Cartoon Animation with Preston Blair, Revised Edition!

Learn techniques for drawing and animating cartoon characters

Preston Blair

• Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781633228917
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Learn from a master animator how to bring your cartoons to life through movement with Cartoon Animation with Preston Blair.

CHAPTER 1

GETTING STARTED

TOOLS & MATERIALS

To master the basics of cartoon animation, you only need a few supplies. You can get started practicing with some paper, a pencil, and an eraser, but inking and coloring tools can help you create finished-looking characters. An animation board is a bigger investment, but it makes it easier to flip between pages and to create “cleanup” or revision drawings from rough sketches.

A pencil sketch on a loose sheet of paper.

Paper Drawing paper is available in a range of surface textures (called “tooth”), including smooth grain (plate finish and hot-pressed), medium grain (cold-pressed), and rough to very rough. For the purposes of learning animation, using loose sheets of thin, smooth printer paper is best. If working with an animation board, use unruled, 10” x 12” loose-leaf paper that is punched with two big holes.

Pencil Animators usually draw with a mechanical pencil with a No. 2 lead, so there is no need for sharpening. In traditional animation, animators would also use a “non-photo blue” pencil when creating initial sketches. This is because the color was virtually invisible when the final sketch was copied on a copy machine. For your sketches, you only need to make light marks that are easy to erase.

A dog inked with a brush after its sketch lines were erased to create a cleanup drawing.

Erasers There are several types of art erasers. Plastic erasers are useful for removing hard pencil marks and large areas. Kneaded erasers can be molded into different shapes and used to dab at an area, gently lifting tone from the paper. Lightly rub a kneaded eraser over an entire sketch to prepare for a cleanup drawing.

Pen or Ink Traditionally, most cartoons were inked with pen, but a brush and ink could also be used to give the lines a heavier, more accented look. Experiment with pens and inks to find your own style. Choose what you like best and become comfortable with it.

A traditional animation cel colored with acrylic paints.

Paint or Markers You can color your animated characters however you’d like. Acrylic paints were used on acrylic animation cels, but you can also color with watercolors, markers, or scan your drawing into a computer and color it digitally.

Animation Board An animation board is a drawing surface with a light that shines through the paper. Pegs made of wood or metal hold the paper in place. The glass, which should be the same size as the paper, allows you to see through several sheets of paper at once and note how your series of drawings varies in position. The pegs also allow for easy flipping back and forth between pages.

DRAWING BASICS

A beginner can only become an animator through many hours of drawing practice. Get comfortable sketching, drawing the same character in different positions so that it looks the same every time. These basic techniques will help you get started.

SKETCHES

Following a basic formula for drawing this character makes it easier to draw it the same way each time. Animators use reference drawings to know the proportion guidelines when drawing the character in different poses and actions.

Hold your pencil loosely to create the basic construction of the character with rounded forms and add the details as you go. In this example of a cartoon dog, it takes several steps to go from a few simple lines to a cleaned-up sketch.

Once you’ve sketched the character, make a cleanup drawing by working over the rough with a new sheet of paper on your animation board (similar to a tracing). Then ink and color the final using the mediums of your choice.

When you’re happy with a rough sketch, trace the lines you want to keep over the messy sketch...