Thoughts on Drawing for Storyboards, by Dave Pimentel
This is a combination of two fantastic blog-posts by Dave Pimentel from back in 2006. You can find the original posts on his old blog here and here.
Part 1.
I recently took some of the great illustrations from Bill Peet’s autobio book and decided to draw over them and find out why I liked them so much. Aside from his artistic charm and wonderful acting and posing choices, there where things about his work that I thought supported what we do in the gesture class. We always look at these and grasp a bit of inspiration from them but then we keep on moving without considering how we can disect them. I know there are many ways of looking at art but for me this is how I looked at it and learned from it.
The terms that came to mind for me where:
Directional Rhythm- Using the lines and composition of the drawing to direct the eye to the point of interest.
High contrast- the point of highest contrast usually helps define the point of interest or the character you want the viewer to see.
Other terms that I didn’t write on these overlays, but it is evident in them, were:
Lean- do it when ever possible, even in the slightest way. only draw striaght up and down if the character calls for it. the more straight up and down the drawings, the less life it could have, so if your character is scared stiff maybe straight up and down is what you need. But lean when ever possible.
Perspective and overlap- We’ve all studied perspective and any book out there on the subject is usually fairly good to explain it but Overlap it extremely important to execute perspective Be it a flower pot, a car, a person or a building you need visual cues of diminishing sizes and shapes relating to each other to really get the effect working.
line density- the best way to understand this one is, if the object is further away, the lines should be thinner. If the object is close the lines should be thicker.
Tone and Value- Again, simply put, the closer to screen the darker it gets.
Life drawing and gesture drawing do translate to story sketching if we know how to bridge the gap.
Hopefully these pics will help.
Part 2.
These pages were given to the Cal Arts kids a while back and I hope that this can inspire others as well.
The principles that weren’t highlighted with visual aid in the last post were: Line Density, Perspective and overlap, and Leaning the pose.
I’m not going to go into heavy detail on these subjects, so I hope these pages are treated more like cheat sheets to remind us of the principles.
The “letter” panels on the left (below), really helped me understand this idea.
Leaning in the pose was something that Walt Stanchfield always knocked into my head. Certainly the straight poses in my examples have a place in this world but an ever so slight lean or a large lean, in any drawing helps give movement and weight. Bill Peet does this constantly.
Once again, the perspective panels I drew were really more of a cheat sheet idea to remind us to overlap within perspective. Otherwise the drawings can be flat such as in the example third panel down on the right.
And last a few quick examples of high contrast and rhythm:
Part 1.
I recently took some of the great illustrations from Bill Peet’s autobio book and decided to draw over them and find out why I liked them so much. Aside from his artistic charm and wonderful acting and posing choices, there where things about his work that I thought supported what we do in the gesture class. We always look at these and grasp a bit of inspiration from them but then we keep on moving without considering how we can disect them. I know there are many ways of looking at art but for me this is how I looked at it and learned from it.
The terms that came to mind for me where:
Directional Rhythm- Using the lines and composition of the drawing to direct the eye to the point of interest.
High contrast- the point of highest contrast usually helps define the point of interest or the character you want the viewer to see.
Other terms that I didn’t write on these overlays, but it is evident in them, were:
Lean- do it when ever possible, even in the slightest way. only draw striaght up and down if the character calls for it. the more straight up and down the drawings, the less life it could have, so if your character is scared stiff maybe straight up and down is what you need. But lean when ever possible.
Perspective and overlap- We’ve all studied perspective and any book out there on the subject is usually fairly good to explain it but Overlap it extremely important to execute perspective Be it a flower pot, a car, a person or a building you need visual cues of diminishing sizes and shapes relating to each other to really get the effect working.
line density- the best way to understand this one is, if the object is further away, the lines should be thinner. If the object is close the lines should be thicker.
Tone and Value- Again, simply put, the closer to screen the darker it gets.
Life drawing and gesture drawing do translate to story sketching if we know how to bridge the gap.
Hopefully these pics will help.
Part 2.
These pages were given to the Cal Arts kids a while back and I hope that this can inspire others as well.
The principles that weren’t highlighted with visual aid in the last post were: Line Density, Perspective and overlap, and Leaning the pose.
I’m not going to go into heavy detail on these subjects, so I hope these pages are treated more like cheat sheets to remind us of the principles.
The “letter” panels on the left (below), really helped me understand this idea.
Leaning in the pose was something that Walt Stanchfield always knocked into my head. Certainly the straight poses in my examples have a place in this world but an ever so slight lean or a large lean, in any drawing helps give movement and weight. Bill Peet does this constantly.
Once again, the perspective panels I drew were really more of a cheat sheet idea to remind us to overlap within perspective. Otherwise the drawings can be flat such as in the example third panel down on the right.
And last a few quick examples of high contrast and rhythm:
