2D Animation

Chapter 1: Introduction

What It Is and What It Ain’t…

As a handy beginner’s guide to start making your own cartoons, from pencil to pixel (or just plain pixel, if you so choose) with Macromedia Flash.
It’s the book I wish I’d had when I started using Flash to make my own cartoons for video, web banners, or just my own personal amusement.
It guides you, step by step, from drawing storyboards, scanning them, finding voices and sound effects for your soundtrack, and creating your drawings (whether with pencils or pixels) that will move and talk… and, hopefully above all else, act.
I’ve tried to make this book an enjoyable, informative, and
Entertaining read by embellishing the text with original illustrations, interviews with animation professionals, and student artwork, along with a few doodles from my personal sketchbooks and yes, even restaurant menus.

Those of you more eager to jump into Flash are perfectly welcome to leap past these sections and come back to them at such time (if any) when you’re so bored you look forward to another evening of bashing your head repeatedly against the wall plaster.
This tutorial ain’t a 50-pound coffee table book subtitled “Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Flash Action Script in 1.2 Oversized Volumes But Were Afraid Someone Might Tell You Anyway,” and it is not intended to be the end-all, in-depth Action Script guide.
There are plenty of other books on that very subject. This ain’t it.

Chapter 2: Learning to Draw, Tools and Tips

Which comes first? A story or your character? That’s every bit as difficult to answer as “Which came first? The chicken or the egg?” (All right, the chicken, if you’re a creationist, like yours truly, but that’s a whole other book I’ve got to get around to writing.)
But in the realm of animation, it is tricky to say whether a character is developed by the story or vice versa. But either way you look at it, it’s a pretty bleak script without characters, so let’s start with character design.
Besides, if you think about it, how on earth can you start your storyboards unless you have at least a vague idea of what your characters look like?
With that said, let’s move on to the fascinating world of character design, which I’ve tried to neatly divide into three tidy little methods.

My Drawing Process tools

There’s one thing I have to say up front. I learned one of the greatest secrets to making your drawings better from that Tendou Souji. He calls it

“My Grandmother said this”

Lesson #1: Unplug. Turn off that TV, unplug that stereo, and take those earphones off.
Set them aside. Leave them there.

Okay, now that you know the condition under which you’re supposed to work — silence — we can go on to the tools you’ll need to get started.
Here are the three basics I think you need to draw animation:

Mandatory Animation Supplies

Light blue (not “non-repro blue”) Col-Erase pencils
Acme-punched animation paper (one ream of student bond is fine for starters)
Acme plastic peg bar (you can tape it to a drawing surface to keep it steady)

And here are some more possibilities, depending on your personal approach and preference:

Optional Animation Supplies

Pilot Precise V7 Rolling Ball ink pen (black)
#4 or #5 brush for inking (probably the smaller you can stand, the better)
Small jar for water to rinse brush
Waterproof black ink
Tiny jar or lid for an inkwell
100% cotton cloth for drying brush
A light table

Animation Pencils
The secret of my drawing method (which is hardly what I’d call a secret) is a small, obscure, friendly-looking utensil called the Col-Erase light blue pencil.



Almost immediately, people leap to the conclusion that I mean
“non-repro blue pencil.” Absolutely not. Although it has the same effect, it’s a bit of nitpickery, but essential nitpickery. Though the light blue doesn’t reproduce either, it’s slightly darker (than
non-repro blue), but just enough so that you can see through your blank sheet of animation paper to your previous drawing.
And the reason I insist on Col-Erase is essential. Something
about that almost magical little eraser keeps it from tearing up your paper, even after multiple erasing. Better yet, you can ink right on top of the Col-Erase pencil. With many other kinds of pencils (especially the vile non-photo blue), if you try to ink directly on top of
them, their consistency is chalky and it lightens up your ink too
much so that when you scan, you’ll waste way too much time cleaning up the mess.
However, if you’re fortunate enough to have a light table, you can pretty much see through as many sheets at a time as you like, which would make this argument pointless.



When you draw in light blue (or non-repro blue, for that matter), and then try to either photocopy or scan that drawing in black-and-white line art mode, what’s going to happen? Exactly! The blue lines are going to disappear.
So this is what I do: I do my animation drawings with a light blue pencil so that I can ink directly on top of the original sheet of paper. Even though the delightful eraser (its namesake) allows you to erase to your heart’s content without shredding your paper.

