Thursday, 17 March 2016

The Importance of Life Drawing

Why is it important to sharpen your life drawing skills? How does it connect to Animation? Drawing from the imagination has absolutely no limits, whereas drawing from life can be quite challenging. Having drawn from my imagination for the majority of my artistic career, I found that the few times that I have drawn from life I have been less than adequate. But before you can draw from your imagination, you need to have a fundamental understanding of anatomy and movement. This is especially important for Animation.

"By using simple lines an artist should be able to give a figure a real sense of life and individuality, not just an action pose or stereotypical expression.” Glenn Vilppu, http://www.awn.com

This is quite important for Animation as the art of Animation is to create movement. Each frame of a shot must carry and communicate flow and natural movement. An illustrator may focus more on the pose he is creating and may use a photograph for imagery but drawing from life carries an entirely different weight.

"The Renaissance artist was judged by much the same standard as the animation artist is today. The great masters of the past were first story tellers. They had to be able to create figures that the viewers could empathize with so that stories were brought to life with a sense of realism and believability. Animation drawing is, in essence, the closest thing we have to classical Renaissance drawing today.” Glenn Vilppu, http://www.awn.com

Life drawing is about going back to basics and grounding our technical artistic skills. Through regular practice, our animating skills will improve and we will be much more intuitively aware of anatomy and natural movement. This is why many large animation production companies provide Life Drawing classes to their employees.


Nude Study, 1515 Raphael


Never Underestimate the Power of Life Drawing. Glenn Vilupp http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.3/issue2.3pages/2.3vilppu.html 



  



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