Artist Resources We Love, Vol. 3
Plus: news and a Canadian short film.
Happy Sunday! It’s the latest edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is our lineup:
1) Five excellent art and animation resources.
2) About Northened, a newly premiered Canadian short.
3) Animation newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1 – Precious resources
It makes our day when people tell us that the newsletter has helped them creatively. Over the years, we’ve heard from teachers, students and learners in general who’ve used the things we’ve published (like Hayao Miyazaki’s guides to painting and animating) for education. It’s a part of Animation Obsessive we love.
So, every once in a while, we’ll share a batch of free resources aimed specifically at learning art and animation. In 2022 and 2023, they included gems like Living Lines Library, the Don Bluth Collection of Animation and Paul Felix’s layout guide. We’re bringing a third edition in this issue.
Today’s list covers a wide range of subjects: 2D and 3D and stop-motion animation, character design, painting. With luck, artists and animators of all persuasions and experience levels will find something interesting below. We hope you’ll enjoy!
1. Character Design Crash Course
There’s no single, absolute way to design animated characters. Almost every rule has an exception. But it’s an art that can be studied — and there’s a lot to learn from a good class. The problem: they can be expensive.
Not always, though. A few years ago, the animation industry vet Ron Doucet compiled a free Google Doc that he named Character Design Crash Course. It isn’t all his own original work — he cobbled it together from many, many, many sources. But it’s the biggest, most exhaustive resource on character design we’ve ever found online.
Character Design Crash Course is over 1,300 pages long. As Doucet explained, “This document is for learning and self-training in the art and process of character design.” It starts with the very basics and then gets much trickier. The document offers 12 assignments — asking you to design characters in the styles of Wolfwalkers, Motorcity, The Legend of Hei and beyond.
Alongside that, Doucet includes seemingly endless tips, examples, quotes, links and especially images. The document is a repository of thousands of character design images, with links to even more. Most of these are real production materials, making them invaluable by themselves. Don’t miss the sections on style and pose guides.
There are a few ways to approach Character Design Crash Course. It offers so much that even a casual browse is worthwhile. But it rewards commitment — Doucet links to so much additional reading and viewing that you could use this document almost like a free college course. It’s worth a look for anyone, beginner or pro, interested in designing characters.
2. The Hidari streams
One of the coolest stop-motion films of the decade has been Hidari. Its five-minute pilot dropped in 2023 — and it’s amazing. The creators in Japan used wooden puppets to tell a wild samurai story. Drawing on anime and action movies, they’ve developed a style of stop motion unlike any we’ve seen.
Their goal is, ultimately, to turn Hidari into a feature film, and the team has been hitting events worldwide to build hype and do business. In early 2024, they decided to expand the original short with “a quick scene that follows where the pilot film left off.” And they livestreamed that process — recording over 20 hours of material.
Thankfully, the Hidari streams have been archived for posterity on YouTube.
Hidari is animated at Dwarf (Pokémon Concierge), which may be Japan’s best current stop-motion team. These videos allow you to watch serious talents at work. If you’ve enjoyed Laika’s time-lapse footage, the Hidari streams are the raw version. It’s slow, methodical stuff, but this kind of access is rare — and priceless. It gives you a fly-on-the-wall look at how they did it, minute by minute.
Like artist Coleen Baik wrote in her newsletter The Line Between:
The animation is so painstaking that it might be hard to understand what’s actually changing on set in most of these videos, most of the time — at 11:00 on Filming Day 2 things may be a little more obvious. At 15:11, they do a quick run-through. … Beautiful things take time.
(Toward the end of the final, day-five video, the finished animation plays on loop. It’s exciting to watch — and a testament to the hard work revealed in these streams.)
3. Nick Cross’s background guide
It’s safe to call Over the Garden Wall one of the best American cartoons of the 2010s — and one of the best-looking. A key factor in that look: the haunting (and immediately recognizable) background art.
Nick Cross was the art director for Over the Garden Wall, and he set the style for its backgrounds. Along the way, he created a short guide for the digital painting team “in the early days of pre-production.” And, years ago, he posted it on Tumblr.
Nick Cross’s background guide is a step-by-step technical breakdown of the painting process for Over the Garden Wall. “We are really trying to [prevent] these backgrounds from looking digital,” Cross noted. Lots of techniques went into it, and he got specific about them.
In his guide, Cross pointed to set design ideas from silent films — “we want the eye of the viewer to be drawn to the light like a moth to a flame.” Regarding shadows, he wrote, “Use black set at about 40–50% and with the hard round brush.” Here’s his explanation of detailing:
… use a textured brush set at 60–70% opacity … The idea here is to emulate the technique known in oil painting as “grisaille,” which is where they paint a monochromatic underpainting that is glazed over with transparent layers of paint. So here, in order to save time, we are using color instead. Try to concentrate on the main light areas at this point. Accentuate important details like leaves, tree trunks, glass clumps; as well as brick and wood elements.