Animation Paper and the Acme Peg Bar

One of the first things I saw when exploring the possibility of doing animation for fun and/or profit was how animators used something in drawing (especially on those interviews or Disney specials on drawing animation) called an animation disc.
It’s a large, unwieldy metal disc that is attached to your desk and has the advantage of rotating to enable the ease of drawing characters at different angles. But of course, like anything that makes life easier, it has a price. It’s all about 1,500 – 2,500 Php.
As you start to draw animation, one of the things you’ll quickly appreciate is how important it is that the drawings stay in registration with one another. If the drawings do slide around, a character that’s supposed to be standing perfectly still might slowly begin to drift left or right. An amusing error perhaps, but unintentionally so.
The Acme peg bar and its accompanying paper consists of one peg in the center, and two rectangles on either side. The reason for this, of course, is to keep the animation drawings firmly rooted in place as you draw, rearrange, and flip your drawings to test the motion of the character.
Like most desktop animators, I scanned my animation drawings into the computer even then. But my scan bed was the usual, just-barely-over 8½" x 11" size. Often, my animation drawings were too big for the scanner, which made me have to scan a drawing
twice because part of an arm or a leg was just hanging off the edge of the scan area. When that happened, after scanning in the offending character art twice, I then had to copy and paste the pieces back together. And as many animation drawings as you’ll soon find are necessary for a scene, that is an unnecessary bit of time- consuming work!

I’ll mention one last thing about animation paper before we get started actually drawing. There’s been a big controversy over the years whether you’re a “top-peg” animator or a “bottom-pegger.” All this means is that some people prefer to draw with the pegs at
the bottom of the page, and others with the pegs at the top of the page. The advantage of being a top-pegger is that you can flip the drawings as you test the action to watch it progress.
Personally, I’m a bottom-pegger, because I prefer to simply “roll” the drawings back and forth by placing my left fingers between five or six pages at a time.

done

Learning to Draw

You probably have some basic experience drawing, as do most of us who are interested in animation or cartooning, so regardless of your level of expertise, let’s just go over some simple, basic tips that will hopefully help you refine your technique.



When you draw, whether it’s with a good old #2 for rough sketches or with a light blue Col-Erase for finished animation drawings, always start out light. That way, when you make mistakes, and let’s face it, you will, they will be easier to erase if the pencil marks are lightly shaded at the beginning. Otherwise, if you’re bearing down on your pencil, grinding into the paper like you’re giving it a tattoo, it’s naturally going to be more difficult to erase.

Three Methods of Character Construction

These are not to be confused with the three methods of character design, which we’ve already covered. However you’ve arrived at the design for your character, now it’s time to draw that character, over and over and over again, while still remaining consistent in the overall look, using one of the following methods:

The Grid method
The Gingerbread method
The Geometric construction method

The Grid Method

First off, if you’ve got a book that tells you how to draw characters using a grid, do you and me both a favor, and either chunk it in the garbage or donate it to the library for some other hapless, misfortunate soul to discover the wrong approach to constructing a character.
Grids are fine if you’re six years old, and have no real desire to draw that character in any other way than the way you see it already drawn.



Grids are fine if you’ve got a finished drawing you’re trying to
reproduce at a different size, but animation producers aren’t hiring animators who can only draw that perfect drawing of a character in that one given pose that’s already been done. You need to be able to draw a character in a myriad of poses and with different facial expressions, with different physical, emotional attitudes.
A grid won’t help you there.

The Gingerbread Method

When I was young, this is basically how I drew. I would start with the outlines of the character, like a gingerbread man, and then I’d fill in the features as I went along, like putting frosting features on my flat little character.
And right away, that’s the problem you’ll encounter with the gingerbread method. A flat, two-dimensional character, which looks just like that… a flat, two-dimensional character.
Yeah, yeah, I know… this is hand-drawn animation. I know it really is only two-dimensional characters that we’re dealing with.
We only have that x-axis (width) and y-axis (height) at our disposal.
But we’re trying to give characters that illusion of the third dimension, that illusion of the z-axis… that illusion of depth.



So how do we do that?
I’m so glad you asked. Fortunately, we have one last method of character construction.

