uhlaylays reblogged

madeline-kahn

✨Chappell Choreography ✨

happy birthday @queenoftherodeoo!

uhlaylays reblogged

lychgate

toddhowardxreader

When i was in middle school i was banned frm the twilight wiki bc i kept changing Edward’s photo to this

uhlaylays reblogged

vasira96

ali3nboyfriend

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help

me: my what

suave-eddboy

thepioden

What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.

sparksel

when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.

so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!

concerningwolves

t-c-art-inspiration

How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense

justpickupthatpen

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

Reblogging to save a wrist

uhlaylays reblogged

ehnrat

queermasculine

normalize saying "okay💖 yay💖" while masc

uhlaylays reblogged

redasatomato

moorgius

he refuses to eat anything but the zombie meat

uhlaylays reblogged

uhlaylays reblogged

You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

feyosha

uhlaylays reblogged

scales

ubercharge

op is posting from tamriel. or perhaps the lands between

uhlaylays reblogged

animationbits

Chuck Jone's rules for good animation

All living creatures, fictional or not, have anatomy. Equally true of an amoeba, an angle worm, a mastodon , and a Grinch.
If you want believability in your characters, you must have visual consistency. In animation, each character must move according to its own anatomical limitations: Daffy duck must move with Daffy Duck’s anatomy, Donald Duck with Donald Duck’s structure. The amoeba’s anatomy seems to have only one restriction - its bulk; like an inflated baloon, it can vary its shape, but it cannot change its volume. That is, if you want a believable amoeba
All animals - humanized animals or animalized animals - must appear to stand, walk , run or skip under the stablizing pressure of gravity in order to achieve believeability
There is no sympathy without believability, no real laughter without sympathy.
In the sympathetic recognition of any character there must be some evidence of one’s own self, one’s own weaknesses, one’s own mistakes, no matter how well self-concealed, buttoned down or pigeonholded.
The flimmaker as well as the viewer must be able to find the character within himself. We cannot fashion personalities from what we SUPPOSE another person to be.
If you start with character, you probably will end up with good drawings. If you start out with drawings you will almost certinly end up with limited characters, caught in the matrix of your limited drawing. Therefore…
It is not what or where a character is, nor is it the circumsances under which he finds himself that determine who he is. It is only how in a unique way he responds to that enviorment and those circumstances that identifies him as an individual. hopefully, an interesting character becomes interesting because of that uniqueness among his contemporaries.
For identity, you do not DRAW differently, you THINK differently. It is the WHO of the character , not the WHAT that counts. Walk- through circus clowns depend upon WHAT they look like for their brand of comedy. That is WHAT they are. Comedians depend upon HOW they move for comedy and pathos - their wonderful who-ness.
As the writer John Buchan said, you will never succeed in playing a part unless you convince yourself that you are it.
Animation means to invoke life, not to imitate it.
no great children’s book, film or fable was ever written for children. It was written for the witer, the artist , the flimmaker. Again, the mark of any ’ great work ’ for children, from one by Beatrix Potter to a book br Dr. Seuss , can be easily identified: if it can be read with pleasure by adults it is probably a very good, possibly a great, childrens book.
you cannot write DOWN to an audience or to your subject. you must write UP to them with the certainty that you cannot ever do justice to your subject, but must bend every creative nerve and muscle of your heart and brain to its full capacity in an attempt to do so.
The least you owe an audience is the best you can do
No art form can exist without restrictive disciplines. Most of the great paintings in history have been caught in the terrible discipline of the rectangle. The flimmaker finds himself trapped in the exact and severe disciplines of both the rectangle an time. Most cinema features are in a time warm of 90 to 120 minutes, most animated cartoon shorts in a confinement of 6 minutes.
You must not complain of your restrictions. If you cannot live with them, find a discipline you can live with.

——————-

Above is a section from Chuck Jone’s book Chuck Reducks. I’ve bolded some of my favorite and most inspirational rules. Forgive me some spelling errors. I was staring at the book while I was typing so I wasnt really watching the screen haha.