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Thread: KoolMoves is not the limiting factor

  1. #1
    Senior Member evolbeagle's Avatar
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    I have aspirations of doing a lot of short cartoons on a website (sort of a la joecartoon.com) and the problem is that my drawing and animating skills are weak. As I've posted before, I've bought a few books and I practice a little each day. I got to thinking about what exactly it is in my drawing ability that limits me. I decided to try to imitate somebody else's drawing in KM to see if the program (or more correctly, my lack of expertise in using it) is what slows me down.

    The answer is a resounding "no."

    http://demo.voikos.com/animation/cavedude.html

    The above is a quick (under 10 minutes) rendition of the little caveguy in the daily cartoon on this site. This is NOT a traced image. I flipped back and forth between KM and the image of this guy and just tried to draw what I saw.

    I think, especially for an under-10-minute drawing, that he looks pretty good. This tells me a couple of things.

    1. KoolMoves is an incredible program that actually makes drawing easier. I couldn't have done this by hand in under 10 minutes and have it look this good (especially before I started studying the subject).

    2. What's really holding me back isn't KM or my ability to draw with it. It's my lack of experience visualizing a character and seeing it clearly enough to, in effect, copy the image in my mind onto the screen. At least, this is what I think, given the success of this little experiment. So this is the skill I'm going to work hardest on in the coming days. If any of you better artists have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. (Like techniques to improve this skill, or maybe that I'm completely wrong, or whatever.)

    Thanks.

  2. #2
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    Try "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." They just re-released it.

  3. #3
    Senior Member evolbeagle's Avatar
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    I've seen that in the stores and thought about getting it several times. I'll look at it again next time I go. Thanks.

    I've really been working on trying to see a character in my mind before I start to draw. I pick characters out of the blue and try to draw them. This is an attempt at Mr. Clean (who, for those of you that don't know, is a mascot for the cleaning supply product by the same -- he's bald and very clean). Anyway, this is a shot at Mr. Clean after he'd let himself go.

    http://demo.voikos.com/animation/freeyin2.html

    I'm also trying an approach to mouth shapes for better lip synch with sound. (I think it was Brad who pointed out my weakness in that area.) I tried drawing, in this case, three basic mouth shapes off screen. Then I copy and paste one at a time onto the right part of the face. The originals stay off-screen to be used over and over throughout the movie. There's no sound on this movie, but doesn't it sort of look like he's saying, "Hey, okay"?

    I'm going to try this for real with a few more mouth shapes and an actual test sound track in the next couple of days. This seems like a good way to do it, but I'd be glad to hear of alternatives from anybody.

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    lol

    Its Steve from the Jerry Springer show.

  5. #5
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    http://anime.sprocketworks.com/techn...g/talking.html

    this link has tips on mouth movements.

  6. #6
    Senior Member evolbeagle's Avatar
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    Thanks for the resource. I added it to my folder of animation tutorials.

  7. #7
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    Pretty good, job......
    My suggestion as to the mouth shapes would be to make mouth shapes in relation to the phenomes(spelling error?)
    But for now you could try the easier (easy is good) and actually sometime more believeable way of doing mouth movements in relation to closed and opened mouth, thats what I would recommend until you get better skilled in drawing.

    Brad

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