Justin Milgate

I am always trying to improve my ability to communicate ideas through drawings, and gesture drawing has been a particular focus for me. Even as a 3D Animator, being able to quickly sketch poses and possible compositions is a huge help, so when I had the opportunity to attend an Analytical Gesture Drawing workshop by Andy Cung I took it and learned so much.

As a way to practice some of the principles discussed in the workshop, I decided to start studying the movements of baseball pitchers. Being a Dodger fan, it was easy to narrow down which pitchers to study first. Each pitcher has differences in the wind-up and delivery as well as different timing. This allowed me to develop my ability to capture unique motion in as few drawings as possible.

After completing a few studies, it was only natural to see how they would move. I used Photoshop to crop and align the drawings digitally and then different software to assign a length of time for each drawing to be held so that when viewed as a movie the drawings would match each pitcher’s particular timing.

The resulting clips are fun to watch and share and the entire process was a joy and source of encouragement for me. I have always been fascinated with animation as a medium and always like trying it in different ways. I’m sure I’ll be doing more in the future and hope to add to this collection soon.