArtoGraph LightTracer

Odds are, when you were first trying to discover the field of 2D animation (or as you try to discover it now), you went through dozens of experiments trying to simulate the work of professional studios, including a lot of guesswork and trial-and-error. I know in my junior high school days I made some attempts that bring an amused smile to my face to remember them even now; most of my frustrated efforts were aimed towards trying to figure out how to trace animated motion on separate sheets. I tried tracing paper, I tried making flip books, I tried drawing on transparencies-nothing worked. What I needed was alight table. Whether you're drawing 2D animation for cel painting or doing the preliminary pencil work to be scanned in for a computer animation, a light table is one of the most important tools for frame-by-frame animation that you'll ever own. A light table (or light desk) is a very simple device-it's just a box with a clear or translucent white surface with a light inside, that shines through the surface so that any paper overlaid on it is rendered transparent/translucent (the onion-skin effect that Flash simulates). This way you can layer multiple sheets of paper on top of each other, and see your sequences of frames for reference as you're working on drawing or tweaking new frames. Large studios or other professionals in the animation industry sometimes use highlyspecialized light tables with glass surfaces over a special light; the tables can be locked, or set to rotate and pivot in order to help the animator draw with the rotating sweep of his/her full arm. Those tables are rather delicate and highly expensive, but there are much cheaper options for personal use. Any hobby shop or camera store will be able to help you pick out one of their light boxes, which are generally used for viewing slides and transparencies but that can also work well for animation as long as they have a large enough drawing surface. Your local art store or craft shop will probably have basic light desks/light tables, though. I shop at Texas Art Supply here in Houston rather often, and that was where I picked up myArtoGraph LightTracer for under $30. It's just the right size for an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper laid out in landscape format, and angled so that it can rest

comfortably across the lap or on a desk or drafting table. The bulbs last a long time and are easy to replace. If you really want to simplify, though, really all you need is a glass surface and a medium-strength light. I've known people to build their own light boxes with a wooden frame and a sheet-glass surface with a lamp inside, or to even just place a desk lamp underneath a glass coffee table. Whatever works for you--just don't ruin your furniture in the effort. Once you've got a light desk set up you'll find yourself animating with ease.

10 Essential Art Supplies for the Traditional Animator Non-Photo Blue Pencils

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With all our recent talk of traditional animation in Flash, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at some essentials to have around the home (or studio) if you're going to work on actual traditional, cel-painted animation. Top on my list is nonphoto blue pencils. These pencils are great for doing your initial sketches, because they're just the right shade of pale blue that they tend not to show up on copies when you're transferring your work from paper to clear cels. If I'm working on an actual hand-drawn animation instead of digital animation, I usually do my motion captures, my basic rough work, and then my detail work in non-photo-blue pencil before retracing with a well-sharpened 2B pencil.

Drawing Pencil Sets

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Speaking of 2B pencils, it's always good to have a set of drawing pencils around. I tend to use mechanical pencils rather often--too often, my instructors in art school would crack on me about it all the time--but for animation work, usually a regular wooden pencil is best. I like my Eberhard Faber set, but Sanford and Tombow also make some good collections of pencils in various lead hardnesses.

When you're retracing animation, 2B is usually the best hardness to use; it's soft enough to have enough give for a varied line, but hard enough to make good dark, clean lines.

3-Hole Punched Paper

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Of course, with your drawing instruments, you'll need something to draw on. Your best bet is to buy copy paper with three holes punched down the side--by the ream, or by the case. One second of animation will take you anywhere from 30 to 100 sheets of paper, allowing for duplicates for retracing and for mistakes, so you'll need quite a bit of paper. 20-lb copy paper is heavy enough to make a good copy, but light enough that you can see through several layers of it with a light table on beneath it. The reason that I choose three-hole-punch paper is because I use a little peg bar on my light table to hold my paper in place, and buying my paper already punched saves me the trouble of punching it manually or taping it on to the table, and makes it easier to align pages. I'm definitely an HP Quickpack kind of guy--they come 2500 sheets to a pack for a fairly good price, and I like the particular type of texture that HP copy paper has.

Light Table/Light Desk

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Unless your eyes are better than mine or you have a penchant for torturing yourself with your nose pressed into your desk, a light table/light desk is crucial. Your light table has two primary purposes: to retrace your sketched frames, and to sketch new frames as in-betweens. With this you can light your artwork from below to make it transparent enough to see through for reference. Some light tables can be very expensive; professional glass-top rotating tables can cost thousands, or you can find a large desktop box for just under a hundred dollars. I use a cute little Artograph light tracer box with a 10"x12" slanted drawing surface; I think I bought it for about $25 back in art school, and I've kept it ever since-though I think they're running a little over $30 now.

