Carter Goodrich earned fame as a top character designer working on animated films such as Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Ratatouille, Brave and Coco. As someone noted when Goodrich was working on Prince of Egypt, he "designs characters from the inside out."
Because the preliminary character designs for major motion pictures are often confidential and proprietary, much of the work seen by the general public has been his published magazine illustrations. But now Goodrich has released two books of his animation characters in conjunction with an exhibition in Paris at the Daniel Maghen Gallery. One is a book of new works on the theme of the old west. The other is a book of animation characters that he describes as "bad actors and ne'er do wells" who never made it into a final movie.
I get a big kick out of these drawings.
Note how Goodrich squeezes as much character into this tiny little wisp of a girl...
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| The crossed arms holding her books, the hunched posture of a prepubescent self-conscious girl shielding herself with her shoulders, the overbite, the spindly coltish legs, the tilt of her head, the thick glasses, goofy smile, the total absence of a chin... marvelous observations! |
... as he puts into this immense wall of a character:
It's a delight to see excellent work, usually cloaked behind nondisclosure agreements with movie studios, set loose in the free air to be openly enjoyed.
17 comments:
Awesome drawings.
Thanks David, these are great! Are they pencil?
Am I hallucinating or did this post have different images/text before?
MORAN-- agreed!
chris bennett-- Yes, these are all pencil. Goodrich has worked in other media as well. For years he did splendid magazine illustrations using colored pencil applied in an intensely layered manner that gave images a kind of saturated sheen. Very unusual in my experience. And of course he has worked in water based paints.
Robert-- Not sure what you mean. Occasionally I go back and correct a typo. This time I also added a caption below the drawing of the little girl to specify what I liked. But other than that, I don't switch things around or change the substance. If someone has a criticism or comment, I don't want to create a moving target by revising what I wrote.
Apologies, I was confusing this post with the older one about Goodrich to which you linked.
Thanks David. The layered colour pencil illustrations sound interesting - I'll see what I can find on what's left of the Google search engine...
chris bennett-- I think your best shot for seeing Goodrich's color pencil technique will be going to this post: https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2014/05/style.html
and looking at the closeups, particularly of the hockey player. From a distance these might look like paintings but the closeups show you that he went back and forth a hundred times, intensely digging in with different colored pencils.
Agreed, I love these drawings. Requiring that they work in three dimensions and are easy to animate, using simple forms, seems to have produced just the right constraints for Goodrich.
The quality of drawing and character design sensibility in these is a nice antidote to the previous post.
These designs are literally just basic shapes.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
Funny and true. And well-crafted. His New Yorker covers still uphold the older standards.
Have you tried designing these kinds of simple shape characters before? If you haven’t, it’s deceptively difficult. I think of it like writing a Beatles song: amateurs who are just starting to learn guitar and songwriting often assume that, because of the simple melodies and chord progressions, it will be easy. They assume hair metal is much more difficult.
Once you see the design solution, the design problem can appear trivial. It’s much more difficult to answer the problem than to check the answer (NP-hard). It’s easy to confuse understanding a solution with elegantly answering the problem. They are not the same.
Great example of the American school of graphical/animation character design, which pays a of of attention to silhouettes.
My comment was not intended as a slight towards the work shared in this post, but as an comment to Laurence John’s observation on the qualities of these works vs the qualities of the 2500+ year old works in the previous post.
As an aside, yes, I have designed for animation (in games).
EDIT: Please delete mye above post (imprecision + HTML-error).
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"These designs are literally just basic shapes."
My criticism of the work in the previous post wasn't that it was overly 'basic'. It was that it was naive. Whatever amount of simplification Goodrich might use, the sophistication of his drawing and eye for design is evident in so many places in the finished work (unlike naive work, where the unrefined, and ill-considered is evident everywhere you look).
That's very kind of you to find that post of yours David. Much appreciated!
Studying its illustrations I was struck by how Goodrich's particular manipulation of colour afforded by the coloured pencils carries a great deal of expressive commentary about the shapes and forms that contain it.
«Naive» is an interesting term here, especially when contrasted with «sophistication».
As a continuation of the earlier posts brief references to Plato, I am here reminded of the naivite of Socrates vs the sophistications of the sophists.
As singular works of art, the works featured in this posts are elegantly designed and delicate, but as production / concept art they also seem somewhat needlessly noodled with…or sophisticated, if you will. Not all ADs would approve.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
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