Hunstman Model

Man Models

The Crane - Model Sheets

Designing Huntsman Character

Adventure Time - The Art of Ooo 2

Below are a lot of guidelines on the drawing of the main characters; Finn and Jake, by the show's creators. They are used to help the animators keep their work consistent and the look of the show always fluid. I am already totally in love with this book, as it not only shows finished pieces and grabs from the show, but also all of the concept and development art. It discusses the processes the artists had to go through to create and finalize all of their characters and worlds, which is super useful to me!

Glen Keane Design Notes (Rephrased by Shiyoon Kim)

'Some great quotes from Bill Moore, famous design teacher at Chouinard, establishing a great way of approaching and studying shapes' - Shiyoon Kim. All above taken from Kim's Tumblr : shiyoonkim.tumblr.com/

The Making of Beauty and the Beast

Unlike the 'Making of Sleeping Beauty' video, this one delves deeper into the issues concerting the adaptation of a fairy tale to become an animated feature film. It compares the original folk story and the adapted version. The story team working on the film changed the character of Belle by fleshing her out; making her more humble and quirky. They created new characters to expand the story further from the original. Comedy is added to a gloomy story, as well as commentary, in the form of the Beast's servants. the villain, Gaston was added to thicken the plot. He acts as a foil for Beast.
This video focuses a lot more on the character design and development rather than the concept art and background design.

Character Studies

Drawing Tips: Tapering in Body Shapes

'The skin closet to the the joints such as the elbow, wrist, and ankle are some examples where the shapes taper in. the rest of the anatomy could very in almost any kind of shape depending on the person'

'Tapering shapes will help any drawing or sketch. This is deceptively simple but a good one to remember. It's enemy is symmetrical shapes and parallel lines'

Source: http://drawingsfromamexican.blogspot.ca/2010/04/tapering-body-shapes.html

Odd Little Character Drawing

I drew this in about 5 minutes in black felt tip directly onto a drawing pad. I based it off the cartoonish work of 'drawnin1985' and used one of my bearded friends as source material. This would be too hard to do for my animation but it's fun getting to play around with different styles and explore what I find easy or hard to do.

Drawing Tips: Normand Lemay

 

'A lot of times, asymmetry will bring energy and movement to a pose or composition. More specifically, I feel like breaking the symmetry of a character’s expression is key to bring interest to it. Of course, there’s always a situation where there’s a need for symmetry. On top of my head, I can think of depicting a character who has an authority role, or the “undefeated champion of something”, or the “cold stone killer”, etc. So, a symmetrical facial expression usually means the character is: supremely bored, supremely confident, has no emotions, has a poker face, or is dead. Did I miss one? 

In general, it’s a great way to flesh out a character’s thought process. What is he/she thinking about? What’s their goal?'

Source: grizandnorm.tumblr.com

Drawing Tips: Rad Sechrist

Here is a (relatively small, I must say) compilation of tips and tricks for character drawing from one of Dreamworks' animators, Rad Sechrist. I Follow him on Twitter, Blogger and Tumblr (from which all the below images are). His work and instructions have certainly helped me with my own figure drawing, especially his points about 'pushing' angles and proportions which can give characters a more cartoonish look that's really suited for animation. I've been practicing these techniques whenever I sketch people now, and look for their skeleton inside their frame and to see which way they curve. radfordsechrist.tumblr.com

'short-hands for boarding'

'Some thoughts on bones. The bones are bent, but sometimes I'll use a strong straight to show tension, flexing, etc.'