Gesture Drawing for Animation v
Foreword by the Editor
Walt Stanchfield was an animator who taught life drawing classes for animators with a
special emphasis on gesture drawing. For each weekly class session, he wrote informal
handouts to emphasize the theme of the current class session, to comment on work done
in the previous class, or discuss whatever topic struck his fancy. Over a period of years,
these notes were lovingly shared, studied, and treasured by animators and animation
students everywhere.
Mr. Stanchfield personally gave copies of his collection to interested students, and was
happy to seem them distributed. According to many people who were lucky enough to
study under him, he wanted to publish them as a book, but the studio where he worked
was not interested.
The goal of this project is to imagine the book that Walt Stanchfield might have written.
This project is a compilation of the first 60 handouts that are shared on the
http://www.animationmeat.com website (as that site has numbered them). Walt Stanchfield did
not present his topics in any particular order, which suited the ongoing nature of the
classes. Walt's handouts are like individual frames of animation—some are extremes,
some are inbetweens, some are even cleanups. As I was reading the notes and trying to
absorb as much as I could, I thought I might understand them better if it were all laid out
in sequence, with basic topics followed by more complex ideas. I wanted to see his ideas
grouped by subject so I could compare the ideas. In other words, I wanted the topics to be
arranged like a normal book. So I've re-arranged bits and pieces from the handouts into
cohesive chapters, while taking the liberty to eliminate redundancy and make minor edits
just as a book editor would.
In deciding how to organize the material, I imagined how Walt himself would have put it
together if he'd written it. Where would he have started? Knowing that the readers of the
book would not be the lucky members of his classes, what concepts would have
illustrated before moving on to more advanced topics? I tried to follow the principles
Walt himself outlines in these notes: clarity, attention to the "essence," emotion, and
using the minimum number of words (lines) to get the point across.
Another reason I wanted to see this material as a book is that there is no other book that
covers the same information. There are many excellent volumes on animation, but they
generally assume that the reader can already draw animatable characters with strong
poses without explaining how to get to that stage. All the books on generic figure and life
drawing, even those that emphasize gesture, encourage capturing the model's appearance
and gesture without explaining how to internalize the gesture so as to push it to extremes
or apply it to a different figure. Personally, I think this compilation—if it were a book—
would take its place among the top volumes on animation.
There is an informal, lively charm to the original handouts that gives the reader a sense of
'being there.' You may want to check them out to get a feel for how this information was