Walt Stanchfield (1919-2000) was an artist who taught life drawing classes for animators with a special emphasis on gesture drawing.

For each weekly class session, he wrote informal handouts to emphasize the theme of the current class session, to comment on work done in the previous class, or discuss whatever topic struck his fancy. Over a period of years, these notes were lovingly shared, studied, and treasured by animation students everywhere.

Mr. Stanchfield personally gave copies of his collection to interested students, and was happy to see them distributed. According to many people who were lucky enough to study under him, he wanted to publish them as a book. Reportedly, the studio did not pursue this opportunity due to the difficulty of obtaining copyrights for the student drawings.

The goal of this project is to imagine the book that Walt Stanchfield might have written: Gesture Drawing for Animation. It is based on the first 60 handouts that are shared on the www.animationmeat.com website (as that site has numbered them). Walt Stanchfield did not present his topics in any particular order, which suited the ongoing nature of the classes. Walt's handouts are like individual frames of animation -- some are extremes, some are inbetweens, some are even cleanups. As I was reading the notes and trying to absorb as much as I could, I thought I might understand them better if it were all laid out in sequence, with basic topics followed by more complex ideas. I wanted to see his ideas grouped by subject so I could compare the ideas. In other words, I wanted the topics to be arranged like a normal book. So I've re-arranged bits and pieces from the handouts into cohesive chapters, while taking the liberty to eliminate redundancy and make minor edits just as a book editor would. I hope you enjoy it and benefit from it as much as I have putting it together. -- Leo Brodie

Click Here, Download Gesture Drawing for Animation by Walt Stanchfield

Edited by Leo Brodie.

Download the entire book as a single PDF file.

Or download the same book as a series of PDF files:

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