BGs and Style - Part 4 - Use Organic Shapes AND FORMS

The manual pages below are about BG design, but they feature the principle of "organic" so I figure I better give you a clear definition of what I mean by that.

Organic as opposed to mechanical or geometric. Natural objects are organic. They are uneven, they flow, they are not symmetrical, they are complex. Humans, animals, rocks, trees, rivers and old cartoons are organic.

Nothing in reality is perfectly geometric. Man tries hard to make things into simple shapes and forms sometimes, like boxes, balls, mailing tubes and modern cartoons. This kind of form is simple, regular, predictable, easy and in most eras, boring.

Organic art uses smooth flowing lines and shapes describing various surfaces and densities and textures as opposed to geometric lines and shapes that describe all surfaces and substances stiffly and the same way. Organic art under control gives you an infinite palette of ideas to create from. Geometric is limited. There are only so many types of shapes you can make with straight lines and simple curves.

ORGANIC DRAWINGS

Organic comes in infinite variations and styles.



Stylized cartoons can be organic - and should be.

Of course you have to be a much more sophisticated, intelligent, cultured and skilled craftsman to be able to take advantage of organic art, but if you regularly haunt this blog that's your goal, isn't it?

If you want the easy way, then get a circle template and a ruler and you can create cartoons like these:

GEOMETRIC DRAWINGS

Because the trend for the last 30 years has been stiff, regular and evenly composed art, it makes it hard for me to hire current artists-especially if they are over 25 and set in their ways. This happened to me on The Ripping Friends. I hired 2 Canadian studios who were used to drawing in the Canadian style, which is even stiffer than the LA styles. Jim Smith and John Dorman would draw brilliant backgrounds and character layouts and we would send them to the Canadian studios who would look at them in disbelief, toss them away and then "correct" the drawings by spacing every object in the scene on a grid and standing all the characters straight up and take out everything interesting or worth looking at.

LOOK AT HOW DIRTY CANADIANS DRAW

GOD, HOW THEY MUST HATE KIDS.

So I made all these manuals to try to teach them. The younger folks, Helder, Kristy, Nick, Steve, Jose and a few more caught on quick. They hadn't been ruined by Nelvana yet. Jess already drew in an organic old fashioned sophisticated way, so I didn't have to teach her anything.

The studio's old guard of calcified brained 30 year olds and older were hopeless. They couldn't even grasp a single concept I wanted - and refused to even try.

So here's more free information for you. Learn it and practice it and if you become decent and functional, work for me. If you understand these concepts you will be suicidal working on Samurai Jack or the other million modern cartoons.

Animation School 7 - When Generic is a Good Thing

Remember when I talked about the two different types of cartoonists?
One conservative, the other wild and crazy?
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/2-types-of-cartoonists-origin-of.html
These two types worked together all through the 30s and came up with a blended style-the 40s style of pears and spheres and sausages style which is my favorite type of animation.

If you are a young cartoonist (or a geezer who wants to improve his skills) who wants to learn the best way to draw and animate, you should study this approach in its most generic form.

GENERIC 40S CARTOONS

When is "generic" good?
When it is highly skilled as in these Tom and Jerry model sheets below.Generic is good for study.
If you are trying to teach yourself the principles of good cartoon drawing for example, it's best to study bland cartoons that don't have individual style. Strong style will distract your attention away from the underlying principles that are more important.

Disney helped popularize a style in the late 30s that most other studios adopted-the pear shaped, squash and stretch style.


It's not really a "style" though.
It's a collection of principles that everyone in animation used in the 1940s.
It developed out of the rubber-hose style but added some techniques to help smooth out the animation and give it weight.


3-dimensional but cartoony construction:
The characters are rounded and turn in space like real objects.
But unlike real anatomy, the characters are built out of simple shapes-mostly pear-shaped bodies and round or oval heads with sausages for limbs.
In a strange way, they are real because they are 3-dimensional, but they are also cartoony, because they are made up of forms that aren't anatomical.
All the details of the characters wrap around the major forms that the characters are built from.
The eyes obey the perspective and direction of the position of the head, etc. They don't exist on their own planes.


Squash and Stretch:
These 40s characters bend and stretch and squash like soft rubber.


Line of Action:
The poses are usually strong and simple and all the details of the characters flow along the line of action.

Clear Silhouettes:
The poses usually have strong silhouettes-which helps them read, especially when the actions can be so fast.

