cartoonists and animation-adjacent folks: my kid is teaching himself to animate on the ipad, I'd love to get him some library books on animation principles. Any recommendations besides the traditional Frank & Ollie tome?
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This is a flaming hot take but the only "good" animation book is The Illusion Of Life and it's not really a how to book it's just really interesting. The survival kit is overall pretty good but has a lot of REALLY dated information
You should look into Bang Animation and cherry pick tuts
Just bare in mind that it's a channel geared towards a teenage audience so some of the humor might not be age appropriate, but most of its fine and their video on character animation (the one with the little 80s cat character) is really good and he should watch it. It combines the 12 principles to 4
And weirdly these 4 principles teach almost all the same concepts more precisely, the 12 principles were written when the artform was brand new so a lot of them are both vague and redundant, the twelfth is literally just a character design principle in relation to animation lol
It'll also be a lot less vague and give him tangible things to practice rather than abstract ideas out of context, which is really important for art education in general. Tangent: i had a Drawing teacher once who only had us drawing from life without any care to form or 3D space and it made me worse
I MADE A BIG TYPO: BAM ANIMATION, not bang animation i was close lol
Of course if he gets bored making 2D animation there's other mediums he could also try. Obviously stop motion but 3D animation too, the only thing about that is he'd have to learn Blender, but that's pretty far off
Disney style is by far the most difficult. For anime (which can potentially be a bit easier) they use a lot of "limited animation", which means you're very selective about what parts you animate. For instance a head might do an emotive turn but the rest of the image is still
I'd like to help him get a footing in the basics of movement first, there are so many tricks to making it lifelike that apply in both 2 and 3 dimensions
The old Walter Foster “Animation for Artists” and “Advanced Animation for Artists” are great—helpful and charming. You can still find them at arts and crafts stores, art stores, and online. I loved them when i was a kid teaching myself animation.
I also learned how to animate on an iPad when I first started 9 years ago. My go to books are
-Understanding Comics
-Animation Unleashed
-The Illusion of Life
-How to Shoot Film That Doesn’t Suck (film and editing techniques translate to animation well)
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You should look into Bang Animation and cherry pick tuts
Of course if he gets bored making 2D animation there's other mediums he could also try. Obviously stop motion but 3D animation too, the only thing about that is he'd have to learn Blender, but that's pretty far off
-Understanding Comics
-Animation Unleashed
-The Illusion of Life
-How to Shoot Film That Doesn’t Suck (film and editing techniques translate to animation well)
https://edhooks.com/