|
For the long run, keep practicing drawing. Your lines indicate a lot of uncertainty on your part about how everything works and fits together, and that'll change as you get better at drawing. You should work on your gestures and lines of action especially. You mentioned John K, even in his super rough sketches, his lines are confident, he knows exactly the motion he's trying to convey and draws the line in one long fast stroke, which prevents the weird lumpiness you dislike about your nerd's legs. An example grabbed from his blog: In the short run: draw a turnaround for your characters, draw them doing different things, see how they work doing different actions. I have no idea how these characters will look from the front, and I suspect that you might not either. Figure it out now  Also, what will the final style look like? Take one of these guys to how you envision the final product will look, rather than just a quick sketch.But most importantly keep drawing, lots, and asking people who are better than you for feedback.
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2017 19:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:14 |
|
|
I think it's really cool that you've completed a couple of shorts already. Lots of people who want to study animation never even do that, and it shows a lot of effort on your part to take something like that and get it done, and post it out there for everyone to see. What I can see, based on the sketches you posted and those two shorts, are that there are 2 big things holding you back right now. The first is that you do not know how to draw. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to fix, just go out and draw a lot more for a very long time. A lot of your animation beats and gags are failing, not because you don't understand the timing or the medium but because your drawing skills aren't good enough to convey what you want. The gross-up close-up shot of the jock character at :46 in Chemical Conundrums, for example, loses a lot of impact because the drawing looks like it was done in MS Paint, when I'm sure what you are going for is a guache-textured super-detailed drawing like below:  Similarly, your character designs suffer a lot because there's a lot of inconsistencies in the "model sheet" drawings that I'm sure are not intentional - Albert's eyeglass lenses and Ian's eyes are two different sizes and point in different directions, your characters look like they're drawn with a mouse most of the time, lots of bumpy wobbly lines and a lack of smooth curves. This'll improve a lot on its own as you draw more, but right now it's the main thing that's detracting from your cartoons. The second thing, something that I hope you'll consider, is that your characters just aren't very interesting. You've created stereotypes rather than characters, and nothing either character does surprises me or makes me think there may be something unexpected lurking in them. "Generic" is almost always never a good end goal for a character design. I'm not saying that you need to hint at Albert's dark past or give Ian some dramatic backstory or whatever, but taking characters designed to be generic stereotypes and putting them in the most generic setting imaginable (Two different people are forced to be roommates!) is super boring and tells me you just started with the first idea that came into your head, rather than refining it and coming up with some hook to give the viewers something more unexpected.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2017 20:29
|
|