ABSTRACT
The meaning behind Solid Drawing comes from more traditional, static, illustrative arts where the principles of form were developed, but it’s focused with animation in mind. Traditional character animation was usually animated at 24 or 12fps (12fps means they were animating “on twos,” which is holding a drawing for two frames to save on work without sacrificing the look of normal movement). Animating at that rate means that they needed to illustrate that character 12 to 24 times for every single second of animation (Image 10.1). A balance needed to be made in order to simplify the sheer amount of representations of solid drawing to keep track of during their animation. For example, look at MGM’s “Tom and Jerry” cartoons before 1942 (they started in 1940). That was a time before Tex Avery made the jump over to the studio from its rival, Warner Bros. Tom Cat looked more complicated than I bet you remember, with spikes representing his hair all over his body. All of these many individual hair points were incredibly difficult to keep track of for the animator. When Tex came in, though not working directly on the shorts, he helped the artists simplify the design to suggest the hair rather than actually specifically show it (Image 10.2). This simplification resulted in not only a smoother-looking character in design, but also propagated to smoother animation since the animators now had far less to keep track of frame to frame and could devote more focus to the movement
Image 10.1 Timeline showing animation “on ones” (top) and “on twos” (bottom).
