Storyboard Layout and Perspective

I've completed my house move and submitted my pilot script to the studio so I finally have time to blog again.  Not a lot of time but some time.

I'll start with a quick one.  I loved drawing since I was a little kid.  The first piece of art that I remember doing was a Dimetrodon, an apple tree and a man painted in glorious tempera color in kindergarten.  I also sculpted a pretty cool duck and one kid made a flying saucer the size of a medium pizza pan that drooped because it wasn't dry when he took it home but that's all off topic.

And what topic was that?  Putting your characters in a world.  The dino and man had a horizontal line of grass and that apple tree.  They had a world to romp in, evidently a Creationist world that allowed for a man and finback dinosaur to exist in the same era.  But outside of furiously trying to keep up with the landscape sketches of TV art instructor, Jon Gnagy, I stopped drawing full scenes and just drew characters.  This got worse when I discovered the world of superheroes.  There was so much to draw: costumes with boots, gloves, capes and all manner of utility belts.  Who had the time to design their lair or the crime ridden streets?  

The twists my career took let me get by with only that basic knowledge that Jon Gnagy and the Famous Artists Cartooning course gave me... and I only sort of skimmed that stuff.  But once you get into real storyboarding, layout becomes much more than just rules of perspective.

Allow me to recommend a book that explains in clear, understandable terms just what it DOES involve.

Ed Ghertner has worked on several of my shows, half hours and feature length. He's worked on Disney feature films and is currently designing backgrounds for Fox's upcoming prime time show, BOB'S BURGERS.

And somewhere in there, Ed took the time to write this book.  If you're working in animation or comics or any kind of illustrative art, it's worth picking up this book.

Ed lets the pictures do the explaining wherever he can but does a great job of describing the thought process that should be going on before pencil touches paper.

 In the meantime I bought Manga Studio 4 Debut which is a program designed to help produce comic books.  It was on sale at the San Diego Comic Con for almost half off.  After talking to Mike Norton, exclusive DC comic artist who used the program, I decided to give it a shot.  Like most art programs, the manual is PDF of several hundred pages in length so I did what most artists do... read just enough to get started and got started on a small project, looking up stuff I needed as I went along.

I bring it up here because of a cool vanishing point feature it has.  You click and it creates a dynamic vanishing point with radiating lines.  You can "grab" the lines and move them which is much like changing the camera angle and lens.  Cool feature.  I'll talk about my experiment in a future post.

In the meantime, check out Ed's book.  

Comments

[JerRocks2day]

Cool. I gotta check out that book sometime.

Haha, I remember back in fourth grade, I wrote and drew a journal story about a giant venus fly trap that was attacking a city (could've made a great Darkwing Duck ep, don't you think?) XD

Also Tad, when you developed your drawing skills growing up, how long have you normally practiced?