07/23/2010
Illustrating Techniques of the ‘Toaster’ Part 4
Cartoon head construction is pretty simple, you start off with a rounded mass; either ball-shaped, pear, or egg-shaped. Several people might be working on the animation so keeping the head and body elements in a circular or rounded form makes the job that much easier to reproduce the character. If you do intend to animate your illustrations the follow-through looks much better and you have more room to play and exaggerate the facial expressions with ‘squash and stretch’ than with a square/box or triangular mass.
Using a simple ball-shaped mass and dividing the face down the middle lengthwise and then across the midsection, you can set the guidelines for eye placement. Even though your character will be changing expressions constantly to portray emotions the eyes will remain anchored just above the horizontal guideline. It’s also important to realize that emotions rely on the tilt of the characters head. A subtle tilt of the head changes the perspective of the characters expression, which is especially important in dialogue scenes where you must portray the emotion even if there are no spoken words!
Here we have Beany Barfalamue in a range of emotions using the above technique for constructing the head. You may still be able to see the guidelines from this scanned image and the rounded form before adding the other features, note the eyes remain in the ‘fixed’ placement even with applying ‘squash and stretch’ to exaggerate the emotion.
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