Karmatoons Drawring tuts

[steve392]

I thought some might find this interesting

http://www.karmatoons.com/drawing/drawing.htm

 

scroll to bottem

[Xtaz]

Great... thank you for share it.

[Rodney]

Thanks for the link.

Karmatoons is one of those perennial sites that folks disover from time to time and it's a great one to revisit.

Doug Compton's flour sack and Mr. Basic treatments (which appear to be from the Preston Blair 'school' of animation) have influenced a generation of artists and animators.

 

I really enjoyed running through the Karmatoons site again because I pick up something new every time.

 

 

Somewhat related:

It's a bit early for the holiday treatment but...

 

Doug Compton (Mr. Karmatoons his-self) animated this short film/music video over the period of a year in a classic hand drawn style:

 

B_7xqqt1Vgs

 

 

There is a (very) short breakdown/analysis of one of the shots posted here.

 

The author of the write up had this to say about Doug's project:

 

A few months ago we received an early Christmas card, of sorts, when Doug Compton sent his film, "Nuttin For Christmas". He'd been working on it for a year and created the whole thing himself. Drawn, scanned, digitally painted.

 

The most amateurish question we're asked (with surprising frequency) is if animation is on "one's" or "two's". The polite answer is "The best animation mixes it up." I won't write what the response should be out of fear of being labeled an obscene site by Google.

 

With that in mind, and the Princess and Frog on nobody's lips, I thought I'd post frame grabs of a single scene. Which demonstrates Doug's terrific sense of animation timing and spacing.

 

Each drawing is numbered according to the frame it appears in the shot. Missing numbers are holds. Example: there's no 8, 9, 10, 11 because 7 holds for those frames.

Emphasis added.

 

This is very applicable to computer animation where a keyframe is used to interpolate the movement of the following frames (of course it influences the movement of the proceeding frames as well). As opposed to hand drawn animation however, computer animation let's us specify different movement for the 'missing' frames; Hold, Linear, Spline and Zero Slope. When computer animators struggle it is often because they expect to see the effect of what would happen with hand drawn animation when what they get is driven by how the computer has been instructor to proceed by this interpolation setting.

 

There is a blog post from a former student of Doug's that talks about Doug's drive to push the students at the Kubert School to perfection.

The take being that Doug encouraged students to really "commit to a line".

This is similar to what we do in computer animation when we have any given idea.

It's not enough to just have the idea... it's not even enough to know the technicalities... what is needed is the commitment to act decisively... to finish the job.

Then once the job is finished... move on.

Alternately, we will noodle away at unfinished projects for the rest of our lives.

 

In a way this is exactly what I like about the Karmatoons site.

It's not perfect... at times it's not even pretty... but it's out there for others to enjoy and experience.

 

Apologies for droning on.

I guess I must have enjoyed the revisit to the Karmatoons site.

[Rodney]

Here's a blog from a guy (Mark Maund) who as a student of the Kubert animation program animated Mr. Basic to get the various still drawings working together.

Note: I assume here that this animation is representative of the course curriculum at the time.

 

http://markmaund.blogspot.com/2008/01/mr-b...-animation.html

[Rodney]

I should note that the attached image is one of my favorites from the Karmatoon series but not for entirely obvious reasons.

 

The Pose to Pose aspect is great.

The actual drawings and poses too.

But what I perceive as an unintended message that a three act play (i.e. any story) is generally comprised of four golden poses (story points) but with three 'actions' to deliver the performance. Now THAT is the gold to be mined here.

 

This lesson is borne out (emphasized) by the Timing Charts... and the Key Drawings... and the plan they create for carrying out the story's 'inbetweens'.

And best of all... this is all captured in one single... solitary... unmoving... drawing.

 

Fun stuff if'n you ask me.

[steve392]

Thats a graet cartoon Rodney Iv never seen it before, thanks for showing it . The pose image is good to see as it has the timing on there aswell wich I find veeery dificult to get