Verdant's Secret Base

Dubious Patch

Exercises for all the homies who want to have a long career drawing.

The true problem with being an artist and drawing all day (as I wanted my whole life) is that human backs are not designed to hold that position, so it is very common for artists and designers to have really stiff shoulder blades, creating a chain of muscle strain towards the arm AND the back… and a lot of pain.

These are some physical exercises for artists and honestly anyone who works at a desk.

“I get it, you’re saying I’ll have a tough time finding a job like my dad’s.”

a couple snippets from a presentation i gave at school this past week on storyboarding!!

‼️DISCLAIMER: I am still a student and have only worked on student and indie projects! This is just stuff that I personally find helpful as an amateur, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt!

If you're going to raise or lower the camera, try to save high angles (looking down at the characters) for when there's less leg movement or a shorter shot, and use low angles (looking up at the characters) when there's a lot of leg movement so you can make use of foreground elements.

You can do this in a way that adds a cinematic feel and scale to your boards, while also saving your animators some legwork (literally). A show that absolutely nails this is Legend of Vox Machina. They drop the camera a lot or add raised elements in the foreground when lots of characters are running toward camera, or doing difficult fight choreo, etc. Here are some examples of low cameras + raised foregrounds:

This one is actually a very slightly high camera, but the foreground is used in a really clever way so none of that pesky walking-on-uneven-ground needs to be animated:

The entirety of s2ep9 is a masterclass in this; there are so many running crowd shots but it's boarded really brilliantly and keeps things feeling really impactful, but they're not wasting animator time on a bunch of weird-angle feet: