I’ll try to update this part frequently, this area is for thoughts on some of the mental & technical problems I’m looking to overcome as I draw the human figure especially when animation in concerned. Any suggestions comments, disagreements, I would really like to know([email protected]). I’m a very curious person.
4-1-02 / ACTING
-I’ve been looking at
“Too Funny for Words(Disney’s greatest sight gags)” by Frank Thomas & Ollie
Johnson. One of the less talked about
animation books as oppose to Frank and Ollie other book, “The Illusion of
Life”. Anyhow, on p.100 of this book,
they talk about, “An important part of the act is the performers’s slow, blank,
helpless look at the audience, sharing his inner feelings with them.” The pictoral example is the scene where in
lady and the tramp, the two are sharing the strand of spaghetti, and it is very
clear on what Frank and Ollie talk about wit the blank, slow and helpless look
at the audience as they describe a thought process.
(4-3-02) / ACTING, an
except I received from Ed Hooks talking about Lasseter(teaches acting 4
animation)
-During the show, he stressed repeatedly how important it
is that animated characters in his movies display "true"
emotion. He cited Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, animators from whom
Lasseter first heard the term "thinking character". Johnston
and Thomas -- and now Lasseter -- understand that all human movement comes from
a thinking brain. And emotion in turn comes from thinking. Let's
examine that for a minute because I think it is profoundly correct and not
nearly as simple a concept as it might appear on the first glance.
When humans die, the moment of death is marked by the cessation of brain waves,
not by cessation of heart beat. We have the science to keep hearts
beating and bodies functioning for years and years, but once the brain stops,
that's the end of the road. Our thinking brain is in fact a defining
characteristic of our species.
But there is more to this picture. Dogs and cats and horses have brain
waves and thought patterns of a sort, and yet they do not satisfy as a
paradigm. Why not? The distinction between humans and lower animals is that we
humans have volitional consciousness. That means we can know a thing is
bad for us and still do it. A dog or cat or rabbit can't do that.
Short of scientists imposing a carefully designed conditioned reflex laboratory
situation, lower animals will operate on instinct, avoiding what nature tells
them is bad for them and pursuing that which gets them into the next
generation. For example, if you can get cigarette smoke into a raccoon,
the animal will never seek out that kind of thing again. Nature tells the
raccoon that cigarette smoke is not good for its life. A human can be
holding in his hands the Surgeon General's report on cigarettes and lung cancer
and still be puffing away while he reads it.
EMOTION
Now let's go to the next step by defining emotion, the other element
that Lasseter seeks in his work. Toward the start of each of my
Acting for Animators classes, I ask for student definitions of emotion.
What I usually get are synonyms. "It's a feeling", is the most
common response. "Yes,", I respond, "but what would you
write if you were preparing a new dictionary definition of the
word?" After a while, someone will finally start talking about
emotional "response", and that is getting close to the answer.
DEFINITION: An EMOTION is an automatic value response.
If you and I
both are shown the same photo of a gruesome murder scene, or a painting by
Massacio, we will each have our own personal emotional responses to what we
see. If you show a crime scene photo to a criminologist, he may just
study it carefully. If you show the same photo to me, I might head for
the bathroom. If you show it to a rabbi, he may just feel sad.
Emotion is a factor of a thinking brain. It has to do with the values we
hold. Take away the thinking, and you remove any possibility of emotion.
They go hand in hand.
As a practical matter, how does this help an animator? Well, in general,
thinking tends to lead to conclusions, and emotion tends to lead to
action. Define your character, get him thinking, and then he will have
emotional responses to whatever is going on -- leading him to physical
action. The audience relates to the feeling that is behind the
movement.
One way we are connected to one another is through empathy. We relate to
one another on an emotional level. When you feel bad, I feel bad.
If I am happy and dancing around the room, it is likely to make you feel happy
for me. An audience empathizes with emotion. It puts up with
thinking in order to get to the emotion. And to push this even further,
the audience will empathize with the SURVIVAL MECHANISMS in a character, as
they are expressed in emotion. What this means is that we humans act to
survive, and we will recognize this tendency in characters on the screen.