Peg Bar 5 of 10

I cannot for the life of me remember the proper name for this next item, or an online listing for one, or an image anywhere, so I'm just going to try to describe what I call a peg bar as best as I can, and hope that you can take it from here. (Update: Thanks so much to Natalie for finding one of the few online stores where you can purchase peg bars.) This little bar is a plastic strip the length of an 8.5"x11" piece of paper, with three small pegs on it spaced along the same intervals as the holes in a three-hole-punch sheet of paper. You can tape or glue this to the top of your light table, and lay your copy paper over it to hold it securely in place. When you're working on a character animation sometimes it's hard to get your paper to line up again after you've removed it from the light table, so having one of these helps you get everything in its proper place again. Check your local arts and crafts store to see if you can find one.

Art Gum Eraser

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Let's face it--you're going to make mistakes while drawing animation, and for that you'll need an eraser. Art gum erasers are far superior to your standard erasers because they rub out lead cleanly without eroding away the actual paper surface or leaving behind smudges from either past lead rub-offs or the eraser itself.

Cels/Transparencies

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Once you get past the drawing stage, you'll need to transfer your artwork from plain paper onto cels, so that they can be painted and then placed against a separately drawn background. It's hard to find anything packaged as actual "cels"--what you really need iscopy-safe transparency films. These are the same kind of transparencies used on overhead projectors, but you have to make sure to get the kind that are heat-safe, copy-safe; the easiest way to transfer from paper to transparency is using a copier (you can get them done at Kinko's or another copy place if you need to), but you have to make sure to get the right kind or they'll melt in the copier and completely ruin it.

Paints

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When you're ready with your cels, you'll need paints. Painting on slick cels is very difficult, and requires a thicker paint, usually; I use acrylics, but some people prefer

oils. The trick is to paint on the back side of the transparency, the opposite side from the side the that the copier toner is on; that way there's no chance that the wet paint will smudge the copied lines.

Brushes 9 of 10

Naturally, with paints you'll need brushes to paint with. Generally you'll want to have a set ranging from mid-size to a fine hairline; working on letter-size transparencies, you won't find that you have much need for a large brush to fill in enormous areas, but you will need finer brushes for getting smaller details.

Color Pencils, Watercolors, Markers, and Pastels

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For a bit more manual work, there's color pencils, pastels, watercolors, and markers; you'd want to use these more for your backgrounds. Backgrounds are done on the same size paper as your animation, and static backgrounds for a single motion sequence only have to be drawn once so that you can lay transparencies over them. I have to say that watercolors really aren't my gig; I don't have the patience for them and the most time that I spend with a brush is when practicing the sort of traditional sumi-e painting passed down through my family. Pastels drive me nuts; too much smudge, not enough control. For my backgrounds I use colored Prismacolor markers with a clear blender to run the shades together, for a watercolor look with more control--or, more rarely, Prismacolor color pencils.

Animation Tip: Printable Template for 4:3 Frame Drawings

I originally created this template for myself, but thought you folks might find it handy. It's a framed 4:3 aspect ratio drawing area with areas in the margins for me to pencil in the date of the drawing, the frame number out of a sequence of X number of frames, the project the drawing belongs to, and the scene that the drawing is from. The preprinted frame helps me align my animation drawings properly when I'm laying them on top of each other on my light table, and if I'm scanning my images to color and sequence them digitally, gives me a perfect frame to use to crop the images down to the exact frame size without ruining the alignment with the other frames. Any time I run out, I can just run another batch off the printer or take a single printout down to the local copy center to get a bulk batch done. Hope it's as useful for you as it is for me 2 of 9

Start off by taping or pegging your first sheet of paper to the light desk and turning it on. 3 of 9

The first thing you need to start off sketching is your starting pose with your nonphoto-blue pencil; you don’t want to do detailed drawings. Just keep in mind the basic proportions from your character sheet, and draw just enough to establish your character’s pose, position, and the space he or she will take up. We’re going to be redrawing this too many times to do detail every time, and this first stage allows for a lot of trial and error so you can preview the basics of your motion and correct any visible problems before moving on to further detail. 4 of 9

Now here’s where the light desk really comes in handy. Tape or peg another sheet of paper over your first drawing; make sure that however you’re aligning your images whether using the template, just drawing on plain paper, or adding your own hatchmarks – that you have everything aligned properly. You’re going to be removing sheets, adding sheets, shuffling sheets around, etc...and your animation depends on being able to place each drawing in proper position to the others. When you turn the light table on, you should be able to easily see the first drawing underneath the blank sheet of paper. 5 of 9

