Post written by Renato Vargas. Follow me on Twitter.
Over the past week I have been discussing how hobbyists like myself tend to omit certain steps, professional studios are obligated to take in the process of creating animated stories, because they feel that everything is in their heads. I certainly followed that logic, and it brought me nowhere, since I didn’t give my characters a chance to develop correctly, which ultimately lead to very inconsistent character animation. It was so bad, that it looked as if the character that started the motion slowly transformed into a completely different one (and not on purpose). You see, the animation process became stagnated, due to the fact that characters weren’t properly taken out of the crummy piece of paper they were conceived on, and put on a nice model sheet that could serve as a reference throughout the entire project, before the actual work started.
From my Rezadores de la Recolección original concept art.
(Click on the image to see the other side of the paper.)
After reading a lot about animation, it became clear to me that I had to adhere, more or less, to the workflow that studios have used since the first half of the twentieth century if I ever wanted to finish my little project, as I stated in a previous post. It’s a proven formula that just works. It was time to put my money where my mouth was. We’ll, I’ve been doing my homework, and it is turning out nicely. I thought I showed you a bit.
Inspiration hits you in the most unusual places. I was at a conference on climate change when the idea for the look of my characters flooded my mind. Luckily for me, they handed out little note taking blocks for the event and I was able to get a couple of poses drawn before the Q&A round. This past week, in an attempt to get this project going, I pulled the little piece of paper (which you can see by clicking, either on the picture above, or here), scanned it, and decided to make a nice model sheet out of it, to be consistent with what I previously discussed about character development. It is nowhere near finished, but it’s a start. Here’s are the steps:
1. Take the character’s measurements. It’s a good practice to think about your character’s size in multiples of its head. That way, no matter where you draw it on the screen you’ll always know if it’s dimensions are right, just by counting “how many heads tall” it is. This was a good time to correct my character’s original measurements, since I wanted him to be exactly five heads tall. No matter what program you use for your animations, make sure you do every step in its individual layer. That way you have more control over the entire process. Here I just drew a couple of horizontal lines marking the head’s superior and inferior edges, copied them and pasted them down the page as reference. A couple of red lines delimit what would be an imaginary sphere embedded inside his head, which is useful for drawing him rough.
Notice how I drew lines that represent its height in “heads”.
2. Rough it out, and draw a half or a full turnaround. This is the time to start figuring out how to quickly draw your character in various views. Make any adjustments to your original sketch here. Don’t forget to use a new layer for this. Block the rest. You don’t want to mistakenly ruin something. In the following image the original bitmap layer is turned off, but you might want to keep it on while you draw on top of it. At this point, keep it simple. You just want to learn to draw your character in various poses and get its dimensions right.
Look for simple shapes that will help you draw your character faster.
3. Clean it. In a new layer, take the pencil or pen tool (something that will give you same width lines, no matter the zoom) and cleanly outline your character. You can take your time with this step. Use your software’s tools to edit the points or nodes that make up the lines. You’ll end up with something like this:
Be very careful with this step.
4. Color it. Our model sheet is starting to look good. Now it needs some color. You can copy and paste the contents of the clean lines layer onto a new one and color your character there. That way you’ll have both versions in case you need to revisit your lines (say, if you’re writing a post about them 
). Document what colors you are using. If your software doesn’t have color palette management functionality, make sure you know the RGB values for all of your character’s colors. You might (and probably will) need them later. Just write them down.
This is a nice picture you can tape to your wall as reference for your project.
Our model sheets are on the right path now. A couple of expressions and some action poses would be in order, and seem like the next step. What do you think of my process; any suggestions? Tell us all about it in the comment section of this post. See you next time!