The Geometric Construction Method

I know the title sounds a little fancy, but basically it just means that you construct your character out of basic geometric shapes, like circles, ovals, cylinders, and occasionally rectangles (use these sparingly). You’re even allowed to use fruit and other yummy shapes like oranges, pears, cashews, and cucumbers.
Again, we come back to the reason why we use these geometric shapes.
First of all, they’re easy to animate. Remember, you’re going to be doing a lot of drawings on these characters… and I do mean a lot. So right away, you’d better decide to make your character relatively easy to draw by constructing it out of shapes that are easy to draw repeatedly.
You also have to be able to turn these characters in space, and a character that’s built out of a series of circles and maybe a pear is going to be much more easily drawn from different angles. Also don’t forget that (depending on the style in which you’re working)



this character is going to be pushed and pulled around by outside forces, and squashed and stretched by gravity. Once again, far easier to accomplish with basic geometric shapes.
A final reason for basing your character construction on geometric shapes is visual appeal.
It has been noted that the appeal of Disney’s most famous mouse is that he’s built out of circles. A circle has been called the most geometrically perfect shape, and perhaps that is why Mickey has been such a success with generation after generation of fans.
Now that you’ve hopefully settled on the third (and I truly consider it the only viable) method, let’s start with the most obvious feature of a character: the head.
I like to draw a character in what’s called the 3/4 view. Obviously drawing a character in profile is not something you want to do in every single shot. Drawing directly in a frontal view is better than profile, but if you turn the character roughly halfway between a profile and frontal view, you’ve got the 3/4 view.



As I mentioned earlier, we know very well that we’re drawing two-dimensional characters, but we’re always trying to give that illusion of the third dimension.
Drawing your character in the 3/4 view is probably the most important step in achieving that illusion.
Start out with a circle. To ensure that I’m drawing the character in that 3/4 views, I like to place these little perspective “guidelines” on the face. One that goes directly down the center of the face, between the eyes, and all the way around the back of the head back to where we started. The other guide will run perpendicular to the first line you drew, crossing the former right around the nose and at the very back of the head.
If you’re working with a #2 pencil, you can erase these guides later. If you’re working with the light blue Col-Erase pencil as I suggested, you don’t even have to worry about erasing. Should the character turn out well enough so that you wish to ink him, and either scan or photocopy later, the blue lines will naturally disappear in reproduction.
You’ll probably want to place the eyes sitting on that second guideline we created. Since we’re drawing in 3/4 view, notice that perspective dictates that we need to make the character’s eye, the one farther away from us, slightly smaller than the eye closer to us.
If you don’t believe me, try drawing them the same size. Suddenly the eye farther away looks bigger than the one that is close (see the figure at the upper left on the following page), even though we know we’ve drawn them the same size. I have to “cheat” a bit and make the far eye smaller to give the eyes the illusion of being “the same size” (see the figure at the upper right).
The laws of perspective sure are weird, huh?
Okay, depending on the particular features of your character, go ahead and fill those in either according to the example on the following page, or use details of your own choosing. Here, we’re using a sort of traditional 1940s animated character, but of course, style will vary according to your personal taste. You’ve got to start some- where, and this is as good a style to start with as any.



As you start to flesh out the rest of your character, you’re going to start to ask yourself questions: What kind of character is this? Tall, short, skinny, fat, or muscular? How old is he or she? Is the character generally a happy individual, or angry, maybe even sullen? What time frame is this character from? Is this a well-to-do, zoot-suited party player from the 1940s, or is he a peasant from the Dark Ages? Obviously, costume is going to play a role here as well in determining your character, so these are all questions you’d better be prepared to answer.
When I was drawing characters back in high school, I found myself making up stories about them that practically wrote.

With our first character drawing done, now we need to take this a little bit further and do at least two more drawings from the basic angles: 3/4 view (which you hopefully just completed), profile, and back view. You may want to do a full frontal view, just to even things out.
When drawing a model sheet, it’s best to draw all your views of the character at the same size, and standing on the same horizontal line. Many studios even place what I call a “head ruler” across the sheet, just to show how many “heads high” a character is. That’s a further precaution that helps you keep the proportions consistent on the character, regardless of whether you’re a one-man independent animation crew, or have a staff of hundreds that will all be drawing the same character. (Naturally, you’ll soon discover how many assistants you have depends on how many zeros are in your animation production budget.)
You may wish to add to your model sheet, depending on the size of your sheet of paper, the character in various moods, attitudes, and positions. Facial expressions are handy to include.
What you’ll also quickly realize is that it’s unlikely you’ll get any of these drawings right the first time; that’s perfectly all right. For now, you’re in an exploratory process to develop a character that, if properly drawn, can enthrall hundreds, thousands, or per- haps even millions of happy viewers.



