Animated Sketch Book – getting good movement

By Ian Whitworth.

Ian Whitworth is an animator with Cosgrove Hall Productions. He begins a series about getting good movement in animated drawings.

Tips that I would like to pass on are the importance of keying your action, good key poses can carry your animation if your in-betweens are a little out. Also don’t just think ‘I will move [A] to position [B]’, and start drawing. Play around with different poses and lines of action so that you know how and where you are going to move your animation. Study the drawings below and note how the lion coils up like a spring before it leaps forward. Any figure moving forward starts off by moving back a small amount. The faster the forward action the larger the backward movement. Try it yourself when you get up out of your chair.

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