Cross’s guide has nine steps, each one short and to the point. Reading them puts you inside his head, and following them allows you to recreate (and understand) the look of the world in Over the Garden Wall — a valuable experience.
4. An award-winning film in Blender, step by step
Blender is the most powerful all-in-one animation program that’s free to download. Even so, it’s a little complicated, especially when used for 3D animation. We shared a few Blender how-to guides back in 2023, but there are limits to what a guide by itself can teach. The best way to learn is often to make your own project.
Or, alternatively, to watch someone else make one.
Last year, the Peruvian animator Jimy Carhuas Tintaya released a CG short called Hampuy: Amta Haru (trailer), which toured the festival circuit, won awards and got covered by Peru’s mainstream press. And he took the extraordinary step of streaming its process across 70-plus videos, which he gathered into a playlist on YouTube.
Tintaya speaks in some of these videos, explaining what he’s doing. But a lot (maybe most) of it is silent work. As with the Hidari streams, it’s a chance to look over a pro’s shoulder. With Tintaya, though, it doubles as a chance to copy his homework. In these screen recordings, you get to see every slight tweak of a setting.
It isn’t an uncut, start-to-finish experience, but most of the videos run upward of an hour or two — and they demonstrate each part of the making of Hampuy in extreme detail. That ranges from storyboards (using the Grease Pencil) to animatic, color script (using Krita) to modeling, texturing to rigging, CG layout to animation, lighting to editing. It’s a roadmap for any newcomer who’s making their own film in Blender.
5. The SPA videos
Our fifth and last resource today delivers so much that it could be split into multiple entries on this list. For several years, SPA Studios (Klaus) has been posting how-to-animate videos on YouTube. Its channel has turned into a goldmine.
Take its Pearls of Wisdom series, which cuts lectures by animators James Baxter and Sergio Pablos into 37 small, digestible pieces. These are quite literally master classes made available for free.
The videos include technical lessons, but also a lot of theory. This is stuff that can change the way you view the art of character animation. Baxter goes into two minutes of careful detail about the movement of hips, plus another two about the anatomy of horses, and more. Or take Pablos on the acting of Dr. Doppler in Treasure Planet:
He’s a character who’s missing confidence. ... But he’s still, like, “I’m one of those [confident] guys, right?” … If you look at his performance, you’ll see he tends to keep his hands close to his body. There’s a lot of people who are shy who do this without really knowing. Arms become shields, essentially, right? ... He will lick his lips before talking. He’s got a dry mouth. Throughout the film, maybe four or five times, he’ll lick his lips just a bit. Just a tiny bit. And his eyes don’t fixate on anything. He kind of looks around, not really settling down on anything, because he’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna stare you down … and [he] blinks under pressure. Like, an unnecessary number of blinks.
Meanwhile, here’s Pablos on the process of getting feedback:
... how about you show it to someone who has no clue what animation is? ... Because that’s the truest response you’re gonna get — the audience response. Like, “Can you tell me what the character’s doing here?” And, if they go, “I think he’s picking this up and moving it over there — he seems to be bashful about it,” okay. … But, if they say, “Looks like he’s angry,” that means I’m doing something wrong. It’s actually a true reaction from somebody who’s not going to tell you, “Oh, the overlap...” Just, “Do you get it or do you not get it?” I used to work late at Disney and I would come out of my office and I’d grab the cleaning lady. ... And she would give me some of the best feedback ‘cause it was the most honest, ‘cause she just wants to get back to work.
The Pearls of Wisdom series is only some of what’s on the SPA channel. Don’t miss Learn with SPA, either. Here, among other things, we watch animator Alfredo Cassano break down his own decisions while animating Klaus — and speak at length about 2D animation in Blender.
Most of SPA’s instructional videos have under 10,000 views. Way, way more people could be benefiting from these. They’re an excellent place to start for anyone trying to understand 2D animation — or for anyone trying to take their work to the next level.
Those are our five resources today! We hope you’ll find something in them that suits your needs and interests. If not, try our 2022 and 2023 lists for 11 more suggestions like these.
This series began as a one-off experiment, but great resources have continued to hit our radar in the time since. We expect that trend to keep going. If and when we locate another full batch, you can expect a fourth volume from us.
2 – Animation news worldwide
Inside Northened
A new short from Canada popped up online this week. Its title is Northened, and it comes from animator Una Di Gallo, who’s gotten festival notice with films like 1992 (2018). This time, she’s told the story of two kids in “the twilight of industrial Hamilton, Ontario.” They wander this empty place in a miasma of heat and boredom, until a ghostly seagull, formed out of an old slushie cup, interrupts their routine.