An early Jayle Bat model sheet. Note the “head ruler” behind Jayle, which indicates she’s roughly 4½ heads tall. A model sheet should include a turnaround, preferably with front, back, and side views of the character. It should also show the character in various attitudes of happy, frightened, bored, angry, and any other emotions she’s likely to run through during your cartoon.
It’s kind of interesting to see how Jayle has developed over the past 10 years. Oddly enough, the “frightened” image still looks most like how I currently envision the character.



(A) If you have two characters, it may be best to use contrast to your advantage. Even though Laurel and Hardy dressed almost identically, the contrast between thick and thin made them visually amusing to look at.

(B) Variations. When developing a character, don’t be too quick to choose your first drawing. Experiment with those anatomical proportions!
See how many variations you can get, starting with the same shapes (circles) and the same ingredients (1930s bulb-nose, gloves, hair).

© See what I would’ve been stuck with if I’d stopped at any of my first three drawings of Jayle?

Basic Character Types

Naturally, as I’ve stated before, I don’t expect to be able to tell you every possible character type and body description, but I would like to discuss a few basic characters to get you started: the hero, the heroine, the wacky sidekick animals, and the villain/monsters. I’m sure we could name plenty of others, but as I can see you chomping at the bit to leap into Flash, we’ll stay simple with these four.

Basic Hero Construction

The hero is a guy who may have an everyday build, more on the slender side (like the caricature of yours truly), or any variation of these, but generally, in the category of the animated film, we’re talking about the Charles Atlas/knight in shining armor type.



One of the most basic differences between males and females
is what I call the “appeal of the inverted triangle.” (Ahem! Now, be nice!) With the male, and even more so in the hero, you’ll want to have a triangle pointing downward. The broad shoulders taper down to a narrow waist.
In the female, there is a significant difference. And to quote Pepé Le Pew on that very subject, “Vive le difference!”
The female’s basic overall form starts from a flat-bottomed triangle, or a standard pyramid, pointing upward. Her narrow shoulders and waist widen out to the hips, which are the widest part of the body. But more on that later.
As for the hero, you’ll probably want to keep him at least rea- sonably muscle-bound, or at least enough so that he’s prepared for the challenges he’ll face in the adventures you’re about to lead him through in your cartoon.



A good rule of thumb I’ve read about drawing muscular characters is to try to keep most of your muscles on one side of the arm or leg… and that’s the side with a bulge on it, or at least something of a curve. The other part, closer to the bone, will have a tendency to be more straight.
Again, depending on the physical tone of your hero, he may have a thick neck, a lantern jaw, and the traditional six-pack just below his rib cage.
Additionally, you’ll note that one difference between the more realistic characters and the more cartoony characters is the number of heads tall. We have a tendency to think of the head taking up more space on the body than it actually does, but that’s mostly psy- chological. Since we focus generally on the face (during a discussion with someone), we think it’s larger in proportion to the body than it really is.
On adult males, we’re generally about six to seven heads tall, and not too far from that on women. Naturally, we’re all different, and that’s what makes us interesting as real-life individuals or cartoon caricatures. These are obviously just general rules of thumb.
And remember, it’s best to learn the rules of anatomy first… and then break them only as necessary.

Basic Heroine Construction

I’m one of the few artists who will allow you to see some of my earlier lousy drawings, but here you go. I think he was probably talking about a drawing not unlike these:



At this point, I had two choices: I could (A) get angry and/or indignant, throw myself into a serious tantrum, and never ask his opinion again. Or I could (B) grow as an artist, by weighing the opinion he had offered as diplomatically as he was then able, and taking a careful, scrutinizing look at my work.
I went with choice B, and looked carefully at my attempt at an attractive woman.

