Construction

While strictly an invention of traditional hand-drawn animation, I believe that concepts like construction are of great importance to any animator (or indeed any visual artist). Its use develops one's spacial awareness; something that is as important to our art as good timing.

As with all subjects I bring up, I'm going to split this topic in half. People new to the subject should read part one, but those who understand the basics will probably prefer to scroll down to part 2.

Part 1 - The Basics

When animating with a pencil and paper, the animator is required to produce many, many drawings of the same character, who might be twirling and dancing around the screen, towards and away from the camera. Construction is the method of drawing whereby the animator can plot the character's movement using simple shapes rather than worrying about complicated details. The animator will actually draw very simple three-dimensional shapes: spheres, cylinders and boxes. He might make an arm out of two cylinders, or a head out of a sphere with another sphere attached for the nose. Once he's happy with how his simple character is posed, he then adds more details. Often he won't add many details until he's got the whole sequence animated. Think of it as making a model out of clay - you will start with a ball of clay then you add or remove chunks to make it look more like a head. Then you would think about details like eyes and ears and whatnot.

Here's an example. With this character I have started with a simple circle for the skull and have added a larger modified spherical shape for the muzzle, a sphere for the nose, a squashed sphere for the lower lip, with two more spheres for eyes.


When doing this kind of drawing, it is important to learn to visualise these shapes as if they are in three dimensions rather than as a flat image on the paper. A good practice exercise is to just draw each type of shape in lots of different angles. The subject of perspective is important here, but I'll cover that in a separate post.

To these simple shapes, I can now add details to make it look like a proper character.


Another great exercise is to design your own character in this way (or just copy mine) and try re-constructing him from different angles. What would he look like from above? And from the back? You can learn more about constructing your favourite characters by searching the net for model sheets, which are used to help animators maintain consistent looking characters. I've given a link at the end of this post to a large collection of Disney model sheets.

Part 2 - Taking Things Further

Construction is not limited to cartoon drawing. It is a great tool to use for any drawing situation. Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens once said, "you can draw anything using a sphere, a box and a cone." Well I'd say replace the cone with the cylinder myself but the two are pretty similar anyway.

Life drawing is an important thing to do when studying to become an animator. It is arguably a necessary thing to do no matter what kind of animation you are interested in. It gives one a strong awareness of posture, and of action, as well as a more anatomical knowledge of what a person actually looks like, which can then be caricatured in a cartoon form in animation.

I don't want to go into the specifics of life drawing in this post, but I would like to explain the power of construction when applied to it. Take a simple leg for example. As with a cartoon, the artist might, like I have done below, start with two cylinders.

The cartoonist might stop there, but we will continue to layer on more details to make the drawing more complex. The thing to remember here is that we're not actually doing anything complicated, we're still only talking about very simple shapes. The key to this is learning to visualise the shapes you draw in three dimensions rather than two.

On top of these two cylinders representing the upper and lower leg parts, I will layer some spherical forms wherever I see areas of muscle or fat. You can see that even without defining lines more, we have a recognisable leg forming.

Imagine skin laying over the top of these shapes, and you have a decent looking leg.

The point of leaning to draw from life this way is that once you know where the spherical forms should go and how they deform, you can draw a leg in any pose and orientation from your imagination, which is of paramount importance for animating.