Force: Animal Drawing

Animal Locomotion and Design Concepts for Animators

Mike Mattesi

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000384833
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

This 10th Anniversary Edition of Force: Animal Drawing: Animal Locomotion and Design Concepts for Animators offers readers an enlarged and an enhanced selection of images that apply FORCE to animals. With larger images, readers can better appreciate and learn how to bring their own animal illustrations to life. New drawings and facts about the animals create a more comprehensive edition for your library. Readers will also adapt key industry techniques that will help personify animal animations as well as endowing their creations with human-like expressions and unique animal movement. content can be found at DrawingFORCE.com

Key Features:

• This full-color 10th Anniversary Edition makes FORCE even easier to understand through great diagrams and illustrations

• Color-coded page edges help you find more easily the animal you want to draw

• Learn about key specifications for each mammal such as their weight range, food they eat, and how fast they run

• Video content can be found at DrawingFORCE.com

Chapter 1
The FORCE Animal

There is only one anatomical structure to understand when drawing human beings. In the animal kingdom, there are many. This vast difference leads to numerous architectural iterations for the book. Other animal drawing books present their ideas on a per animal basis, but that did not make much sense to me. My focus was NOT to teach you, the reader, how to draw a bear or horse. I want you to leave this book with a broader understanding: FORCE in ALL mammals in a manner that would allow you to draw them with or without reference through the application of some simple rules. Since this book is based on the abstraction of FORCE, it made perfect sense to compose the chapters in the main three mammal locomotive classes. They are plantigrade, digitigrade, and unguligrade.

This approach was still not a simple enough manner with which to draw all mammals, so I dug deeper. My epiphany was that the main difference in these mammals is the adjustments made in their appendages or front and back legs, not in the trunk of their bodies. These changes determine how fast the animals move. In general, a plantigrade animal is much slower than an unguligrade one, for example. These two animal types are designed to function against friction and gravity in two different ways.

My research led me to another incredible find, one that will change the way we perceive the animal kingdom and thus how we connect to and draw it. Join me now, through the step-by-step process I experienced to reveal this discovery.

Since I am not an animal but a human, I started with human anatomy and analyzed how it is different from an animal’s. Always start with what you know. Let’s go through these steps together to better help you understand my conclusions.

Step One

Counting FORCES

Let’s start with the human body. For the sake of this lesson, I have numbered the FORCES in the diagram to the left to match those found in the diagram on the right. The main concept to focus on in the upright human is rhythm’s functional design defined by a left-to-right motion. This motion is caused by gravity unfailingly pulling down on the human body. Our anatomy has reacted to this pull and therefore is designed to function with this invisible FORCE’S constant pull on us.

The image on the right presents the human body’s FORCES horizontally. Basically, we have support against gravity in our hips and ribcage/shoulder regions. Our belly and neck/head areas hang from the supportive regions.

Step Two

FORCE Comparison between Man and Animal

The human body is designed to stand upright. It has four major FORCES that balance out the masses of the trunk of the body. When this silhouette of FORCES is compared to an animal’s, an interesting difference becomes apparent. The animal has one less directional FORCE than the human. Why does this occur? The rhythm of the animal is as follows:

1. There is an upward FORCE in the hips, similar to the human.
2. Then, there is a downward FORCE in the human lower back. In the animal, downward FORCE occurs much further up the spine where the weight of the ribcage and all the animal’s internal organs are pulled down by gravity. This difference will lead us to further investigation.
3. In the human, the third FORCE pushes up into the upper back, whereas in the animal, we find our last FORCE pushes up the neck and head. So the FORCE that is missing in the animal is the upward FORCE in the shoulders and upper back. Let’s take a closer look at this region of anatomy and figure out why this is occurring.

Step Three

Front-View Cross Section: Man-to-Animal Comparison of Scapula (Shoulder Blade) Movement

This image compares the shoulder blades on a human versus an animal.

1. The human’s ribcage is in a more horizontal alignment. The blades slide left and right along the back of the body. They can also rotate to some degree on the back’s surface.
2. An animal’s ribcage is primarily vertical in its alignment. This allows for the blades to slide along the long axis of its ribcage. This also stops animals from stretching their forelimbs away from their ribcage, otherwise known as brachiating.

Step Four

Skeletal Differences in the Shoulder Region

A few observations are of utmost importance here:

• Primates and humans have clavicles or collarbones. The close-up image on the bottom presents that skeletally the clavicle (attached to the ribcage), scapula, and humerus, or upper arm bone, all lock into one another. This is VERY IMPORTANT! Why?
• If a human were to lie horizontally, similar to a push-up position, this position would affect him by skeletally supporting his ribcage and upper body because of the chain of structures we just discussed. This observation is important because if we remove the clavicle/collarbone, the scapula has nothing to attach itself to and neither does the humerus bone in the upper arm! Just to make my point clear, this means that all the weight in the front end of an animal’s body is supported by the sliding scapulas and the muscles that surround them. When we, as human beings, do a push-up and position ourselves horizontally, our ribcage and internal organs are supported by the skeletal structure of the clavicle, scapula, and humerus! An animal does not possess this skeletal support!
• The ribcage and all the internal organs of the animal suspend from the two pillars of the forelimbs. This is crucial to the number of FORCES in our FORCE animal and where the FORCES are located.

The Big Reveal!

Here is the silhouette of our FORCE animal. This animal is what all others will evolve from. Isn’t it beautiful? Perfect efficiency. The shape is broken down into three sections. Each section comprises a straight-to-curve shape that links up with the next one in the adjacent section. The orientation of this shape is called out with a separate illustration of a straight-to-curve shape. Let’s discuss:

1. This area represents the upward FORCE in the hip region. This occurs here because the spine is attached to the hips. The bottom of the shape in this area offers a straight line to support the upward FORCE.
2. This section presents what we...