MAF Day 1 - Joanna Quinn Life Drawing Workshop

A workshop run by veteran animator Joanna Quinn, whose work I adored. It is a 2 hours life drawing session, but it is not just a normal life drawing session. Despite the fact that I have been regularly attending life drawing sessions last year, I learned a lot from this workshop because Joanna Quinn puts life drawing into the context of animation. She emphasised the importance of capturing the gestures and movements, instead of focusing on 'replicating the life drawing model', or in other words the aesthetic of the drawings produced.

The workshop focuses on getting effective information from the poses in a short period of time because a fresh pose does not last for long. Each of the poses last for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

I am a slow drawer so I struggled a lot to keep up with the timing. I tend to take my time to think of where to put the lines, and from the session, I learnt that it is not good to do so. A good practice, as Joanna Quinn has taught us based on her experience, is to finish up the rough first and go back at it once the rough is done to start to add on details and clean up the drawings.

Another useful tip that I have got is that drawing by looking at negative space would help to get the proportion right. By doing so, the person who are drawing will see the model as a whole, and not just focusing on getting some specific parts of the body right.

Joanna Quinn emphasised the importance of the line of motion and weights in drawing for animation. When working with rough of the character, she suggested that we can start to make spaghetti rough (parallel lines which bends according to the line of motion) to focus on the squash and stretch aspect of the movement. After when we got the bend and twist right, we can add more details on the character so that it is more believable. Interesting gestures consist of overlapping shapes and their movements around 3D space when the character is moving.

Lastly, we studied how lines could convey energy and emotions of a character to the audience: happy, sad, fear and arrogance. Sometimes we overlook the power of lines in a drawing, especially in conveying the energy of a character in an animation. I learned that gestures that are emotionally positive consist of lines that faces upwards, while the emotionally negative gestures have the lines facing downwards, putting more weight on a character.

Q&A:

Someone asked whether she animates on ones or on twos, Joanna animates on twos and she talked about her recent visit to Walt Disney Animation Studio with Richard Williams, and how Richard reanimated a scene of Milt Kahl's animation on ones, and make them look better than the original ones. She acknowledged that animating on ones are better than animating on twos. It makes the animation smoother, but not always feasible due to having to produce work with limited resources.