OUR EVOLUTIONARY HERITAGE BLASPHEMED

Here are some scattered pieces of fossil evidence of great days and greater creatures long gone.
From these few fragments and my immense powers of deduction I was able to piece together an accurate depiction of primitive life in a more beautiful age.
A petrified pair of googly eyes...
a couple of gouged out plugs of flesh...

A remnant of a paw with the fingernails on the inside of the hand...

another...

From these meager archaeological scraps we can remagine ravenous creatures of the past meeting up with and devouring the first few members of our smaller modern cousins.
This was Bedrock City Arizona in a Golden time... long before modern man came along to destroy its greatness.

Eons ago, my buddies and I used to take periodic treks into prehistory to experience the majesty of a naturally evolved off-model theme park, untouched by executives.
Here are the happy sentinels of Bedrock, eager to greet us while urging us to crawl into the belly of their pet giant land Lamprey.We were too tricky to fall for that old ruse, and explored the park at will.

This famous animator forged a whole new style of motion and changed the face of modern cartoons.
(after visiting Bedrock City)

Seriously folks,
I hear Disney purists complain and whine all the time that Disneyland is being ruined more and more every year by getting away from Walt Disney's vision and characters. Executives keep taking out all Walt's creations and replacing them with foul things like Star Wars land and "Toontown". The cool giant squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has been changed into some wimpy fish thing, Tomorrowland was destroyed decades ago; and now they are talking about redesigning Mary Blair's Small World Ride etc.

All this is definite blasphemy but nothing compared to what happened to Bedrock City and it's high time this abominable horror has been exposed.

RASH EXECUTIVE DECISION DESTROYS AMERICA'S GREATEST NATIONAL TREASURE!About 10 years ago (maybe more) Fred Seibert told me he had discovered this awful Flintstones theme park in Arizona where the character costumes were really off model And the place was run down. He was thinking of closing it because it was an "embarrasment" to the HB legacy. Then I told him how much I loved Bedrock City because of it's honest and natural pure off-modelness. And that "of-model" toys and costumes and cartons had inspired me to draw my own caricatured versions of old characters:

This is from a Flintstone Laser-disk set I produced for Fred a couple years earlier.











http://arglebarglin.blogspot.com/2007/02/flintstones-first-fourteen.html

So Fred decided not to close Bedrock City, but instead to update it and make it "hip". He went and hired someone to copy my own off-model drawings of the Flintstones and then he threw out all the old cool stuff that was naturally evolved and innocently off-model and replaced it with pseudo hipness.
Aaaaaargh!
It's so rare to have really authentic off-model worlds that I consider it a high crime to throw one away and replace it with fakeness.
Now Fred is probably about as good as cartoon executives get - he actually likes cartoonists - but some things are sacred and should be protected from random tasteless executive whim. There's nothing worse than when execs (the unhippest people on the planet) try to update things and make them hip. It should be illegal.


Here's another natural wonder of off-modelness:


For God's sake, don't tell any hip-executives about it!

INKING - EMOTIONAL LINE WEIGHT

Original pencil art

The biggest communication tool humans have is our face. We pay more attention to people's faces than any other part of them. In cartoons we assign a disproportional size and emphasis to the face because of this.

Certain parts of the face are the important elements that make the expression.

Main features, eye brows, eye shapes, pupils, cheeks, nose and larger teeth shape

These essential features have thick lines to draw attention to the emotion of the character

The Mouth Shape-




the overall shape of the mouth is very important to the expression and should have a slightly thick line to draw attention to the shape - whether it is an open mouth or a closed mouth

The shape of the mouth itself tells us a lot about the character's emotion.

The Smile Line-

the lines at the edges of the mouth shape are very important. I like to make them a bit thicker in the middle-which gives the effect of a shadow
this helps solidify the expression.

