From the course: Animation Foundations: Drawing Cartoon Characters

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Silhouette and negative space

Silhouette and negative space

From the course: Animation Foundations: Drawing Cartoon Characters

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Silhouette and negative space

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- It's very important to think about your character's silhouette. What does the character look like if you don't see or perceive any internal detail? Is it possible to understand in general what the character is doing and thinking purely based on their outline? And the stronger your silhouette, the better. So this has got a good, strong line of action but it also has a very strong silhouette. So again here, easy to see. If you just look at the guy on the right, you can see that's a droopy, sad walk and chap on the left, obviously the same thing. But even if all we saw was the black area, you have no problem knowing exactly what's going on and exactly how he feels. The classic baseball pose. And again, even this broad action is completely readable, and that's largely achieved because we have a good, strong space here that's left open. And if the arm was cluttered and we fore shortened that bat a bit, it might be very difficult to read that action. So that keeps it nice and clean. We…

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