Organic Forms:
Unlike rubber-hose cartoons which have very simple curves that have the bends right in the middle of the curve, these 40s style characters have more complex flowing curves which makes them feel more organic like skin and guts-although no bones.

The 7 Dwarfs are perfect examples of this style of animation. They are completely generic designs-meaning they really have no design at all-but they do have all the principles that make up the classic cartoon style.


Here's a frame from Chuck Jones' Barbary Coast Bunny, one of my favorite cartoons. The design and style is a more modern 50s approach, yet it still retains all the principles of 40s style cartoons. This type of cartoon is not good for beginning cartoonists and animators to study from, because the shapes are more specific, and they have angles and more complex design elements.

This is much harder to study and grasp than a Tom and Jerry or earlier Disney or Warner Bros. cartoon. It's more interesting graphically for sure, but the more complex design elements will distract you from learning the principles underneath.

Here are some frames from Bob Clampett's Gruesome Twosome. This is a scene by Rod Scribner. It's much more exaggerated than a Tom and Jerry cartoon and has slightly more complex design elements in it.

It's still based on all the same principles though, so once you understand the principles you will be able to then start exploring your own style and variations of designs.

I always recommend to animation students to draw Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig and Tom and Jerry when learning.

Why?
They are fairly simple and very rounded.
When you are animating you have to turn out a lot of drawings.
The more complicated the drawing, the longer it will take you to make the animation work.
NEVER use your own character designs when you are learning to animate.
It will slow your progress.

Use characters that were designed by top Hollywood professionals that already work in 3 dimensions and are simple. You will progress much faster that way.

This frame is from Chuck Jones' Elmers' Candid Camera. Jones hasn't developed his strong personal style yet and is just trying to make the characters look solid and move well. This cartoon is a great one to study for rounded smoothly moving characters.

This is from a later Chuck Jones cartoon and is much more complex, but again it still is based on the same principles. It has angles and more complex forms-but the angles are all in sensible places - unlike today's angular cartoons that have arbitrary and inconsistent designs that don't work well for animation. -think MULAN.

That's why the best cartoons to study are the cartoons from the early to mid forties.
They are all very rounded and do not have really distracting angular styles. Study Jones, Clampett, Avery, Disney, Tom and Jerry.
Avoid Freleng and other 40s styles. They are all trying to imitate what the stars were doing but the drawings and animation are much sloppier in the rest of the cartoons being done at the time.

(By "avoid" them I mean, avoid copying them if you are trying to learn to draw good principles. Watch them, because they are all fun, but study from the best!)

Beware of 50s cartoons!
I'm not saying I don't like 50s cartoons-I do, but in order to do those styles well, you need to understand how they came to be.
If you start by drawing angular characters before you understand your principles, you will put the angles all in the wrong places and not have any control over your designs and animation-like most modern cartoons.

Principles are the most important thing!

Barber Shop - the concept of "Organic Drawing"

Here's the rest of the comic.
Some of the drawings are generic. Some are specific expressions and some are very studiously designed.

All the drawings are Organic. The lines that flow around the characters (and the props) flow in a non-mathematical way. The curves aren't bent evenly in the middle. There are lots of "s" curves and even the "s"s are not even. In real life, nothing is even, not flesh, not rocks, not bricks, not grass, nothing. I like to try to capture that in my cartoons by using organic forms and lines.

Organic seems to be really out of fashion. For a couple of reasons.
1) Barely anybody has even heard of the concept these days.
2) Organic forms are much harder to draw than graphic mathematical simple shapes.

The use of Organic shapes and lines are not used in an arbitrary assortment here, either. They have a purpose: to describe what everything is made of and to show what state of tension they are in.

These drawings, while having fairly solid forms underneath are then wrapped in skin and cloth and hair-all three substances which are pliable and in different ways.

In most old cartoons, everything is made of the same substance- "cartoon skin"-clothes, wrinkles, flesh and even hair all act and lay on forms the same way. Look at the Porky Pig clothes wrinkles in the last post. Do they look anything like how wrinkles really work on clothes? Not that I mind. I like old time cartoon skin.

Look at these sexy examples of a door with cartoon skin (and other vital organs) from Bob Clampett's "Kitty Kornered".

http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/01/100-greatest-cartoons-of-all-times.html

In modern cartoons, most characters not only don't have structures, they don't have wrapping either. It's just a bunch of squares and triangles and circles glued together.

Ugly and uninteresting and too easy.
The end.


BTW, a modern master of organic drawing lives here:
http://funnycute.blogspot.com/