If you remember the lesson on keyframe and in-between basics, the next thing we draw won’t be the next frame in the sequence. Instead you should pick a key point; my animation is going to show my character making a short turn and then moving his arms a bit, so I picked a key point showing when the character is facing fully forward after turning from the starting position. Draw that key point, using the drawing beneath as a reference for proportion and position. It’ll take some practice, but you’ll get pretty good at eyeballing these things as you go along. Once you’re done, you should have your first two primary keys. 6 of 9

Now we need to layer a third piece of paper on top of the other two. Again, you should be able to see both drawings through the top sheet, when the light table is on. If you can’t, you may need to go darken your sketches just a little. 7 of 9

Now we’re going to do our first in-between. Again, this isn’t a sequential drawing, but instead the drawing that covers the midpoint of the motion between your first and second keys. When in-betweening, you tend to work that way, in successive iterations until you’ve filled enough frames for smooth motion and to match your timing. The more frames you have, the slower but smoother the motion will be; you kind of learn to plan that instinctively, as well, once you get used to understanding how many of these drawings take up a second of motion. Most of the time, if you’re working in Flash for web animation, you’ll work at 12 frames per second. I’m doing mine at 15 frames per second, which is the standard for basic television animation, while cinematic animation is generally done at 30 frames per second. Back on the topic of the in-between drawing: I don’t know if you remember this little trick, but it helps a great deal in accurately drawing the image that marks the halfway point between starting and ending. What you do is pick major points on your drawing – top of the head, point of the chin, each shoulder, the waist, the neck, etc. – and draw lines connecting those points from the first drawing to the last. Then mark off the halfway point on those lines, and you’ll have where those major points in the drawing should be on your in-between. 8 of 9

Using those guides and the references of your first two keys, you should be able to sketch your first in-between. 9 of 9

With that in-between drawing, you now have a basic, jerky three-frame animation, with a starting, middle, and ending point. Now all you have to do is keep inbetweening to smooth the animation out; take this entire process from step six, and using your first key and your first in-between, create a second in-between drawing the position of your character between those two points. Do the same with the first in-between and the second key. Depending on how far your character moves in a time frame, you may be done at that point, or you may need to keep filling in more and more in-between frames. Keep filling out your in-betweens in rough sketch for now, and in the next lesson we’ll move on to basic detail.

Animating from Pencil to PC II: Rough Detail Sketches 1 of 8

By the time that I finished the roughs in the last lesson, I had 17 drawings – a bit over a second of animation. That’s a little daunting to consider, isn’t it? Especially if you think about doing feature-length animations. Over an hour of animation, at anywhere from 15 to 30 drawings per second, all of which have to be sketched, detailed, retraced/inked, transferred to cels, and painted...I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty daunting. Anyway, before we move on to the next part of the lesson, I want you to take a look at those three layered frames up there, where I’m in-betweening the arm on the rough-sketch, moving up and out from the body. Just a reminder: the human body moves in arcs. See how I have those little notches to mark where the elbow should be, and how I may have used a straight line to measure the halfway point between… but I used an arc to measure where the elbow should be? Because of the way joints

are constructed, any motion takes place along an arcing path. Don’t believe me? Move your arm, or your leg, and watch the tip of your fingers or toes. They’ll transcribe an arc, not a straight line. 2 of 8

With all of my roughs done, it’s time to start on the detail work – which basically means going through the entire mess all over again, frame by frame, pretty much in the same order of in-betweens. This time, though, we’ll be drawing in roughsketched detail. You don’t have to worry about getting it perfect; just sketch and scribble, erase and correct, whatever you need to do to get it right. You can make it perfect and pretty later. Start off with your first keyframe, laid on your light table. 3 of 8

Start sketching in the basic shape of your character’s body, trying to match the pose that you outlined when you did your stick-figure motion roughs.