As much as I hated to admit he was right, well… he was right. My women needed some serious work.
So, I practiced. I looked at photos, and tried to figure out and analyze what unique, individual features made each woman attractive. I tried to inject that into my designs. Here are some of the observations I collected from my own opinions regarding feminine physical charm and from other artists over the years.



Helpful tips in drawing females

Overall, when drawing women, again make sure the hips are wider than the shoulders, which are generally more soft and rounded than her masculine counterpart’s. The neck also has a tendency to be more slender, and the hands are longer and more graceful.

One of the foremost features to be considered is the face. And since the eyes are, as they say, the “windows to the soul,” that might be as good a place as any to start. I have a tendency to draw the eyes on women larger than I do on men. When possible, I like to draw the iris as a separate shape from the pupil. Normally the iris, or colored part of the eye, is the first thing to be lost during the simplification process of caricature. Otherwise, the larger the pupil, the more alert (and sometimes even the younger) the character.
Keep the eyelashes as a single, thick and thin line. Think how mascara thickens the eyelashes and tends to clump them together. Ask yourself, how often can you count individual eyelashes when standing three feet away from someone? Avoid drawing the little cartoon eyelashes whenever possible, except perhaps for a moment of comic effect.
For a more attractive woman, also put as little detail in drawing their noses as possible. As weird as it sounds, look at those fashion commercials, when they flood a model’s face with light, or when they’re interviewing an aging model/actress. They’ll either overlight or soften and even blur the picture so those wrinkles and detail lines disappear. One of the first things to go is the nose. Don’t believe me? Look at those two foundations of feminine teen beauty (well, in the cartoon kingdom, anyway), Betty and Veronica. Find a picture of either one and look at their noses. Not only are they missing the bridges to their noses, they don’t even have nostrils. They just have a little right triangle, a triangle set on its side. In other words, less is more!
The same basic rule for drawing eyelashes applies similarly to drawing hair. As one of my first drawing instructors told me, avoid drawing the individual hairs, and instead approach hair as a mass. Because even though it is composed of those tiny fine lines, gravity (and air, especially wind) tends to treat hair more as a mass, so we as artists should do the same.

In any case, another artist was kind enough to offer me a few words of advice on drawing female hands. Besides keeping the fingers relatively long and slender, it’s best to avoid drawing all the fingers clumped together (a fist would be the obvious, inescapable exception); otherwise the hand is in danger of looking too massive. Instead, cluster them together in groups of two or three.
Legs are widest at the thighs, tapering down to the knees, flaring out again slightly at the calves, and then down again to the ankles.
Naturally, all these general guidelines for drawing men and women are just that… general guidelines.

A woman doesn’t have to be a total walking stick figure to turn heads, folks!
I’m probably one of the few people involved in the media who will tell you this: Just because idealized men and women are portrayed physically a certain way in popular entertainment doesn’t mean that’s the way we’re supposed to look. Remember, animation is largely a fantasy world.
If the famed Barbie doll were a real woman, and walking down the street, she would get more than a few casual glances. Because if a human female were actually as tall proportionately as that popular toy, which is regrettably given to little girls around the world at an impressionable age, she would be seven feet tall.

Wacky Sidekicks

The wacky sidekick characters, much like the 1940s character explored earlier, have a tendency to be shorter and fewer heads tall. Your wacky sidekick could be any number of silly forest or barnyard animals walking upright or down on all fours, goblins, insects, or even humans.
If you can stick a pair of eyes and a mouth on it, you can make it into an animated character. As a matter of fact, if you take into account characters like The Addams Family’s Cousin Itt, and perhaps better yet, the Flying Carpet from Disney’s Aladdin, even those details may not be needed for a particularly talented cartoonist. You can get a surprising range of expression with a minimum of details. And that’s something else I like about animation.
Of all of the expressive art forms, I think animation has the greatest storytelling potential. With animation you can give anything a range of emotions, whether it’s an anthropomorphic bat-girl, a pompous teapot conducting a symphony with a spoon, or even an animated flour sack, hopping and scrambling across the room to get away from a rampaging eggbeater.
As I often tell my students, if you can do this scene in live-action, why bother to animate it? You’re going to a lot of trouble, so make sure your trouble is worthwhile.
Such is the case of the wacky sidekick.