Cheeks and Smile explanation

the smile lines and the cheek above together create a form - a piece of flesh that is somewhat triangular
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/05/animation-school-lesson-2-squash-and.html
this form stretches and squashes to make expressions-whatever the smile line does affects the cheek line above

that form points to the top of the nostril like an arrow

when inking a smile line or a cheek line you have to look at the other line at the same time so that the two lines together make a fleshy sensible form

The Eyebrows-

The eyebrows are also very important to the expression

Eyebrows are generally thick in the middle of the forehead, and pointy near the temples

THE EYES

Head outline and face combined

Even without the details and wrinkles, the expression should read strong and clearly

THE WHOLE TOOTH BAR

THE OUTLINE OF THE WHOLE SHAPE OF ALL THE TEETH IS THICK

then the individual teeth are thinner

Details

all details are subject to the larger features that they help define. They have to flow sensibly around the head in the same directions of the parts of the expression they help define.

None of these lines should "float" or be arbitrary. They need to help the face be fleshy

these lines are thinner

Individual teeth

Wrinkles- crow's feet, eyebrow wrinkles, bottom lip wrinkles

Tongue split

Side by side comparison

1984-85 layouts - Lynne Naylor Jetsons Crowds

Most animators dread crowd scenes, including me. Lynne Naylor jumped in and did these impossible tedious scenes and made them look great!
She designed all the characters too and made each one different. Not only that, they all have slightly different poses, yet all their poses balance well against each other.
OTO_ID_5268923805165045186" border="0">
I could stare at these drawings for hours. Every litle detail, each leg, belly, face has such unique and subtle stylish shapes.



This is great cartooning and thinking. She not only captured Ed Benedict's style; she added a lot of her own style to it - she brought that kind of cute appeal that only girls seem to be able to do.
0/Jestons+Layouts14112008_00029.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5268924286700758114" border="0">
Even her actions really fit within the Hanna Barbera style but come off as lively and fun. And in the 1980s!...the era of "don't dare have fun making cartoons".
These scenes show a lot more than mere raw talent, which Lynne has a ton of. They show knowledge, skill and a great deal of thought and planning. To be able to combine so much control and and so many elements, yet still have it come off as so light and fun and easy is pretty monumental.
I'm envy work like this.


Lately I've been a bit down because every year the whole idea of control, fun and skill seems to vanish further into the past. It gets harder to produce the simplest cartoons. When I dug these up the other day, I couldn't believe what was being done in the 80s - under the worst possible conditions. We should be much furher than this by today, but it doesn't look like control or clarity is ever coming back - let alone appeal.

Inking Advanced pt 1 - Logical line weights

Deciding on where to put thick and thin lines can almost be boiled down to a science. In 2 parts
1) Logical line weight
2) Emotional line weight

LOGICAL LINE WEIGHT

Here is a pencil drawing of a key pose from a scene. It needs to be inked.

The inking has to make sure that the charactr reads easily and quickly.
It needs to look solid.
It needs a hierarchy of line weights.
The lines need to flow around the forms.

1) HEAVIEST LINE WEIGHT

The heaviest line weight is around the overall form of the pose or silhouette ("sillo")
I generally like a slightly heavier line at the bottom of major objects:
The jaw
the feet
This gives the whole character a feeling of weight.

This example still has a couple mistakes, but Brian is fixing them an I'll replace it.
Missing the cuff, the right side of the jacket fold
legs should have more consistent weight with the rest of the character
The bottom of the left cuff should be inked in this weight

2) 2ND WEIGHT LEVEL slightly less heavy

Design elements that are subdivisions of the overall character have a line weight that is still thick,
but slightly thinner than the outline of the sillo
Like clothes, or the outline of the hair (not the individual hairs, but the overall form of the hair)
Or color separations on animal characters

3 DETAILS

The details, wrinkles folds etc are the thinnest lines
They should not be totally one weight though, they should be slightly thicker in the middle
These lines need to flow around the larger shapes in the same form and perspective
Where these detail lines come to a stop in open space (like the fold on the jacket) -the ends should taper to a point.

EVERY LINE ON A DRAWING SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING

IT SHOULD DESCRIBE SOMETHING

THERE SHOULD NEVER BE FLOATING LINES THAT DON'T MEAN ANYTHING

ALL THIN DETAIL LINES SHOULD HELP DESCRIBE THE LARGER OBJECT THEY ARE PART OF

TOMORROW:
EMOTIONAL LINE WEIGHT

The face is the most important part of every cartoon character. It follows the logical line weight aproach overall, but also has an "emotional line weight" that helps us see the expressions...