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*2d Shadows and tones help*

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*2d Shadows and tones help*

Hi all

I was wondering if anybody out there has an idea of any books or internet resources that have tutorials or demos on how to draw tones and shadow levels in traditional animation?

Im pretty stuck at the moment.... :(

any help would be great!

regards

Hey

thanks for the reply and the pointer toward the book - i had meant to look over that book a while back and it mmust have slipped my mind! Thanks!

Its basically traditional efx im interested in learning about, whether its a shadow ON an acutal character OR the characters acutal shadow, or maybe a highlight etc.

There doesnt seem to be many books on the subject...

cheers!

Tones, shadows, highlights, rim-lights etc.

Hey there, whoever's interested ("Laughing Man"? Odd name...),

to the best of my knowledge you guys are both right - there aren't yet any books that cover this specific area of traditional, hand-drawn special effects animation, even in a single chapter.

That being said - the guy who was really responsible for perfecting the art and the techniques of applying frame-by-frame shading to 2D characters - often goes without credit, even though he's still active in the commercial animation industry in London.

His name is Chris Knott and - prior to heading up the Special Effects Animation Dept. on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in London in 1987 - he was in charge of Special Effects at Richard Williams' commercial animation studio in London.

I know this because I was lucky enough to be hired by Chris for "Roger Rabbit" - and I spent my entire time on the production (along with a very large number of other people) putting shadows on rabbits (and all the other characters) frame by frame, following Chri's tremendous example and (never yet surpassed) attention to detail.

After "Roger Rabbit" several of Chris' crew joined him in working on TV commercials in London - most of which followed the then-popular "Roger Rabbit" format, mixing live action footage with cartoon characters.

So - my question in answer to your question is: are you interested in the techniques of tone matte animation because you want your own work to look more rounded? Or do you need to work on these techniques because you're trying to integrate flat "toon" characters with live action footage or backgrounds?

The basic techniques are the same for both - but the challenge is different (if that makes sense). Shading ON characters and shadows beneath or behind them them ("contact" or "cast" shadows, to follow Chris' terminology) all tend to follow the laws of everyday physics, but they obviously have to conform to the chosen style of the film itself.

A lot depends, in other words, on the general Art Direction, the design approach you're working with.

The basic principles, techniques and procedures can be explained and picked up pretty easily - but you need also to consider how you're going to do your final compositing. It's a fairly detailed and time-consuming step-by-step process to achieve anything as fancy as "Roger Rabbit" - some of the scenes had more than 6 levels of effects work on top of the characters, so.....

If you can provide a little more detail about the context of what you're doing - I might be able to give you some general pointers (without giving away too many of Chris Knott's own custom-developed industry "secrets"....)

Mind you - maybe it's time Chris published something about this himself?
I guess it would depend on how much interest there is out there - CGI has kind of shunted all of these techniques off to one side over the last few years, so - if you're keen to revive and explore them yourself, one of the best things you can do is to study the best examples of the technique (starting with "Roger") - look at "Illusion of Life" also - and ALWAYS draw from life as much as you can.

If you spend time observing, understanding and reproducing/rendering shading effects within the context of drawing or painting from life - as patiently as you can - you will be well on the way to discovering most of what you need to know in order to add these dimensions to whatever it is that you're animating.

But - to some extent - it's a "how long is a piece of string" question.

If you describe more of what you're trying to do - that might make it easier to try and advise or help you,

FM

hope this helps

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by draw tones, but if you mean how do you differentiate between the shadow area and a normal line, than this might help.

http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=Columns&column=ctc&article_no=1659

Mark Simon has an example where he uses the red pencil on a cloud drawing. I got the book and actually liked it quite a bit. Hope this works for you.

KalEl118