The Lost Boards part 6 January 31, 2013 11:05
The point of today's post is that doing lots and lots of rough drawings can do wonders for your gestures. I've had the experience of struggling all day on a single drawing, only to have it come out way too stiff and self-conscious looking, and end up throwing it away - eight to twelve hours for nothing. In the case of storyboards you don't have time to fret over things, you just plow ahead and leave rough drawings behind, hoping to get the time to clean them up later. Consequently, you're forced to relax and just throw down little graphic scribbles that capture a teeny little piece of the larger puzzle. After the first dozen or so I always start to pick up speed, and by the end of the day can have several hundred such drawings. None of them ready for a story reel or anything, but plenty strong enough to pitch. And there are always some that I can pull out for beautification, their poses or expressions way better than if I had set out to draw only one.
This is the main reason I use a fat China Marker - it's impossible to draw details.
In this series of drawings, pulled from a much larger sequence, Eep climbs up in a tree to vent her frustration from an argument she just had with her father - she wants to keep Guy but of course her father wants to let him go. As I mentioned in the last post, the Croods are quite a bit more dense than Guy, mentally and physically. I made it my mission to have them treat Guy like a rag doll or stray kitten whenever the opportunity arose. Not the prettiest drawings, but the last five have an ease and confidence that I can only manifest if I've been drawing all day.
