Animation Resource Library

Overall Resources

Inspiring Artists

Tools

  • Lazy Nezumi plugin for Photoshop, Clip Studio, Krita, etc. - Cannot recommend this plugin enough for drawing backgrounds, or anything in perspective. Takes a little getting used to, but it’s well worth it. For my extended notes, see Background Design below for a full write up.

Figure Drawing & Anatomy

Life drawing reference images

In the past, we have referred students to various free sources for life drawing poses, however, there is a significant quality difference from the free options than from some of the paid options.

Important! Ensure you do not use poses on your portfolio that could not have been held from life (like a leaping / airborne pose, or one leg raised), or that show an exaggerated “wide angle camera lens” view with distortion. These are good references for comic book hero drawings, but not for observational life drawing. These are tell-tale signs of using photography as reference. Some schools (like Sheridan and Seneca) are quite fussy about working from photographs.

For the free options, these have been the most beneficial to past students. They are ordered in priority of quality as judged by our instructors:

  1. New Master’s Academy Life Drawing Playlist on Youtube (careful, this playlist is well used by many students, so look elsewhere for creating drawings for your actual portfolio, but this is fine to practice with)

  2. The Pose Archives Deviant Art

  3. Draw This! Youtube Playlist (only clothed models though, not the most ideal for figure drawing for anatomy and structure of the body)

However, the quality difference is pretty great if you would like to spend a little more than free! For superior quality reference images, we recommend using either:

  • Grafit Studio on Artstation (this is an incredible resource - large photo packs, and the quality if superb - use coupon code GARTH10OFF for 10% off your order!)

  • Reference Pictures on Gumroad (a little more specific to figure drawing, but also very good quality images).

Additional Tutorials

Colour & Light

Animation Fundamentals 1 & 2

AF1

Week 1

Week 2

Weeks 4-6 (Character Design)

Weeks 7-8 (Layout)

AF2

Week 1

Worldbuilding: Background Design

This is an incredibly thorough Youtube channel involving navigating the challenges of perspective manually. To start, we recommend watching his Setting up perfect perspective manually tutorial. These are more great introductory perspective tutorials that each have a special emphasis - Drawing Within Boxes tutorial, Organic Forms and Contour Lines tutorial, Inclined planes in perspective tutorial, Drawing Ellipses tutorial, Turning objects in perspective manually tutorial (and Part 2 here).

Storyboarding Fundamentals

For Storyboarding Fundamentals, I also highly recommend purchasing the Lazy Nezumi app mentioned above for Worldbuilding: Background Design. You can purchase it here.

Toniko Pantoja - Blue Eye Samurai was a tough show to storyboard on - Gives you a great sense of the complexity of modern storyboarding, especially something that is aimed to resemble live-action more than animation.

Week 2

Studio Binder - Shots

Studio Binder - Framing

Studio Binder - Angle

Past Portfolios and Artworks of Students

Cynthia’s Portfolio - Accepted in 2022

Bella’s Portfolio - Accepted in 2022

Daisy’s Portfolio - Accepted in 2022

Su’s Portfolio - Accepted in 2022

Veronica’s Portfolio - Accepted in 2022

General Art Inspiration

Environment Design

Lazy Nezumi plugin for Photoshop and other drawing apps - $39 CAD cost (Update: This works with a number of apps, but do email them if you’d like to check if it is compatible with a specific app. Works very well with Photoshop and Affinity software. Due to this fact, I highly recommend signing up for an Adobe Photography Plan for the duration of this course, which is far cheaper than using the full Adobe package).

I just love this plugin and highly recommend it for navigating through some of the complexities of drawing in perspective. It is also highly used in the industry of animation.

Perspective I - Introduction

Inspirational Artists to inspire your homework:

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Videos

In this section, we’ll add videos that we’ve made as well as videos we recommend from others.

Handpicked recommendations tailored to aspiring animators.