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With your character sheet for reference, sketch in the details on top of the basic body. 5 of 8

Now, just like in the last lesson, layer your next key frame on top of the first. That doesn’t mean the second frame in your animation, but the next point that you chose as a major stopping point. In my case, it’s when the character is facing forward after the turn. Make sure to line up your registration marks, framing, or whatever else you used to delineate your boundaries. You can completely bork your animation to heck and back just by drawing in-betweens for two mis-aligned keys. 6 of 8

Start drawing your character’s details on top of the pose for the second key. You might find it easier to turn the light table off while doing this, as when using darker lines it can get a bit confusing – some people prefer to blue-line this, as well, but I find I end up with a soft, scribbly mess where I can’t pick out details if I do that. It’s up to individual preferences. Even if it’s easier to work with the light table off, you will want to turn it on every once in a while to make sure you’re not deviating too far from the details drawn in your first key, in term of size and proportion. 7 of 8

Now comes the hard part: in-betweening detail. This can be a royal pain in the tuckus, especially with things like hair and other small details of clothing. This is why you’re usually advised to simplify your characters as much as possible. Honestly, I didn’t simplify Vin up there enough, and I’m going to be kicking myself for it as this lesson continues. Take the rough sketch for your first in-between – again, not the first one in the sequence, but the first one that you drew, bridging the halfway point between keys – and align it on top of your two keys. You should be able to see both keys through the sheet, as well as your rough motion sketch of the in-between. The same way that you marked halfway points between major areas on the roughs, you’ll do again with the detail – finding things like the eyebrow, tip of the nose, mouth, shoulder, etc.

and sketching lines between them before marking a halfway point so you know where they should be on the key. Doing in-betweens on detail is something that takes a lot of practice; even with the little sketched guides, a lot of what you end up drawing is estimated and eyeballed. You get the hang of it after a while, although if you stop doing it for any length of time, it’s quite easy to fall out of practice. 8 of 8

Once you’re done, you should have a rough detail sketch of your first in-between. Now, just like last time, you have to do it again between this in-between and the two keys. And again. And again. And again, until you’ve done the rough detail sketches for your entire animation. Good luck. Remember that if, at any point, you’re in doubt about your animated motion…you can actually use your light table like a flip book, by making sure that the tops of the sheets are anchored properly before fanning through your pages in order to watch them zip past to let you get a basic idea of how the motion looks. When you're done with that, move on to the lesson on retracing and line weight.

Animating from Pencil to PC III: Retracing & Line Weight

Animating from Pencil to PC III: Retracing & Line Weight 1 of 7

When we last left off, we’d gone through and done all of our detailed sketches for the key frames and in betweens of our animation, basing them off of the rough motion sketches we’d done before and using the details on the keys to interpolate the details on the in-betweens. What we need to do next is fairly easy, but time consuming – but there are still a few helpful points to keep in mind. We’re going to retrace the sketched artwork onto blank paper with clean, dark lines. To start off, affix your first rough detailed sketch to your light table, whether by tape or by peg bar, whichever you prefer. 2 of 7

Layer a clean, blank sheet of paper on top of the sketch. If you used the printable 4:3 animation template I provided or if you use some other kind of registration mark for alignment, make sure the lines or marks on the sheet above align with those on the sheet below. 3 of 7

With the light table on so that the image below shows clearly through the top layer of paper, start retracing your lines, making sure to only retrace the clean lines you need with none of the excess sketch lines. Make sure to have a good eraser on hand, because you need to avoid leaving any smudge or sketch marks. Try to get the line as dark as you can without making a mess. 4 of 7

One thing you need to keep in mind while retracing is line weight. Line weight refers to the thickness of the line, and varying line weights can create a subtle illusion of depth. Lines would appear thinner towards your image’s light source, and thicker the farther away from the light source they are. Thinner lines can also indicate delicacy or the thinness of the object outlined. Depending on the light source, lines may either grow thicker as they bell around a curve, or thinner. They tent to taper off toward points. A (rather fuzzy) example can be seen above, in the sweep of Vin’s collar; you can see a thicker curve helping to indicate depth and distance in how the cloth curves a bit under its own weight, only to taper to a thinner point. 5 of 7

Some like to show a difference between internal lines and external lines, as well. External lines are generally the lines tracing the basic shapes of the drawing, defining the key parts, while internal lines show little details like the seams in clothing – and like Vin’s scars. This shows more solid weight to the actual shape itself, by contrasting the heavier external lines with the thinner detail lines. 6 of 7

Lines also tend to be thicker where the end of one joins the middle of another, as that usually happens where something overlaps in the picture. Take, for example, where Vin’s brow ridge overhangs the lines marking his eyelid; the lines of the eyelid start off thicker where they extend from beneath the line for the brow ridge, then taper off.

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When you’re done, you should have clean black-and-white artwork using line weight to add the first hints of depth and light direction, which you’ll elaborate on later with color. Continue on to retrace every drawing in your animation sequence; you should be all right doing them all in order rather than in the order of keys and in-betweens that you followed before, but after each drawing make sure to stop and flip through your pages to make sure you haven’t skewed anything to throw off your animation.