12 Principles of Animation: Solid Drawing

In class, we were given the basic object of a walnut to help demonstrate the first of the twelve principles of animation, Solid Drawing. This is the dimension of weight and perspective in dynamic proportions.

We were told to draw what we saw in still life, as well as patterns on the shell's texture and interpretative one line drawings.

The one I found the most appealing was drawing the inside of the nut without opening it to see for ourselves.

From this we were told to redraw in a more detailed way. I decided to make my drawing more unrealistic, and based it off of the idea that the walnut shell was a home for the nut inside, and anything else could be living inside my closed walnut with it.

This gave me the idea to draw a creature holding the same nut.

The next activity was turn our drawing in to a character. As I had already made a character, I tried to figure out how I could get rid of the shell and nut part of my drawing. My original sketch made the shell look a lot like a cave, and so when I thought of an animated character living inside of a cave, my first thought was Yogi Bear.
I kept the same shape I had drawn throughout for the cave and used the nut as the basic form for the belly of my bear character.

During this sketch, I decided that I hadn't incorporated any detail of the walnut's texture in my character. As my background was a part of the character design, using the cave, I decided to add the textures that I documented during the walnut experiments on to the trees and the roof of the cave. This was carried throughout my later bear drawings.

 

After this we did model studies off of our teacher with the purpose to find the line of motion and create quick ideas of posture using basic forms.

Some were done in ten seconds, some in thirty, and some in a minute. 

I then used one of my one minute studies and fully rendered it with colour. In this study I made it look like my teacher, as I could picture him doing the pose in my mind and where the lighting was in the original to fully represent the light of the study.

After this I used two other poses from our observations to draw my bear. Doing this taught me the importance of the line of motion, as my bear's proportions were very different to Ben's and any other human figure. As a person with a comic-book-art-like style, most of my off head base sketches for a pose would be drawn as very unrealistic human figures with wide chests and thinner waists. The line of motion allowed me to create the pose to my bear's proportions despite his stomach being so long in comparison to the base sketches.