Animation 101: Bringing Back the Bag of Flour..

This will be a new series on this blog called "Animation 101", where I'll post my personal notes and sketches that I make in preparation for my lectures. Having been self-taught, I find teaching an interesting activity. It requires you to review material that you haven't thought about for years, and it reminds you how important some of these basic techniques can be!
Bringing Back the Bag of Flour... I gave a lecture last week in my Drawing in Motion class on thinking "around the form", and used the ol' half bag of flour to demonstrate what I was talking about. It really is an effective thing to practice drawing with. The bag of flour exudes weight, shape, volume, and even texture! (I told my students to add stitching in the front to further help in defining the form), but is also a very simple shape which anyone can draw.There's also an extensive amount of comparative anatomy between a bag of flour and the human form (see above). But most importantly, it breaks the habit of seeing drawing as lines on paper.. sculpting the bag of flour forces you to think about it's form, it's weight and how it sits in space.