(cheerful music)
- Hi, my name's Steve Thompson,
I'm an artist for the Walt Disney Company,
and today we are going to be learning
how to draw Pocahontas.
So let's get started on the first step.
Gonna start off with this kind of mask-like shape.
I usually start off with the ball shape,
which helps dictate the shape of the head.
(gentle music)
But she's such a graphic character
that it really makes more sense, to me,
to start with the overall head shape all at once.
Her eyes sit quite a bit higher on her head,
and her eyes sit at an angle,
so that's all a starting point for me.
She's got fairly small eyes
that sit directly on these angles
coming off of the cheekbones.
So I'm just gonna quickly block in these shapes,
and we're gonna have her looking off to the side.
I'm using guidelines to show me where the eyes sit,
and also approximately where the center of this shape is.
Since she's turned slightly away from us,
her center line is a little bit further off to the side.
And I always start with the eyes, which naturally lead me to
the eyebrows just above them.
From there I go to the nose.
Form this angle she doesn't have a very pronounced nose.
You might just see one nostril,
an indication of the side of her nose.
Pocahontas has a really full upper lip,
and it's also very angular.
I always start with the tip,
which starts right under the nose,
and bring it down on either side.
One of the things I really like about Pocahontas,
she's a little bit more of a serious character.
She's really protective of her family
and her friends and her land,
but she's still open to new people and new ideas.
And there's so much of that reflected in her expression.
This head shape leads me right into the neck line.
Pocahontas has a nice, long neck.
Pocahontas's hair is also quite angular
and lays much closer to her head.
It also blows in the wind.
Keep some of these sharper angles closer to the head,
and as the hair is blowing, can soften towards.
I always like to frame Pocahontas with her necklace,
which is also very angular, as you notice.
Think I'll have her hair come down
and blow in front of her as well.
So this is the rough sketch.
It's starting to look quite a bit like her.
I know where I need to take it in the next phase.
But very quickly, that's Pocahontas.
The second stage will be filling in a little bit more
of the character details.
I've noticed things that maybe I wanna change with her,
but I'm pretty happy with where her eyes are.
Again, I'm never losing sight of these construction lines,
because even at this stage it helps me keep things
in place and where they should be.
But I maybe drew her eyebrows a little,
maybe a little too serious,
so I'm gonna just go ahead and make a slight change,
just to soften, just to soften her expression a little bit.
Maybe I wanna give her just a little hint of a smile.
And I think just the subtle upturn of this
corner of her mouth,
a slight adjustment to eyebrows,
can make all the difference.
It's not that I made a mistake in the first time,
it's just I'm noticing things the second time around
that I wanna make little changes to.
This is the same process that
the animators went through in making the film.
Start off with a really rough, really rough sketch,
just to kind of mark down where the character was
in the scene, action, or what they were doing,
and then the animator goes back in and really ties down,
ties down the character which
just means like figuring out what is that expression,
and the last round I wasn't quite sure.
In this round I knew I wanted to just soften her
ever so slightly.
A little less serious.
I feel like it's at this stage
that the character really comes to life.
In the last round, where it was just shapes,
I'm almost thinking about it like that, where,
I feel like, all of a sudden now,
for the first time I'm seeing this character
appear on paper,
almost like she's stopping by to say hello.
It's like they were there all along somewhere
and were waiting for you
to come with your magic pencil.
I'm just blocking in her dress,
maybe the fringe is blowing in the same direction as her,
as the hair.
It's really windy today, so I'm gonna
bring this long hair right down in front of her.
Fun thing with Pocahontas's hair,
it's almost like a character in itself.
At least that's how I look at it.
And so there really are no mistakes here.
Sometimes I add, just to really sell it,
maybe just add a couple leaves blowing behind her.
Just really feels right for the character,
it's almost like capturing a little story moment.
So that's stage two.
For the third and final stage,
we're gonna just take this and clean it up a little bit.
I'm actually gonna start off with a kneaded eraser,
and I don't wanna get rid of all this work that we just did,
I just want to kind of lightly erase a little bit of it.
But I can go back over this with a graphite pencil.
Luckily, the bulk of the work was all done
in that last stage.
We're really just putting a bit of a finer,
more permanent line.
You can add little bits of shadow with the pencil.
I like to go really dark on areas
that I wanna highlight.
Pocahontas's eyes are really intense,
so I'm gonna make these really dark.
I think when I'm drawing this I'm
imagining that very first scene where she
first meets John Smith,
and she doesn't quite know what to make of him.
But again, she's not opposed to learning more about him.
So there's a lot of seriousness in her eyes,
but she's still a fun, playful character.
I called it a cleaned-up drawing,
and you can make it as clean as you'd like it to be.
For example, you don't have to go over this same drawing
and keep some of these construction lines.
You could do it on an entirely new sheet of paper.
But there's something that I like,
there's something that I like about seeing
the thought process.
'Cause much like a drawing
helps bring these characters to life,
I feel like seeing some of that thought and work
still on the paper gives the drawing itself
its own life.
In a fun fact, when you're watching Pocahontas next time,
note that it took a team of 55 animators and artists
to help bring this character to life,
whether it was her design or animation.
There's a lead animator,
but it's the job of everyone else to draw her
almost exactly the same,
which is where some of these tips came from,
in order to keep her looking the way we all know and love
when we see her on the screen.
And I know during the production of Pocahontas,
as well as most animated films,
the voice actors are always cast before animation begins.
So the animators'll often sit in on voice recording sessions
and take visual cues from the actor or actress.
They might pick up on interesting mannerisms they have,
mouth shapes if they're talking,
the way their eyes squint during certain expressions,
and it's all taken into consideration
when coming up with the final design.
So I know it can be really cool.
Once these characters start really coming to life,
a lot of times the actors will
mention that they actually see themselves in the character,
which is really cool.
And there we have Pocahontas.
I hope you enjoyed drawing her as much as I did,
and hope to see you next time.