Hi, friends, my name is Hyrum Osmond, I was one of the supervising animators on Frozen and Olaf was my character And what I mean by that really, is that there were a team of amazing artists that all work together to really create this character.
And I was just fortunate enough to be to be able to lead that and help kind of define who Olaf is.
But today, what I want to do is actually teach you, show you how to draw Olaf I think would be fun.
So if you'd like to grab some paper and a pencil you don't need any sophisticated art supplies for this.
I'm just using the normal pencil and some paper and I'll go through kind of step by step how I draw Olaf.
And as I do so even kind of talk a little bit about how Olaf came to be.
The beginnings of Olaf and maybe a few fun little things about Olaf that maybe you didn't know.
Now as we do this, just have fun with it, we're not going for perfection, you can practice drawing Olaf later, for now just have fun and draw.
Okay, so let's move our camera to the paper and we'll get going.
Okay, I got all set up here.
The first thing I do when I draw Olaf is I start with the basic shapes of the character.
And you'll find that with most characters that you draw, it's really kind of finding those basic shapes to help guide you to the finished product.
So with Olaf, he of course has a lot of round shapes being a snowman.
And so we'll start with a circle.
And as you draw, you know, keep it light, because as we continue to draw we'll darken things in and get things looking better, but for now, let's keep it light and kind of just flow with the shapes here.
So there's my circle, almost like a little oval circle shape we're going to start with his head here.
And I'm going to use this circle to kind of guide me for how his head to kind of guide and shape what his head will look like.
And you'll see what I mean here in a second.
But I'm gonna take that circle the width of that circle and kind of help me create that kind of bulbous head of his So that's kind of how I started off and from there I'm going to use the circle again.
So we've kind of got this basic shape, egg like shape of Olaf which I love by the way.
Our head of visual development Bill Schwab, he did the designs for Olaf and I love the simplicity and that big Olaf that now very familiar Olaf egg shape head of his.
But anyway, so so we take that, that same circle we've drawn, and I'm going to use this top portion of the circle here to kind of help me place the crease from where his mouth is going to be.
And from that crease, I'm going to draw Olaf's mouth.
Again, not going for perfection because I just made a little mess up there.
Anyway, there's Olaf's mouth, just a little smile.
And then from there, I'm going to draw in Olaf's very familiar tooth And you can see I'm going to use the circle again to kind of guide the placement of that tooth you see the bottom arc of the circle's kind of where that tooth is going to line up.
Now a fun little fact about Olaf's tooth, When we were first developing Olaf, we weren't quite sure what material that tooth should've been made of and for a while there the tooth was actually made of it was like a glass or not glass but an ice block in his mouth.
Which was a fun idea, but ultimately it didn't quite look right.
And so we finally decided no, no, no, let's just go all snow and his, his tooth became snow.
All right, from here and you can see I'm just kind of making little adjustments, but you can kind of see oh look Olaf's head we're kind of seeing Olaf appear here.
And from there, we've got his mouth, got his tooth And now I'm gonna use this circle one more time to kind of help me guide where I want to place his nose.
I'm just going to very lightly just put sort of an oval shape right here.
We'll come back to this later, but that's kind of where I want Olaf's nose to be.
All right, so from there, I'm going to come up to the top of his head here, you see how his head's kind of this little arc up here.
I'm going to use that to kind of guide where I want his eyes to begin And Olaf's got those very cute, very big eyes.
And I'm going to start with there.
And there.
Yes.
Okay.
You can kind of, fill that in right there.
Okay, so we've got the beginnings of Olaf's eyes right there.
Okay.
Again we start seeing Olaf appear here.
Still got a lot more to do.
But now we've got his eyes kind of close to where we want them.
And then from there, we're going to stick those cute little brows of his right above those eyes.
Okay, so there's kind of his kind of the rough layout of his head.
Now I'm going to go through I'm going to clean up some things here.
You can kind of watch how I do that.
As I do that, I want to talk a little bit about how Olaf began.
See Olaf at the very beginning of Frozen, we had a few screenings where Olaf, he was a much different character than he ended up being.
In the beginning Olaf, he was a little bit more snarky, a little bit more sarcastic, a little bit louder.
And we kind of found in those screenings, you know what, there's just something wasn't quite right about that wasn't quite right about Olaf being that type of character.
And then, as the as the story progressed, as Frozen progressed, the writers, the story department kept describing Olaf with words like sweet, kind, full of joy, full of wonder, and just full of that unconditional love.
And he slowly evolved into this character that really sort of represented what the theme of the movie was really about.
And he sort of became this embodiment of love.
And I just love that and when that happened, he became a very different character.
