For years I resisted using professional animation paper. You can probably guess the reason if you’ve already looked it up on even a great place like www.cartoonsupplies.com — the cost.
One of the first things I saw when exploring the possibility of doing animation for fun and/or profit was how animators used some-thing in drawing (especially on those interviews or Disney specials on drawing animation) called an animation disc.
It’s a large, unwieldy metal disc that is attached to your desk and has the advantage of rotating to enable the ease of drawing characters at different angles. But of course, like anything that makes life easier, it has a price. And when I was looking in the back of Animation Magazine at the time, that price was in the neighbor-hood of $300 to $500 and up.
I was a struggling college student at the time, so I quickly came up with an alternate method that both held my drawings in registra-tion (more or less), and gave me a place to keep them all together at once: a three-ring binder notebook. As a matter of fact, it became a personal challenge to find larger and larger notebooks as time went by, just to keep my growing stacks of animation sequences organized.
The advantage, of course, was cost. A three-ring binder might set me back a couple of dollars in those days, and I could simply use a standard three-hole punch (a one-time fee of about $15 or so) on a pack of typing paper, which was thin enough so that I could see through two or three drawings at a time without a light table.
The disadvantage, naturally, was keeping the drawings in regis-tration with each other. The holes created by the paper punch were
considerably larger than the wire rings, and the drawings have a tendency to slide around a bit as you draw.
As you start to draw animation, one of the things you’ll quickly appreciate is how important it is that the drawings stay in registra-tion with one another. If the drawings do slide around, a character that’s supposed to be standing perfectly still might slowly begin to drift left or right. An amusing error perhaps, but unintentionally so.
Fortunately, an inexpensive solution awaited me after taking the Animation MasterClass. I found out that manufacturers produce a plastic peg bar that went for about $3 apiece back then. (They’re about $3.50 to $6 now, depending on your supplier.) With this knowledge in hand, I eagerly made the purchase of a plastic peg bar.
The Acme peg bar and its accompanying paper consists of one peg in the center, and two rectangles on either side. The reason for this, of course, is to keep the animation drawings firmly rooted in place as you draw, rearrange, and flip your drawings to test the motion of the character.
Now that I had an animation peg bar in my possession, I knew it was time to buy some official animation paper. The first place I dis-covered was www.cartooncolour.com, thanks to their ad in the back of Animation Magazine. I found their 12-field animation paper, at 10½" x 12½", would suit my purposes. It was about $26 a ream, and I soon found out there was a problem.
Like most desktop animators, I scanned my animation drawings into the computer even then. But my scan bed was the usual, just-barely-over 8½" x 11" size. Often, my animation drawings were too big for the scanner, which made me have to scan a drawing twice because part of an arm or a leg was just hanging off the edge of the scan area. When that happened, after scanning in the offend-ing character art twice, I then had to copy and paste the pieces back together. And as many animation drawings as you’ll soon find are necessary for a scene, that is an unnecessary bit of
time-consuming work!
Fortunately, I discovered the other website you’ve already heard me mention, www.cartoonsupplies.com, which offered stu-dent animation bond paper conveniently sized just for a desktop scanner. Better yet, at a mere $8.95 a ream!
You can guess where I’ve been buying my animation paper since.
I’ll mention one last thing about animation paper before we get started actually drawing. There’s been a big controversy over the years whether you’re a “top-peg” animator or a “bottom-pegger.”
All this means is that some people prefer to draw with the pegs at the bottom of the page, and others with the pegs at the top of the page.
The advantage of being a top-pegger is that you can flip the drawings as you test the action to watch it progress.
Personally, I’m a bottom-pegger, because I prefer to simply
“roll” the drawings back and forth by placing my left fingers between five or six pages at a time.
Whichever you choose, especially if you’re working with a friend, fellow student, or assistant, choose one and stick with it throughout an entire scene. When I was subbing for an animation class last term, I was simultaneously amused and horrified (a dis-turbing and confusing feeling) when I saw that during a class exercise, two students were sharing the tasks of animating and inbetweening the same scene. The cause of my conflicting emo-tions was that while the student acting as the animator (doing the key drawings of the scene) was using the pegs at the top of the page, his assistant (or in this case, “inbetweener”) was using the pegs at the bottom of the page. I’m sure they would have figured out the error if I’d let them be, but I much preferred to go ahead and save them some grief by pointing out the problem before it went any further.
I’ve even had some students want to draw with the pegs on the side. Forget that right away. Whether you’re drawing animation for the Internet or for video, or even film, remember the orientation of the viewing screen or monitor. It’s in landscape mode, or sideways.
If you try drawing your character in an opposite orientation to the destination of your animation output, you may end up inadvertently cutting off your character’s head or feet.