Even though you’re main characters may be more realistic, like Fred and Daphne, you may very well find the wacky sidekick can provide a helpful role in an otherwise serious drama… and contribute more than their potential marketing future. (Yeah, we all know the wacky sidekick will have great merchandising sales potential as a Beanie Buddy!)
Seriously though, even Shakespeare knew the benefit of having an amusing character in an otherwise deep drama. Think about the Fool (or Jester) from King Lear, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Especially after moments of heavy tragedy in a play, a wacky side- kick can relieve the tension.
Generally, the proportions of the wacky sidekick are an over- sized head (but try not to overdo it, or the character will end up looking like a frightening Mardi Gras escapee), hands, and feet. (Think about how puppies look, with oversized paws that they later grow into.)
Just be careful, though, because if you overdo it with the wacky sidekick, you’ll end up with an annoying, or worse yet, a downright obnoxious sidekick… like Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace, Orko from He-Man, or the most despicable, the most contemptu-
ous, the absolute worst of them all… yecch! Yes, I mean, of course… Scrappy Doo.

The Villain

One of the first things Disney Studios realized in dramatized animation was that often your hero is only as strong as your villain.
A villain, like any other cartoon character, can be human, animal, cyborg, or any other conceivable being capable of rational, or for that matter irrational, thought.
While your hero and heroine (and even supporting characters) has more everyday proportions, your villain is often a character with which you can have a little more leeway.
They can be thinner, with drawn features and bags under their eyes, suggesting they’ve lost sleep pondering tomorrow’s big plans of subjugating the masses to their cruel authority. The hands can be skeletal, pointy, as if to indicate the similarity between their fingers and the talons of a bird of prey.
Just as easily, you can go in the opposite direction, like Jabba the Hutt. They’ve gorged themselves on the finer things in life, and are now bloated sacks of fat. Maybe they’re so oversized, just like the giant aforementioned space-slug himself, they often send underlings to carry out their nefarious missions of destruction.
Although certainly a true villain may not be apparent from the outset of the story (just as in real life), things that they say or do, or even from our artistic viewpoint certain design cues, may act as hints that these are less than trustworthy individuals.
Color cues go as far back as the heyday of the Hollywood Western, where the hero wore a white hat and the villain wore a black hat. We can even look at more subtle clues: Perhaps there may be a certain off-color hue to their skin, like the pale green of Snidely Whiplash or the Wicked Witch. Maybe though they’re not dressed in black, instead wearing colors or trimmings like dark purples (they imagine themselves royalty) or reds (the color of blood).



Even the lines of their design could be more harsh, angular… something that suggests the cruel point of a dagger.
Don’t underestimate the value of a worthy villain. A weak villain makes things too easy for the hero. And what makes a strong story is a believable conflict… it’s what keeps us interested.
I learned from watching cliff-hanger shows like Dark Shadows, and even back when I was reading Spiderman comics that if any of the characters ever got their problems permanently solved I’d lose interest and stop watching.
Avoid established stereotypes altogether; instead, build on these existing stereotypes by modifying them, or try creating a new stereotype altogether. Be a trendsetter. But make your characters interesting to watch, and maybe even suggest a moment of sympathy the audience by showing why they went wrong.
One villain that stands out in my mind is Hades in Disney’s Hercules. The villains in their most previous films (Scar from Lion King, Jafar from Aladdin, and that forgettable guy from Pocahontas… what was his name again?) had been snobby, stuffy, upperclass British types. While a few of the early character studies of Hades looked in danger of taking this beaten path yet again, someone made the suggestion to go 180 degrees away, in the opposite direction of a scheming villain… they made him a New York business executive.
I’d never seen that done before and I think it worked particularly well. But I’ll repeat what I said at the beginning of this section: Your hero is only as strong as your villain. So make ’em strong.
Whatever character types you’ve come up with — heroes, heroines, wacky sidekicks, and/or villains — make a model sheet. Whether you’re working by yourself or with a small studio, you need to keep all these drawings consistent, regardless of whether we’ve got one, several, or dozens of artists working on them.
So now, from your various drawings on various sheets of paper, photocopy and cut and paste or scan and assemble your final model sheet in your graphics program of choice, like Photoshop.
When you’ve got a model sheet of your character, or better yet, several original characters that look like no one else’s, you may want to seriously consider registering them with the U.S. Copyright Office.