Hi, my name is Mark Henn.
I've been an animator for the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios for almost 40 years now, amongst many of the characters that I've had the opportunity to animate, many of them were princesses.
And the very first princess I had the opportunity to animate was a young lady by the name of Ariel.
And that's who we're going to draw today.
So come along, and let's draw Ariel.
Okay, the very first thing that we want to do and for many of our characters is to start with a ball.
Or a circle, it’s going to look like a circle, but in my mind's eye, it's round like a ball.
So I'm thinking of the volume.
It's not just simply a round circle on a piece of paper, it's a round object and this represents the character's head or skull.
And in this case, with a human, it's definitely you know, the skull of the character, and I'm just going to put myself a little line here which again thinking volumetrically, thinking round is going to, in my mind, give me kind of the middle of where this is.
So it's a slight three quarter turn with this round ball.
This represents Ariel's head.
Now we're going to add her cheeks, and her chin and her jaw.
So that's going to come down here and you'll notice that as I'm drawing, I'm kind of bouncing all over the place, just putting marks down, nothing I put down, you know is you know perfect the first time out.
Artists like to feel their way through a drawing.
And so you'll see artists constantly bouncing around, feeling their way through maybe making several strokes like I'm doing here trying to find the right shape and refining that.
So now we've got her head basically enclosed.
Her head and skull, cheeks, chin, and kind of roughly indicate where her neck’s going to come off here like that.
Okay, and now the next thing it's really critical are her eyes and her eyes are quite large.
So we can use kind of where the bottom of this ball is and use that as kind of an eye line to help us.
So we're going to go ahead and just rough in where her eyes would be.
And they would be obviously on opposite sides of this halfway point on the ball, so we're going to kind of do this like that.
And again, just very loosely lightly sketching in, in her eyes to give me an idea.
It's all about relationships you know how far apart are our eyes, how you know high in the forehead are her eyes, all those kind of things come into play.
The next thing we want to look at her eyebrows.
They're gonna play an important part so they fit right over your eyes, just as you, yours do at home can look in a mirror and you'll see that your eyebrows are right over your eyes like that.
But in this case with her left eyebrow screen, right, this is going to become important in terms of creating a graphic image for her in terms of the placement of where her nose is.
So this, we're going to kind of bring this line down here to which would be the top or the bridge of her nose.
Bring it down here like this.
I'm just going to kind of rough in where I think her nostrils would be.
And this triangular relationship is very critical because then that tells me where to put her mouth and placement and proper placement her nose into her eyes and everything.
So now that we have her nose kind of roughed in here, and we can put her with a big smile.
Again, we're just gonna, I'm just kind of roughing it in very lightly, very loosely.
Always have my eraser handy don't go anywhere without my eraser.
Because you make adjustments, you're constantly making adjustments.
And Ariel, of course has a really nice big smile like this kind of indicating where teeth are, where her bottom lip is.
Where her top lips is.
Okay, so now we've got kind of her face roughly blocked in.
I was doing a lecture once and a drawing demo with a group at a college, and I got this far and I asked the college, the audience I said, “Who do you think I'm doing now?” “Who do you think I'm drawing? Which character is this?” And they kept throwing up all different answers: Jasmine, Belle, a bunch of different answers until I did this one thing.
And as soon as I did that, there was no question as to who this character is.
And besides her fins, her flippers, Ariel's most distinguished physical attribute is her hair.
So as soon as I put that big swooping bangs on there, everybody knew who I was drawing.
Right now what I’m doing was just going back into the eyes, and just kind of roughing in the shapes of the eyes.
The iris, the pupil, and then the littlest mark, in the upper corner here will be the highlight.
So again, I'm just kind of bouncing all over.
And just starting to indicate her eyelashes.
And as you can see, one of the things I did when I added her hair was actually go a little further than where the original drawing for the circle for the skull is.
And that's because hair has thickness.
And so, while this just gives me a basic idea of the first circular drawing I did, now that I've added her hair, I wanted to give her a nice, thick, full head of hair that we all know she has.
So I'm just going to kind of bring it down like this.
We've added her neck here, added a little bit of a sideburn on her.
We've indicated here where her ear fits in.
And it's okay, you can see here that I've let her bangs cover up her part of her right eyebrow, which is perfectly fine.
So all we have to do is darken up the part that’s sticking out from underneath the bangs.
Her left eyebrow is going to be left visible like this.
And just before we finish, we will take an eraser, if you have one, and just kind of lightly remove some of these underdrawings so it doesn't look quite so funny.
All right, so going back to the eyes, I said, I just roughed in the iris which is the outer band, and the pupil which is the inner circle.
And then the tiniest is is the highlight.
So you can kind of shade that in as one color for the iris and then a darker darker shade darker color for her pupil, which is the inner inner circle there and then leave the highlight as the lightest color, the whitest.
And then we'll come back And kind of suggest the fold where her her eyelids are as they fold up into her head here.
Kind of reinforce where the eyes set in the head here.
This line here on this side of the cheek which is visible is very, very important.
We can actually too, shade in underneath the swoop of her bangs here.
We can indicate that space up underneath underneath her bangs here.
And these extra little swoopy lines lines are just suggestions that make a graphic statement that her hair is hair.
We don't need to worry about, obviously, drawing every single strand of hair on a character like this.
But we just, But just with a few strokes, make a suggestion that it’s hair like that.
So let me grab my eraser now.
And we can go in and start removing some of these under underdrawings or construction drawings, just kind of lightly rubbing some of those down including her eyebrow that's underneath her hair.
and including this little center line here.
Just take those, knock those down a little bit.
That'll kind of help soften things up a little bit.
And we'll just come back to her mouth here, and make sure, put a little darker corner there to suggest that the the teeth are going, are curved, again thinking volumetrically.
those teeth curve and go back in and around her jaw.
Like that.
And if you want you can kind of sketch in a color for her lips.
Just to kind of differentiate that from her teeth.
Okay, so we're going to just double check here, just check a couple of adjustments.
She is shaping up here I think.
Looking pretty good.
And there we are just about there.
And there my friends, is Ariel! And I hope you've enjoyed following along and drawing along if you had paper and pencil, but my first princess in a long line of princesses that I've animated: Miss Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
Thank you for watching.
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