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What Are Spatial Relationships?
Spatial relationships are the distances between key points or objects in your drawings. An example of this would be the distance between a character’s eyes, the size of their head in relation to their body, the distance between a chair and a table in a room, the width of a doorway or the height of a wall. Whenever you draw something from more than one position, as you would a cartoon character or an environment, it’s important to be consistant with the “model” (as it’s called in studios) or the spatial relationships of things.
Inconsistancy shows up immediately, especially in animation where ther are 12 drawings for every second of motion. If just one of those drawings was “off model”, it would stand out from all the opthers as a jerking action in the characters movements.
If it was from one scene to the next, and the character’s design changed, it would seem weird. For example, let’s say you’re watching your favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon and for the first minute Bugs looked like he was supposed to. Then all of a sudden, in the next scene, his ears were really big, then the next scene his hands and feet were human looking, then the next scene his eyes were just little dots with no white area around them, and all of this took place without any link to the story line or actions of the characters, they were just drawn off model. I’m sure you’d notice that something was wrong. The reality of the character’s consistancy would be shattered and you wouldn’t be able to accept the cartoon for what it should be.
Here’s another example, let’s pretend you’re in your bedroom. You walk in through the door and everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be. You walk across the room to the wall and turn around to look back at the door you just walked in through but now it’s as small as a mouse hole, in fact it actually looks just like the stereotypical cartoon mouse hole. Don’t you think you’d be a little bit freaked out by this? |
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