It always comes as a bit of a shock for students and artists preparing portfolios for animation industry positions that, almost without exception, what the studios first want to see are figure drawings from life. They don't want to see caricatures, cartoons, or copies of the studio's characters. They want traditional, classical figure drawing.

Why traditional figure drawing? First, let us look at what skills are needed in good animation drawing. At the top of the list is the ability to communicate movement and personality through drawing. By using simple lines an artist should be able to give a figure a real sense of life and individuality, not just an action pose or stereotypical expression. Next on the list is to be able to draw three dimensionally, to make the characters feel like they are not only individuals, but that they exist in a real world. Since the characters we create and work with are products of our imagination, the animation professional has to be able to draw from his imagination. Next on the list is the ability to consistently draw the same character using the same forms, proportions and details in the particular style that has been set for the production. As you can see, the list is asking for a high level of skill, and we haven't even touched on imagination, story telling and inventiveness yet.

"A "Renaissance" style" life drawing by glenn vilppu.

Modern Renaissance Drawing
So, how do you know an artist has these skills? Figure drawing has been the standard measurement of an artist's skills for hundreds of years, probably from the moment we first started capturing the living world around us. The Renaissance artist was judged by much the same standard as the animation artist is today. The great masters of the past were first story tellers. They had to be able to create figures that the viewers could empathize with so that stories were brought to life with a sense of realism and believability. Animation drawing is, in essence, the closest thing we have to classical Renaissance drawing today.

The Renaissance artist primarily created figures to fit an ideal of perfection using simple volumes to construct figures. The constructions of Raphael are no different than many model sheets you see for classical animation. In traditional drawing, this is referred to as plastic drawing, or "using synthetic forms". This allowed the artist to create fantastic imaginary worlds peopled with figures, in the most part, drawn from imagination. The beginning compositional sketches of all artists are more similar than they are different. The goal is the same, to capture the sense of the abstract total. A compositional notation by the Mannerist artist Tintoretto would fit in quite well with rough layout and story sketches from our current major studios. The artists of the past are the inspiration and yard stick of quality that we still use.

To draw the human figure well from imagination you must first be able to draw the simple forms of construction -- the sphere, box, cylinder and cone -- from memory, in any position and combination. The famous Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens said that "you can draw anything using a sphere, box, and cone." These simple volumes are the foundation of good figure drawing, and are the fundamental tools of figure construction. These "tools" not only help you to draw the figure from imagination but to see the forms of the model. A portfolio will almost automatically be rejected if the figures inside do not have a clear sense of volume and unambiguous space based on model observation.