From the course: Animation Foundations: Drawing Cartoon Characters

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Squash and stretch: Understanding volume

Squash and stretch: Understanding volume

From the course: Animation Foundations: Drawing Cartoon Characters

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Squash and stretch: Understanding volume

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- When you animate a character, when you draw the character, even if you're drawing a storyboard panel, it doesn't have to be moving, there's going to be times when you want this guy to squash and stretch or deform in various ways. When you do that, you have to be very careful that you maintain the volumes, that the mass of the character isn't gaining or losing weight, or volume, as we call it in animation. Let's take a look at these. I'm going to show you what these look like when we go through them in animation mode. Here's the first drawing, so let's go through and see what this looks like. As you can see, it's a pretty simple action. I'm going to go back through it again, in reverse now. So, that's our first. Squashed into the anticipation. That feels like a pretty good transition. He might be gaining a little bit of volume, but so much of it is hidden behind the head. This is the kind of thing that's quite, I think, cheat-able. On the next drawing, here's where I have a problem…

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