not started yet
This is the plan for this module as it stands. It gets revisited once it’s reached — kept if it
still fits, changed or swapped out if something better turns up along the way.
This is the pivot away from pure fundamentals drilling and toward cartooning proper.
Proko — free gesture and figure-drawing videos on YouTube. Gesture is the
single most important skill for expressive cartooning; it’s what keeps drawings from looking stiff.
Line of Action / Quickposes — free timed-reference websites. Note: both include nude reference photos by default alongside clothed ones — both let you filter this in their settings.
Andrew Loomis, Fun With a Pencil — free and legal on the Internet
Archive. The first ~30 pages teach cartoon heads and figures via ball-and-plane construction,
the perfect bridge from fundamentals to cartoon character.
Make it a weekly habit, not a single session
Gesture doesn’t come from one good session — it comes from a repeated cycle, which is exactly
how it was actually taught. For twenty years, Disney animator Walt Stanchfield ran weekly gesture
classes for the studio’s own animators (his students include Glen Keane, Brad Bird, and John
Lasseter): draw from a model, get critiqued, repeat, week after week. His own class handouts are
freely shared online with his family’s blessing at
Thinking Animation — read a few alongside your own gesture practice; they’re as much
about attitude as technique.
how to practice
Short timed gestures (30 seconds–2 minutes), then “mannequinize” into simple shapes.
Chase flow and exaggeration, not accuracy — and keep it weekly for the whole course, not just this phase.
skip / deprioritize
Rigorous écorché/muscle anatomy, “100 heads / 100 hands” realism challenges, and the
Solo Art Curriculum’s multi-term anatomy sequence. You need enough anatomy to caricature it,
not medical accuracy.
Steps
Started weekly timed-gesture sessions (Stanchfield’s own Disney classes ran the same draw-critique-repeat cycle) — keep it goingLesson
Part of Djaunt