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Basic Work Process
This section will be called your, “Basic Work Process” from now on. I’ll refer you to it throughout the course in the “Thought Process” section. I’ll add on any new things that you should be thinking about as we go along and as it pertains to the particular assignment you’ll be working on at that time.
Each individual artist probably has their own personal, individualistic way of approaching their drawing, you know those quirky things like locking themselves in their room, turning out all the lights and lying down under their drawing desk with a sketch pad while listening to ABBA. Well, not all artists do this but there is one common way of handling your designing. This is a very general guide line and is not to be taken as an absolute. There are many variables involved such as deadlines, budgets, style, complexity of design, thoroughness of the design model sheets, etc.
When drawing cartoon characters, the basic method I use is what I like to call, Analytical. Here’s what I do:
1) receive the assignment and read through the outline,
2) review the assignment with the supervisor. Find out what the context of the character is in relation to the other characters within the story. What is the mental motivation of the character, the physical motivation?
3) If there is lipsync, or if you have a character actor who is doing the voice, do you have access to the sound track to find out what the intonation of the character is, what is the attitude. If you don’t have this luxury, could you imagine a voice for this character?
4) Then take the character and act it out. Act it out in front of a mirror, in front of a video camera, in front of a friend or by yourself. Try acting like the character in a number of different ways with different attitudes,
5) Hyper analyze the design of the character and come up with a mental image of them,
6) Draw thumbnail sketches of alternate designs,
7) Make any revisions necessary and then redraw the character.
* It should be noted that this isn’t an absolute statement and doesn’t apply to every designer’s work habits.
Try using the following points on the next few pages and adjust them to your own work system.
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