Walt Stanchfield's book has been an absolute pleasure to read. Drawn to Life is filled with his lectures on gesture drawing and performance, and is written in a way that is easy to read. Towards the end of the book I felt that the chapters seemed to repeat themselves a bit, but I'm glad I stuck it out because of how motivating and inspiring it has been to read. Stanchfield really stresses the importance of practicing your drawing, and to really feel the pose or emotion that you are trying to capture. It has made me come to the conclusion that I am going to keep a separate sketchbook to work in alongside writing and researching for my dissertation, so that I can begin to practice capturing gesture, which has been pointed out to be a huge aspect of performance in animation.
Quotes I considered to be potentially useful/interesting:
"I have concentrated on gesture drawings because that is one of the foundations of good animation." "Necessary to good gesture drawing are acting, caricature, anatomy, body language, perspective, etc."
"Your mental and emotional processes are you."
"Nothing moves independently in full animation. All the parts of a drawing are related."
"Stretch and squash is one of the most useful principles in animation. The lack of it can make a scene seem lifeless." "The over use of it has not yet occurred." "Look for ways to use it. It can mean the difference between animating an object or just moving it."
"Silhouette is a test of whether or not the lines have successfully depicted the pose."
"Usually the part of the body that is curved is the muscular or fleshy part, that bends or folds inward. The straight is usually the boney part, which stretches or pulls tight when a bend takes place."
"Some of the main things we should be concentrating on are the basic principles of squash and stretch, balance and weight distribution, and how these things work for us in animation. Copying the model without this awareness would be like copying a novel to learn how to right novels."
"The goal is to find the essence of the gesture and make all the parts of the body contribute to and enhance that gesture."
"Break one of your bad habits today. Which one? Not sketching."
"Tangents are the enemy of the illusion of depth and to be avoided at all cost. Tangents occur when two or more lines converge, or when one line ends at some point then seems to continue on at another point."
"I repeatedly harp on feeling the pose rather than merely looking at it." "In feeling the pose you actually picture yourself as doing the pose."
"The ability to animate is akin to the ability to act. Animation is, in effecting, acting on paper." "This doesn't mean an animator must be able to act well on stage or before a camera, but that he must certainly be sensitive to poses and gestures that portray the various moods and emotions that story telling demands."
"Don Graham in his chapter on reality (from the unpublished Art of Animation) called the extreme 'a story-telling drawing', and that by making this drawing more expressive; the intervening action could be suggested rather than delineated. He also suggested 'posed' animation is like watching a hummingbird darting from flower to flower. The rest periods when the bird is hovering in midair or when it is poised with its beak buried in a flower are the poses we have to see. The intervening action can be mere blurs, but the essence of the action will be clear."
"Good crisp timing will make blurs unnecessary."
"Other things not to see, especially in the initial stages of a drawing, is anything that complicates or dilutes your first impression. The first impression should be as simple and direct as you can possibly make it."
"Gesture drawing to the animator is what acting is to the stage or movie actor. What the actor portrays on the stage or before the camera is what the animator draws on paper." "So a perceptive and keen observation in regard to gesture (acting) is essential to the animator."
"When making a drawing for animation or for animation study, it must be saying something; that is, depicting an action or a mood, otherwise it becomes a mere doodle." "So...whenever studying drawing to better yourself for animation, don't doodle (draw aimlessly), draw with a purpose - go for the gesture. Save your doodling for telephone calls."
"...you must be very careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside." "Never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and is not interesting to you." (Stanislavski in An Actor Prepares)
Eric Larson: "There is no inner experience without external physical expression. In other words, what is our character thinking to make it act, behave, and move as it does? As the animator, we have to feel within ourselves every move and mood we want our drawings to exhibit. They are the image of our thoughts."
Walt Disney: "In other words, in most instances, the driving force behind the action is mood, the personality, the attitude of the character - or all three."
"What is going to make an artist out of you is a combination of a few basic facts about the body, a few basic principles of drawing, and an extensive, obsessive desire and urge to express your feelings and impressions."
"Animators are not just recorders of facts; they are storytellers, using their drawing vocabulary instead of words to spin a tale. They have at their disposal many exciting and dramatic ways to make expressive drawings, some of which are squash and stretch, twisting, contrast, angles, tension, perspective, and thrust. These are not physical things but they are what give life to physical things."
"Whenever we stayed too close to the photostats or directly copied even a tiny piece of human actions, the results looked very strange. The moves appeared real enough, but the figure lost the illusion of life... Not until we realised that photographs must be redrawn in animatable shapes (our proven tools of communications) were we able to transfer this knowledge to cartoon animaton."
"It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be young, to continue growing - not to settle and accept."
"Thinking of your drawing as a verb will add life and movement to even the subtlest action." "You can carry the thought a little further by adding an adverb."
"The mime uses gestures, he uses attitudes of the body, and he uses illusion. Attitudes of the body suggest what the character is feeling. The mime has to show more than one thing: what the character is like, how he is involved, his traits, his environment, and what is motivating him." "The mime 'magnifies' the truth - he doesn't just exaggerate. This is an interesting concept, for we animators think of exaggeration when we caricature a character or action. 'magnify' seems to be less mechanical, less surface adjustment. Character and feeling and ideas are from deep within, they are the truth of the character and therefor to magnify their truth seems more completely expressive."
"One of the hazards of putting too much work into a drawing that isn't right, gesture-wise, is that you are likely to fall in love with it (you worked so hard on the details) and hate the thought of changing it, even though it needs improvement."
"To get someone's attention and make an appeal, universal body language requires that you lean towards the person. This intensifies the eye contact, in the hope of making a more sure contact, arousing interest, or even pity."
"Think first, then draw."
"I'm thinking that the quality of empathy is a needed ingredient in becoming a good animator or assistant animator. One needs t be sensitive to the feelings emotions, and passions of others and to be able to portray these feelings to an audience in a sincere and often humorous way."
"In the case of using live action as a basis for animation, the animator soon learns that tracings of photostats will not suffice. Here is where his ability to understand and draw gestures really hits pay dirt. I have seen scenes where photostats had been practically traced, and the scene was lifeless. One of the reasons for this is that live action actors do not move from extreme to extreme as animated characters do. Studying live action clips will reveal that many actors mince through their parts like a cloud changing shapes in a breezy sky. Often actors are used whose gestures are broad and crisp, making the animator's job much easier." "So what I guess I'm driving at is the importance of studying a live model for gesture, and of realizing that the extremes used in animation should have the same care of investigation and thoroughness as the study drawings. I continually suggest (implore) that you do not attempt to copy the model, but rather capture and draw the gesture."
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