Imagery: The Language of Shape

Several years ago, I heard about a book called Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes. I’ve always looked up to Disney Animators and wanted to know how they did what they did.

Today as I was working on Draft 2 of Applesauce, I remembered a chapter of the book called Symbols for Poses. In this chapter, Walt Stanchfield talks about how you can use a short hand of symbols to express emotion. If you want to evoke Mystery, you will use different shapes and lines than if you want to portray a calm resolution. He gives you a short hand for emotions and situations such as activity, tension, height, stability, restless, abundance, conflict, etc.

My past self created flash cards for these images. On one side, I wrote the the emotion or situation and on the other I drew the short hand shapes and lines he used to portray the emotion or situation. Today I pulled out the flash cards and went through them and gathered together the words I was trying to portray. I ended up with Tension, Conflict, Emotional Disturbance, Dissonance, Dramatic, Stubbornness, Austerity, Turbulence, and Intensity. Then I turned over each card to see what types of shapes and lines I needed to be using to portray these attributes in my drawings.

As you can see, most of the words I had chosen used verticals and conflicting diagonals. I decided to try to make Paige’s neck have more conflicting diagonals in it. Which lead me to draw this sketch:

I’m about 2/3 of the way through the sketches I need to finish for Applesauce. It’s been hard to make progress on it this week. But I’m done with the thumbnails and I’ve blown them up to 4X6 inch size. I’ve been at my light table for several hours today working on revising and redrawing them for the dummy. The deadline for the contest I’m entering is next week. When I’m done with all the sketches, I need to choose 2-3 of the sketches to take to final artwork. Getting closer every time I work on it!