LAYOUT PROCEDURE and purpose

The function of LAYOUT is:

* Make the scene easy for the animator to understand and use.

That means COMPOSING THE SCENE so that there is enough space for the animator to move the characters - and to clearly see what the characters are doing.

*Preserve the GUTS of the storyboard poses - AND HOPEFULLY TO PUSH THEM FURTHER.

Here is more detail on how to plan a scene for layout:

John K Stuff: Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 5: Roughing The Widest Staging

***Ideally, a layout artist should be an animator with a sense of design and composition. The most skillful artists that combine great draftsmanship with a personal style are the artists best suited to layout.

That's a hard combination to find these days.

Any Toonboom Inkers Familiar with my style?

Hi folks

I'm getting started on the cartoon here.

If you have already inked some of my characters in the past and can use Toonboom Animate I might have some scenes for you to work on.

Here are some inking tips:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/11/inking-advanced-pt-1-logical-line.html
I had a good post on how to ink faces - using inks by the amazing Brian Romero, but the images seem to have disappeared from the page. They must have been from a blog post of his that he has since deleted.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/11/inking-emotional-line-weight.html

Tips For Constructing Faces

The head is made up of 2 major parts:

1) the Cranium - which is generally solid (except in exaggerated instances of cartoon license)

2) the Jaw Area- is more movable and can squash and stretch

CONNECTING THE CRANIUM and LOWER FACE PARTS

The upper and lower parts of the head are connected by MEAT:

cheeks, and upper lip.

The rest of the features have to conform to what positions the cranium, jaw and cheeks are in.

Eyes sit in the cranium but are affected by the mouth and cheeks.

Eyebrows both affect and are affected by the eyeballs.

The mouth is affected by 2 things:

1) Whether the jaw is open or closed.

2) The shape of the lips.

John K Stuff: Lips and Mouth Accessories

Every part of the anatomy affects the others.

If you change the shape of one thing, the other parts have to change (to a lesser extent with it).

The farther away from whichever muscle is moving, the less affected the other parts are.

John K Stuff: Hierarchy 2 - The Facial Expression in broad strokes

USE SPACE IN YOUR DRAWINGS! - SO IMPORTANT

Here is one of my rough story sketches-very scribbly but it shows the character's pose and his emotion. The trick is to take the scribble and turn it into a finished layout or animation pose that is constructed but still retains the guts of the sketch.
Sometimes artists don't use enough space in their poses. In the drawing above, the shapes are all cramped and too close to each other. The eyes are too close to the edge of the head, the space inside the bow tie is almost non-existent. The shapes are overall - too skinny. This makes the drawing hard to read because all the areas of space are too small, so the lines are all too close together.

Sometimes after I analyze the story sketch and then carefully try to construct it for a layout pose I lose bit of the emotion. I might then just redraw it from scratch to make the pose and expression stronger - once I have analyzed how it works.

How To Deal With Lots of Detail

This drawing with all the teeth and wrinkles looks complicated.
It's easier to see if you break it down first into it's largest major shapes.
See that? Much easier to deal with
If you are doing layouts or animation of successful poses with this much detail, it's best to do each pose with the simpler shapes first. Then after all the poses move nicely from pose to pose, you can add in the detail after. -***Wrapping the details around the larger forms

like individual teeth within the larger blocks of teeth.

Make sense?

Profiles Slab N Ernie

Back Views