Gearing up for my figure drawing class in a couple weeks, using virtual models from pixelovely.com. Apparently most life drawing sessions start out with a few very quick poses (gesture drawings), followed by progressively longer poses.

I hate posting lousy stuff like this, but my hope is that it will help to provide some contrast with future attempts, and illustrate my progress. In the meantime, feel free to let loose with the pointing and laughing.

As you can tell from this lopsided sketch of my Dad, I haven’t had much time to soak up the knowledge contained in Tom Richmond’s “The Mad Art of Caricature,” but hey, it just showed up in my mailbox tonight. On first skim, however, it’s clear that it’s really going to help me step up my game.

Besides being packed with all sorts of caricature drawing theory, it tackles the fundamentals of anatomy–obviously the subject of countless books, but presented here with cartooning specifically in mind. For instance, you might not intend to ever realistically render a caruncula, but its existence should certainly influence the shape of your character’s eye.

Likewise, in eight colorful pages, Richmond manages to impart a ton of useful observations about hands, including why they’re such a challenge to draw, even for pros.

Anyway, I’m hoping to really dive into the book this weekend, so cross your complicated fingers that you’ll witness some improvement on the recognizable caricature front.

Conan O’Brien (pictured?) is doing his show in NY this week, so I’m heading out to try to score a seat to tonight’s taping at the Beacon Theater, which is about 100 yards from my apartment. Fun fact: When Conan did “Late Night,” he lived just down the block from me, at 72nd and Central Park West (in a slightly larger apartment, probably).

Edit: Aww, didn’t get in. On the plus side, random Tuesday off!

Many animators use thumbnails as the starting point to their animation; here’s Glen Keane’s take on it if you’re interested. These are akin to gesture drawing; you’re trying to accurately describe the basic lines of force and action, without worrying about detailed features.

Here I actually looped a five second scene from “The Public Enemy,” in which James Cagney introduces Mae Clarke to some citrus, and jotted down what I thought were some of the key poses and actions. Then, because I’m all about mixing old and new, I timed it out using an iPhone app called Animation Timer, which notes the time in film frames every time you tap the screen.

Of course, the more I draw and observe out in the word, the better i’ll be able to make my characters “act.” In fact, today I took a few spare moments and scribbled thumbnail sketches of folks by the 72nd Street subway stop. Unfortunately, all I saw were people chatting on their cell phones, and virtually nobody wielding decorative slices of fruit.

Another day, another underwhelming animation of waterfowl with an inexplicably expanding cranium. (Animation is HARD!) But it was my first attempt at producing something in Toon Boom Animate. I pulled the trigger on buying it after watching an extensive tutorial online that pretty much demystified the whole program for me.  I had tried the Personal Learning Edition, a free version that doesn’t allow you to export your work, but I wasn’t sold on it until yesterday. As much as I liked my homemade Photoshop templates, this program was designed from the ground up for efficient animation.

Anyway, this one is based on an example on page 170 of “The Animator’s Survival Kit.”