Professional cartoonists and animators learn basic art techniques when they take art classes and receive formal training. You can learn to draw and to naturally develop an eye for detail, but knowing how to create realistic images, portraits, and background scenes in most cases requires some level of education. You can hone your natural skills by doing a lot of drawing and by artistically capturing a variety of objects but allowing someone to critically analyze your artwork will help you improve your natural abilities. To become a professional artist, you want to learn to accurately express the things that you imagine and to vividly recreate them on paper for others to see. Learning about the basic elements and techniques of art can greatly assist you as you embark on your quest to become a legitimate animation artist. With this in mind, let’s look at the elements of depth and weight in art.
Our previous lesson focused on perspective, proportion, and shadows in art. I will briefly review those basic elements before going on. Perspectivity is the formation of an image in a picture plane of a scene viewed from a fixed point. A perspective is how you see something, and it is an individual’s visual point of view. Understanding proportionality as a basic element of art is easily understood regarding artistic renderings of the human body. The study of body proportions, as part of the study of artistic anatomy, explores the relation of the parts of the human body to each other and to the whole. Shadows in art show depth perception and perspective. The definition of a shadow is a dark area where light from a light source is blocked by an object. An artist’s use of shadows makes drawings on paper appear more realistic.
Depth in Art
Artists create the illusion of depth in drawings by using a variety of techniques. The definition of depth is a dimension taken through an object or body of material, usually downward from an upper surface, horizontally inward from an outer surface, or from top to bottom of something regarded as one of several layers. Depth is the quality of being deep and describes the deepness of something. The depth of a swimming pool, the depth of a cut or wound on your body, or the size of a pothole in a road. These are all instances when we see depth. In art and graphic design, artists can learn techniques to create the illusion of depth on paper. Doing so is essentially drawing what looks like another dimension of space on a piece of paper, or drawing in 3D on a two-dimensional surface. In the pictures below, we see how the use of shading, color, and tone can give the appearance of a deep hole.
Shading is a technique that artists use to create an illusion of depth. Shading involves varying the level of darkness on an object or around it. It attempts to mimic the way light behaves on the object's surface and around it. Light patterns, such as objects having light and shaded areas, help when creating the illusion of depth on paper.
There are various techniques of shading, including cross hatching, where perpendicular lines of varying closeness are drawn in a grid pattern to shade an area. The closer the lines are together, the darker the area appears. Likewise, the farther apart the lines are, the lighter the area appears. The pictures below show examples of hatching and shading by hatching to make the circle appear to be a sphere.
This picture is an example of hatching to make the donut appear to be 3-dimensional.
Distance
A sense of distance can also be achieved in ways similar to creating the appearance of depth. Artists use lines, overlapping, and scale to show distance. The picture below used as the cover photo for this post shows how lines can be used to create a linear perspective of distance.
Lines drawn lengthwise along a page can be used to create the appearance of something that looks to be far away in the distance. In the pictures below, the lines are not parallel but are drawn towards a point above the beginning of the drawing to show how a road or the end of a hallway would look in the distance.
This optical illusion of a deep hole is achieved by drawing circular lines that are smaller and closer together in the middle.
The picture below of an outdoor scene is an example of how scale can be used to show depth and distance. Artists use scale by drawing objects in varying sizes to show depth and distance. In the picture, the larger trees are meant to appear closer to the viewer and the smaller trees in the background are drawn smaller to look like they are farther away. However, they all look to be the same kind of tree and most likely are all the same height. The picture also shows a path drawn to with lines closer together as it appears to end at a distance far away.
The overlapping of objects is also a technique artists use to convey distance. Objects drawn in front of other objects of the same or similar size appear to be closer. Objects drawn smaller than other objects in a line next to others appear to be farther away.
Color and tone are used to show depth and distance. In much the same way as dark colors are used to show the depth of a hole, differing tones of a color can be used to show distance. A progressive tone can be used to gradually change from a light tone in the foreground to a dark tone in the background, or a dark tone in the foreground to a light tone in the background. The picture below shows an example of this technique. The trees in the foreground are lighter in tone than those in the background even though they are smaller. But due to overlapping, the larger trees in the background that are darker appear to farther away.
If you use Microsoft Publisher, you are familiar with drawing and formatting shapes and objects with that application. You can draw and edit shapes and pictures that you can then edit to give the illusion of depth and make them look three-dimensional. This can be done by adding a shadow to shapes, objects, and lines, and by using the 3-D Rotation feature on the Shape Effects tab.
With the proper use of depth, artists can give their art a sense of space, movement, and dimensionality, which makes the artwork more compelling and engaging for the viewer.
Walt Disney's Art School
The idea to begin educating and training animators for work on Walt Disney’s films came about during the development of the animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In 1932, some of the artists who worked for him started meeting in private sessions to improve on their techniques. The sessions began at the home of one of the artists. Walt heard about the sessions and offered to allow them to meet at the studio and offered to purchase the supplies. Soon, an art professor agreed to teach classes that were principally concerned with human anatomy and movement, and later action analysis, animal anatomy and acting. In the following video, Mr. Disney discusses how they made Snow White, and his art school.
(Sources – Animated Life (blog), Disney Screencaps on Pinterest, Ran Art (blog), Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia)