Hi guys! Welcome to the Alane Adams Studios Smudge
character design demo. This is a quick tutorial on how we go about drawing the main character from
our latest animated short Smudge. I'll explain the basics of how we make choices for character design
and some tips for how you can draw Smudge yourself if you want to. When creating characters for
animation there are a lot of things to consider. Animated shows are typically made with large
teams of artists in many different departments all wo
rking together to create the final result.
So when we design a character that's meant to be animated it's important to consider not only what
we think will look good but also about what would make it possible or impossible for the animators
to move it around. Simplicity is key. A character has to be redrawn or reposed on every frame of
an animation. Think about that for a minute. There are 24 frames of Animation in a single
second. Smudge is 6 minutes and 45 seconds long which means there a
re a total of 9,720 frames in
Smudge. That is a lot of drawings! So you know, keep it simple. Anyway let's get to the fun
part. So you can see that Smudge is made up of some pretty basic shapes-- triangles rectangles
circles. That's not just something that we're using to show you how to draw it, that's actually
how we do it too. Our character designer likes to draw really loose sketches to to begin with
and then you can see that they're going over top of that first sketch with a more finish
ed
line. Often in sketches the lines can be really short and messy so when you go back over to do
your final lines it helps to try to keep them longer and more flowy. That improves the overall
line quality and movement in the drawing. That crossbar that goes through the center is a guide.
If you use a circle to draw in the head first and then put it in the middle that gives you a good
idea of where your center line is. Characters are for the most part symmetrical so they're
the same on bot
h sides unless they have a peg leg or a cyborg eye or...you get the picture,
and it helps to have a guide to show you where the middle is so that you can draw the eyes arms
legs etc kind of equally on either side. That's what our character designer is doing now, making
sure that the eyes are equally distanced from that center line. Another thing to think about before
you start to draw a character is how do they feel? What are they thinking? Those things will affect
the pose that you choose
and the mood that the finished drawing will have. We wanted Smudge to
feel like an unfinished character so their hair is this free form ink blob that moves around with
them and changes shape depending on how they're feeling and what they're doing. Because of that
it's really hard to go wrong with Smudge's hair. If you want you can draw in circles for the main
shapes to give it some guidance, but if they don't feel right it's okay to ignore them and just draw
in whatever shapes seem good to
you. Something that a lot of animators say is you have to get
all the bad drawings out on paper so that you can find the good ones. So if you don't like the
first few drawings that you do, great job! You're doing it right. Every imperfect design is one more
closer to meeting your new favorite character.
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