Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation

By Wayne Gilbert

Anamie, 1999

8½" x 11", 82 pages

As far as I know, this book can only be ordered on-line from anamie. Go visit the previous link to see some preview of the book contents.

This is a smallish book with only 82 pages and costs $29.95 (USD). The book does not contain any useless verbiage though. Each page is basically several illustrations with accompanying explanation texts so this is really geared toward drawing and for people who want to use drawings.

Planning animation, be it traditional cell animation up to 3D CG animation, necessitates a lot of drawings. Drawings to find the proper design for the characters and their environments, drawings to find the most expressive poses, drawings the storyboards, etc. etc. etc.

When doing 3D CG animation, it is oftentime trempting to just use the 3D CG characters and pose them inside the camera frame, tweak for the best pose and camera angle and go with that. I personally don't believe in this approach but I once made a storyboard for a 3D CG animation project this way just for the challenge and to get an experienced foundation for my oppinion. I can say, after that experience, that I still don't believe in this approach. I could go on about the multiple reasons why this is far from being the optimal approach for designing efficient poses, attitude, camera angles and more generally, animation but I will reserve this for another article. The book "Simplified Drawing for planning animation" is, in a sense, exactly about that.

By the time it takes to pose a character in a 3D application, a whole bunch of sketches can be drawn. The beauty of sketching is that it is a search process. A search for the best design, pose, expression, attitude, etc. And by using the simplified drawing techniques exposed in this book, this search process can go very fast and very efficient. The book is organized backward. The fun part first, with interesting character designs and expressive poses followed by a section about simplified anatomy and followed with a "how to draw" section. Although basic drawing principles are exposed, this is not really a "How to draw" book. And to draw with the sort of efficiency that we see in this book would require a lot of drawing experience.

The first section (about 30 pages) covers character design, posing, force, action and acting. This section reminded me of "Animator's Survival Kit" in its presentation because the author takes an animation challenge and progresses through it, adding frames and variations as he explores the solutions. The drawing style is very efficient and shows that with just a very few lines, the character's personality and thought can be expressed.

The second section covers simplified anatomy. This is not a full anatomy course and the author gives several other anatomy books as references. I was gladly surprised to read the author suggest and defend Burne Hogarth books. Burne Hogarth books are important anatomy learning tools IMO but when I suggested those books to peoples in the past, I usually got one or two people posting detracting comments. Thumbs up to Wayne Gilbert for suggesting them. So the simplified anatomy section is not a complete anatomy course but Gilbert gives the most important anatomy desing principles such as flow curves when drawing the legs and arms, simple models for drawing the feets, diagrams about how the shoulder moves (shoulder motion is much more important than animation beginners tend to do if they do them at all), simplified hands and diagrams showing fingers orientation, simple cranium and variations and center of gravity.

The last section covers basic drawing principles and basic perspective. Every truely usefull knowledge about perspective is in there IMO but like for the rest of the book, there are no redondencies. Each principle is explained once and with one single example. There are no presentation of the same concept in different contexts.

The main quality of this book is that it goes right to the center of every drawing issues with plenty of drawings and a little accompanying texts. But this is also its main disadvantage. Although I find a lot of animation books on the market are filled with redundant verbiage, this book would benefit from a little more redundancy and a little more texts given its price. I found this book to be gery good but I would hesitate to recommend it because of the price/quantity issue.