Anyone who’s lived young in a dying town will recognize something in Northened. Di Gallo captures the atmosphere, down to the (real or imagined) seagull creature. Even litter begins to take on fantastical, sinister traits when this little is going on.
We liked the film — and so we asked Di Gallo what went into it. “While developing Northened,” she tells us, “I was fixated on Sean Baker’s filmmaking and the way he told stories about poverty.” His film The Florida Project (2017) was particularly on her mind. Also in the mix: Grandpa Walrus, Annihilation and Akira — namely, the Espers.
“I wanted to create something a little bit surreal and mind-melting … but through a dreamy, childlike lens,” Di Gallo explains. She goes into detail about finding a tone and style for the piece:
I’d go around Hamilton — to the beach, but also around the industrial northeast end — and take tons of photos and videos. It’s a place that sort of illustrates itself. I spent a lot of time sitting around by the water, thinking about how it made me feel and then thinking of which vignettes I’d like to see in the film.
One time I found myself underneath the Skyway at night, which is this huge freeway bridge, looking at the factories across the harbor from a different vantage point. There was this weird little patch of sand that felt like a forbidden beach, and the water there was so polluted that it felt scary stepping close to it. Little emotional impressions like that gave me a mental catalogue to work from, and I’d keep boarding these ideas and making animatics until the tone of the film captured exactly how it felt to be there. …
I wanted the film to be staged and paced similar to my last film, Boy. A series of vignettes, with locations framed like playsets at times … Something else I explored was the idea of time stretching and dilating with the heat. The film takes place during a muggy Southern Ontario summer, so I knew I wanted to pace it like: slow, repetitive days; a sudden ramp up of conflict; an almost evil return to slowness, dragging on and taunting them; and a final, fast-paced climax. The film tends to move slower in its day scenes than in its night scenes. I tried to bounce time and space off of one another.
Di Gallo had a basic story outline for Northened, but she structured the film as a series of vignettes — the key moments she knew she wanted. “I spent a lot of time trying to arrange and rearrange the vignettes along my story skeleton,” she notes. Not everything made it. A Truman Show-inspired sequence, intended for the ending, hit the cutting-room floor: “the city limits were surrounded by an invisible curtain, and Sam and Franklin found it by swimming far out into Lake Ontario one night.”
Instead, the litter creature emerged in the revision process. Di Gallo calls it a “slushie seagull” and an entity “created from trash and industrial waste,” which may or may not exist. Getting it right was one of the big challenges of the film — especially the way it interacts with the main characters.
“To me,” she notes, “it represents all of the ways that their surroundings antagonize them and how their coming-of-age has them realizing the limits of their own lives.”
Everything adds up to an intriguing, worthwhile film that feels grounded in lived experience. You can find Northened embedded below:
Newsbits
Annecy is over in France, but bits and pieces are still emerging. At a filmed roundtable, director Merlin Crossingham spoke about using Feathers McGraw in the new Wallace & Gromit: “the power comes from his stillness. … Sometimes it’s about not moving the character and letting the camera do the work.”
Meanwhile, following his success at Annecy, director Gints Zilbalodis of Latvia now has distribution deals around the world for his film Flow.
In America, the government has brought a lawsuit against Adobe for “preying on consumers who sign up for online subscriptions by hiding key terms and making cancellation an obstacle course.”
With the Japanese film The Imaginary nearing its Netflix release, Charles Solomon profiled the project and spoke with its director and producer. Toward the end, the producer has fascinating things to say about the worldview behind the film.
In India, director Vaibhav Kumaresh did an interview about his feature Return of the Jungle. He called it essential for India to make animated features. Because this one was “entirely self-funded,” Vaibhav Studios worked on it for around 15 years.
In Japan, Goro Miyazaki discussed the creation of the Ghibli Museum. As he told it, when his father tried to retire after Princess Mononoke, he wanted his animators to retire and open a store with him. That idea morphed into the museum.
The Malaysian feature Extinction is starting to land distribution deals around the world.
Inside Out 2 is a hit everywhere — including Russia, where its pirated release topped the box office this weekend. Film piracy in theaters is the new normal, with many unlicensed films screening in Russia “a week from the moment they start in the CIS countries,” reports Film Distributor’s Bulletin.
It’s graduation season in China, and hundreds of student films are appearing. Animation Academic Party looked into projects from the Communication University of China and linked to a livestream, scheduled a few days from now.
Lastly, we published the second and final part of our interview with animator Tony White, a veteran of British studios like Richard Williams Animation.
See you again soon!
These resources are just extraordinary. I think the thing that marks out animation obsessive is its generosity - each post is so full of depth and joy and knowledge and light. Thank you - this made my day!
Thank you so much! How do you manage to find all of these wonderful resources? You're doing a wonderful job!