Less time than ever

I started to get more and more worried about not having any work experience on my resume, so I got a job...sort of. It's only part-time, but it's 7 days a week, which makes it harder to stay on my 12-hour-a-day art schedule. I could do it and still get plenty of sleep, but most days I've been lazy and slept in. I've started to realize how soon I have to go back to school, and it's making me crazy. It makes me feel like there's no point in working because I'll never be caught up enough to be ready for school. How am I gonna design a character or draw a storyboard or that kind of thing when I can hardly draw a straight line without a ruler, or a circle without a compass?

I've realized that one of my biggest problems last year was that when I started on anything (drawing, painting, sculpture) I would always start on one section and work on it and perfect it down to the smallest details before I moved on to another section. But from my research, I've found out that stuff like character design and storyboarding and animation requires you to capture the essence of something, be it a character, or a setting, or a gesture, and communicate that essence first and foremost before trying to add anything else. This makes sense, since the most important thing that you're trying to do, especially in storyboarding, is to tell the story in a way that is visually clear and instantly communicated to the viewer. Once you have that, then you can move on to the details. I can say that all day long, but when it comes to actually finding that essence that will quickly and clearly communicate an idea to the viewer, I'm completely lost. As I've mentioned before, I think it has a lot to do with being able to simplify and exaggerate a drawing until its meaning is most clear. I just have to figure out how to do that, and I've discovered that it's not an easy task.

I went to the library and looked through a bunch of books on cartooning and character design and storyboarding. I checked out Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards.  I think that storyboarding is the best way to start to learn how to simplify drawings in a way that they still communicate effectively. It uses the least amount of detail to communicate the greatest amount of information. Animation thumbnails also use very little detail to communicate a lot of information, but I haven't found any books specifically about thumbnails, other than Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation, which I'm still working from.

I've started to copy some of the drawings from Paper Dreams to try to figure out how the drawings were simplified and exaggerated, as well as how and why certain things were staged the way they were. I think that out of Disney's 12 principles of animation, staging was the one that I understood the least before I started researching how storyboards were done. Now I think I have a pretty good understanding of what staging is and why it's important. It's not just about cinematography and shot composition and that sort of thing. It also has a lot to do with making actions more clear, and essentially making everything in a scene communicate what it needs to communicate to the audience in the most clear and effective way possible.

I guess that's my update for now. I really am going to take some pictures of my work and post them up here someday. I have DSL now, so I could upload them really fast if I ever got around to taking them.