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Anchor Points
Anchor points are specific points on your characters face that we use as attachments for the various features. These anchor points help to keep the character’s features from sliding around on the face. It also allows us to keep the character “on model”. Anchor points help us to establish and maintain the proportion and volumes of the character (see pages 27 & 28 in Lesson 2 and pages 157 & 162 of Designing Cartoon Characters for Animation).
Here are the hard anchor points for your character’s head:
- The inside lower corner of the eyes,
- The bridge of the nose where it connects to the head,
- Just under the nose between the nostrils where it connects to the head,
- The cheek bones,
- The middle of the ears, and
- The back of the jaw just below the ear lobes.
There are also “soft” anchor points on the head. These points are more on the surface of the head as opposed to the “hard “points listed above which are attached to bones in the head. Because these points are on the skin and the skin can stretch and squash to a certain extent, they can move within a small range that is still limited by the character’s being “on model”.
These are the soft anchor points for the character’s head:
- The inside and outside ends of the eyebrows,
- The top lip in the middle just below the nose,
- The middle of the bottom lip,
- The outside ends of the mouth,
- The top rounded edge of the eyes,
- The outside point of the eyes,
- The middle point of the hairline above the brows (or the part in the character’s hair), and
- The tip of the nose. |
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