On Animation

Here’s some more from the sketch book. I’ve started finishing these now with a darker pencil. I was previously just abandoning drawings as soon as I saw something wrong with them and retrying. It’s nice to be able to get this close in fewer tries. I still draw heads way too large, and my flow only extends to smaller drawings. I’ve still got a huge stack to study which I’ll be doing all day. Imust get my proportions under control! More tomorrow…

I’m selling some of my library and other uneeded knick knacks on eBay. I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff up for grabs including a Cartoon Color Animation Disc, a bunch of anatomy and drawing books, some DVDs, my copy of Composing Pictures and Famous Artist Course, and these (very rare) sketch books:

Click the picture to go to the auction, I’d love it if this stuff ended up in the hands of someone that checks out my blog. How cool would that be?

An incredible resource has just popped up on my animation radar: AbeLevitow.com. I wish every animator had a page like this, it would make the process of geeking out a lot easier (and cheaper). This site is loaded with artwork and information. A must see, go now!

I recently bought a scanner to do pencil tests on, and it’s working out nicely. So I thought I’d recommend it to anyone looking at animating on paper. You’ll likely be in the market for something similar someday.  I followed this guide, and set out looking for an Auto Document Feed scanner that could handle 12 Field paper (10.5” x 12.5”). This meant I had three criteria in my search: It had to be cheap because I’m a student, it had to have ADF so I could spend more time animating (learning), and it had to be Wide Format so I could fit the animation paper in it. To make a long story short, after searching the internet, and checking out every store in town, I settled on this:

This in the Brother MFC-6490. It matched all my criteria, most important of which was cost, only setting me back $250. That’s a steal considering the prices for these kinds of scanners used to be in the thousands of dollars range. Now I spend all day animating and studying this:

And when I need to test my work, I just stack everything in the tray on top, and my pencil test is ready in a few minutes. I remember doing a tests with a camera back in film school, and how long that took. So much time was wasted that could have been used animating or learning something new. I hate wasting time, so I’m super happy with this purchase. I couldn’t find anything like this from HP, Epson, or Canon, so I think this is the only one on the market in that price range.

I’m super excited about posting some animation tests, but that will have to wait a bit. I feel I should get past the really basic boring stuff before I post anything. Plus I suck, which doesn’t motivate me to share my shiny terds.

Alright, enough with the insanity. One chapter every week or so, stretched out over who knows how long. When will it end?!

How about now? So here it is, the entire book, Don Graham’s, Composing Pictures, in one humongous PDF. I hope you all enjoy it, and get as much use out of it as I have. It took a long time, and a lot of effort to put this together and share with everyone, and I’m tired now. I’ve included the last five chapters in here, why drag it out any longer? It’s become a bit of a distraction now, and I’d rather animate. Take the opportunity to download it while you can, as I don’t know if posting this is allowed, and it will be removed as soon as anyone asks me to. I just figured since it’s out of print, and hard to come by, I would share.

Composing Pictures by Donald W. Graham

If you want to download by the chapter, go here.