Simplicity in storyboards by Natalie Nourigat (Twitter transcript)

Disney director and story artist Natalie Nourigat has been sharing storyboards she is working on as part of a class by Stephanie Stine on het twitter and instagram. 

The thing that stands out to me in the work Natalie is sharing is the simplicity of her drawings. It goes even further than the often heard clean vs. clear drawings. Her sketches are so minimalistic that they can hardly be called messy. Today Natalie shared some of her storyboard panels both as rough and as a cleaned up version and it is very interesting to see what she focuses on when cleaning up. 

Below is a full transcript (minus emoticons) of Natalie's short twitter thread: 

People asked to see my storyboard thumbnails/sketches vs clean-ups, so here are some examples from the sequence I’m currently boarding for Stephanie Stine’s class! 

You’ll notice that a lot of the time, I keep my initial sketch. As long as it reads and you can tell the emotion that’s supposed to be coming across, why draw it twice and lose the energy from the quick sketch? I like to add at least one tone to separate the main characters from the BG. Sometimes I throw in a Gaussian blur or eye/mouth whites, if I’m feeling fancy & I have time. 

This scene is *spooky*, so there’s mood lighting in the establishing shots and a couple of emphasis close-ups. But I’ll keep dot eyes, crossbars on the face, construction lines, lollipop heads and stick arms/legs/bodies if the story point and the emotion are reading clearly.