And of course, of course with the addition of Josh Gad's voice which adds so much to him as a character.
He became what he is today and I love it, you know, Olaf, he makes us laugh.
He's silly, right? He's a funny little guy.
But because of that, because of his wonder and his love We also can connect with him in a very emotional way.
And I think there are not many characters that allow you to do that.
Okay, so we got his nose, got his head here all worked out.
Now, I'm gonna open his mouth a bit because Olaf, typically, he's very excited, right? Let's open that mouth.
So we just, it's just a few lines you just put down there opening his mouth.
And then just, I like to kind of fill in that mouth.
A little shading there, just a little shadow.
Just a smiley, smiley guy.
Now one other thing that tends to happen as we make these characters is sometimes these characters wind up looking like us.
I've been told that I look like Olaf a little bit.
And honestly I feel like that's because we spend so much time kind of staring at ourselves in the mirror, looking at our mouth shapes and to kind of create the mouth shapes for these characters, and I think that that probably kind of transfers over a little to the character So there he is, there's Olaf, now from here, you know, we got to get his cute little hair.
Cute little sticks.
And that's another fun thing.
We weren't quite sure what to do with his hair at the beginning.
I know there were lots of conversations with Olaf.
You know, maybe he should have grass growing off the top of his head, or for his brows.
we had some some silly little discussions like that, but I love where it ended up.
Just sticks, right? Just sticks and I think that's what's so fun about him He's just so simple.
All right.
So there's his head.
Let's move on to his body.
All right, so, Olaf again we're going to those basic shapes.
We're gonna put that circle in there for his upper portion of his body, but as you kind of noticed with Olaf his circles have little kind of squared edges, a little bit and then his bottom portion here, Just make a big circle.
And even that bottom portion is gonna have a little bit of that kind of those squared edges.
And then of course, we got to go in and put those cute little buttons cute little pieces of coal Now one fun, I like to share this story even though it embarrasses my son.
But one fun little thing about Olaf is when we were trying to decide, you know, to figure out how he moves is a very distinctive way that he moves as a character.
And as the, you know, again, going back as that story department was describing Olaf and they described him as full of energy and just full of wonder, sort of naive and silly and trusting.
The more they talked about him, the more I thought, you know, they're really kind of describing my son, you know, and at the time I had a I had a toddler, my second oldest boy, who really acted, behaved much like I kind of imagined Olaf would behave and so I took some videos of my son, I brought those videos in, and I showed them to the the animation crew as just sort of reference for how this, how this little guy should behave and move.
And there was always sort of a lift of energy to the way my son would walk and run and play.
and so we, we kind of used that as a reference to kind of define Olaf, so I always love to kind of share that.
All right, so we got cute little feet.
Let's give him a little ground here to just stand on.
And he's done right? Well, okay, let's let's give him some arms, shall we? Now, Olaf, I love this pose because Olaf again, he's just so joyful.
And I always kind of imagine him like you know, maybe, maybe he sees a friend.
Right? Or a squirrel in the forest.
Something very Olaf like that.
He's just like, “Oh hi!” “Hi friend!” And these hands, you know, they're just sticks and kind of squarish squares, little, little fingers.
You say “Oh, hi friend, how are you?” And then maybe You know what, let's get both those arms up there.
You can kind of put these little these little bending points in his arm.
That's a fun thing to talk about too.
So Olaf, if you notice, and maybe you did notice this.
But in the movies, he doesn't bend his arms very much.
He usually will keep them fairly straight.
Sometimes he does bend them and that's fine.
But most of the time he keeps them pretty straight.
There's actually a reason for that, it was intentional.
On the first Frozen, Wayne Unten one of the other supervisors had a thought he's like, you know, what if we, what if we kept Olaf's arms straight, almost like a toddler, kind of like a toddler does, you know when a toddler walks around and moves around, he's not bending his arms or he or she's not bending his arms too much.
He kind of keeps them straight to create kind of that sort of that toddler look.
And we thought, well if we keep Olaf's arms straight, and kind of play within that limitation, he might feel a little bit more toddler like.
And so we did those tests and wow, it was right on and it just feels it really really makes him feel sweet and toddler like, so that was very much intentional.
Okay, so there we are.
We got Olaf.
Looking good.
He's so happy, isn't he? Like “Hi friend!” And then Let's top this off with a little orange nose, shall we? Cute little orange nose All right friends.
So there you have it.
Now all of you who've been following along.
Very important, you should always sign your name, your work.
So I'm going to go down here, sign my name and call it good.
Thank you for following along.
I hope you enjoyed this.
I hope you learned some things about Olaf and keep drawing my friends.
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