ABSTRACT
Don Graham, that great teacher of drawing and painting, who was so instrumental in getting the Disney style of animation off and running, said an animation drawing is a “storytelling drawing.” That thought should be uppermost in our minds whenever we are drawing from a model or animating. For the sake of clarifying that thought and to drive the point home (make it your own), let me quote further from Don Graham's book, The Art of Animation:
The extreme, the important drawing of every action, represents the outside limit of an action or a gesture. It indicates at what point the direction of an action changes. If an arm swings backward, at some point it must swing forward. The extreme also represents a momentary pause, or rest, in the action. A bouncing ball, at the point of contact, or at the height of the bounce, seems to be stationary.
At about the time of the Three Pigs this pause in the action suggested a new use of the extreme. Instead of being just a turning point, or a rest point in the action, it now became a drawing of great and special picture interest, a storytelling drawing. By making this drawing more expressive and by having it suggest what was about to happen or what had already happened, the intervening action could be suggested, rather than delineated, to an unbelievable degree.
Watching straight-ahead animation is like watching a buzzard or a hawk wheeling and gliding in the sky. The action is continuous but monotonous because we see a series of poses of equal interest. Watching animation is like watching a hummingbird darting from flower to flower. The action is continuous but exciting because we are able to see separate poses which are made possible by definite rest periods in the action.
