What The Hell Is Wrong With The Pancakes Cartoon: The Drawings

Probably my favorite drawing from the whole thing

     Drawings are probably the most important aspect of a cartoon, even more than the animation. If you can't draw worth a damn, it's going to be at least 12 times more difficult to animate it,24 times harder if you want to be really fluid. Now some of the drawings turned out almost okay, like the one above, but just about all of them are terrible. The underlying problem is that none of the drawings were constructed. They're all just shapes piled on top of each other with little to no cohesiveness whatsoever. 

     The fact that there's no construction lends itself to all sorts of problems. One of the biggest problems being a lack of attention payed to positive and negative space. You need a balance of both for a drawing to read well, and the cartoons severely lacks that. As a result, parts of each drawing are either too cramped or too sparse.

Bim mouth moves to the side of his head for no good reason. It's just weird for weirdness sake.

     The lack of construction also means that the features just float around in the form. Since the eyes and mouth and other parts aren't grounded into a solid head, they just go all over the place. Just look at the ears throughout the whole cartoon. They never stick in the same place. I just stuck them wherever there was room, because I didn't know where they were supposed to go.

Yikes! What's going on with his eyes?

     The drawing above is starting to feel constructed. The arms and hands are still kinda flat, along with the lower teeth and the tongue. The upper teeth, however, feel solid and like they're rooted in the larger form, being the head. This drawing could have been good, but the eyes just kill it. They look like formless blobs that were just pinned onto the upper half of the head. They look like they exist on a separate plane than the head.

The cop is as close to a constructed character as you could get in this cartoon

     The cop had the best design out of all the characters and almost has construction, mostly during his first line.The torso is still a jumbled mess and so is his hat, but the head feels more solid. The face doesn't take up the whole head which is a good start, although the ear needs to go further back. The left eye should have been further back to put it in perspective.

When the cop ducks, all the features go every which way with no rhyme or reason.

     After this line, he looses his construction and becomes a complete mess like the other characters. The only reason I think I even went so long drawing characters without any construction was because before this cartoon, I was mainly doing comics with thumbnail size sketches.

It's scanned weird, but just ignore that.

     I like these drawings, even though they're not constructed. They at least feel somewhat balanced, show some emotion, and they're fun, something which The Pancakes Cartoon was sorely lacking. At that point I was just eyeballing where all the features went, and it wasn't until I started drawing larger that I realized the problem with that. It was after I finished this cartoon that led me to do the Preston Blair studies and learn the fundamentals that I'd been brushing off for too damn long. After several months, I decided to see if what I learned had sunk in and this is what I came up with.

What the Pancakes Cartoon should've looked like

      So here's a drawing that actually has construction. It's far from perfect, but it shows some thought put into it. It's still a little flat, but it feels really solid compared to all the other drawings. The face doesn't take up the whole head, although it could stand to be lower. The ear's pretty close too, which is around the middle of the side of the head. The cheeks push up on the face like they should and the eyes are in perspective. The torso also looks nice and solid, along with the arms and hands... Well, the left arm could stand to be a little shorter. The hands look like they're facing the right way, which is something I've been struggling with. The big problem, though, is that the feet feel like they're not touching the ground. So close and yet so far.
     But that's enough about that. Next post I'll talk about inking and composition.