The first thing we do when we are born is try to live. The last thing we
do before we die is try to live. Think about that. It is the secret
of acting that Lasseter was hitting at. We think and so we
feel. Thinking and emotion serves our survival as a species.
(4-4-02) / GESTURE
-A
drawing is a strong drawing because you are depicting why it's different
-If
you can't draw - forget it, you're an actor w/o legs&arms.
-Good
drawing is not copying the surface, but understanding expression.
-accentuate
and suppress aspects of the modal character to make it more vivid
-in
order to have real movement in cartoons, you have to produce realism
-achive
believability, no realism
-communicate
masses, not lines
What is gesture when drawing for animation?
It
is:
-the
meaning
-meaningful
poses
-control
of subtle actions
-extreme
positions
-DOES
NOT suggest form, but expresses action, movement,
and
mood of the form
-skeletal
lines sometimes describe gestures.
all
these can describe gesture, try to keep these ideas in mind
when
doing your gestures.
You probably often hear the phrase,
"Don't copy the modal, but analyze it, and push the pose."
But how do you push the pose? Well
look at the modal, what is the meaning
of
the pose? What is he doing? Is he bending twisting to reach for
something
or
is he putting all his weight on 1 arm or 1 leg? Look at the pose, before you
draw
it. Study the pose before you draw
it. Make sure you know what you are
drawing
before you draw it. I'm guilty of this
myself, and it's rather hard not
to
copy the modal. You can't exagerate if
you don't know what he's doing.
I
went to a drawing seminar with Glen Vilppu(my
notes) and as he says if you find yourself drawing over the same line(aka.
hiccup), "stop take 3 looks, and 2 thinks"
squash
and stretch
If you don't analyze it and put meaning to the pose, your drawings are worthless.
(5-5-02) / BASIC APPROACHES & PRINCIPLES by Anson Jew
SIMPLIFY
When it gets right down to it, the only marks you need to learn to draw well
are letters of the alphabet: "I", "O", "C", and
"S". Anything you draw can be broken down into combinations of those
marks. How do you draw those marks better? Here are a few things that have
helped me:
1. Sketch those marks lightly. Bearing down hard overcommits you. Do NOT worry
about line quality or weighting at this stage.
2. Back off from the drawing a little. Concentrate on the big view. If you are
drawing your line slowly with your face right up to the paper, you are doing it
wrong.
3. Use big arcs. Learn to draw with your arm or wrist if possible, not your
fingers. Try gripping the pencil farther away from the tip. Three inches
between you fingers and the tip of the pencil is not too much. Never draw with
short, stubby pencils. Try using a pencil extender (even on brand new pencils).
Look at Shane's title page sketch in his Sketch section. Notice those little
overextended lines at the corners? You'd never ink those, but they happen
because Shane uses big arcs.
4. If you do the above things and feel like you are "losing control"
of your drawing, you are probably doing it right. The most common problem is
that people expect too much too early in the drawing. Details, line weight,
rendering are the VERY LAST things to do to a drawing. Give up some of that
control. Learn a little patience.
THINK SHAPE NOT LINE
1. You shouldn't even think about putting down any of the aformentioned marks
unless you know they are part of a shape. Figures are built up from
combinations of shapes. Know what shape you are contributing to before you lay
down a mark. Do not build a shape from a mark. Think of the shape first!
2. When I say that the figure is built up from combinations of shapes, I do NOT
mean posing a "sausage man" and adding muscles over it like many
comic book artists do. I mean that over time you will discover that in the
figure, certain simple shapes will predictibly appear in certain situations.
For example, a woman's entire leg, when foreshortened toward you often looks
almost like a perfect cone. Or when a woman lays on her side, her total body
shape looks similar to a sideways capital letter "B". In a different
pose, that same body shape becomes a guitar or vase or lower case
"B". If the foot is tucked into the buttocks, the same leg that
looked like a cone now looks like a rectangle (with an "S" in it).
This way of looking at things is much different than the "sausage
method", but only comes as a result of carefully and repeatedly observing
real life (life drawing comes in handy here).
3. Keep the shapes simple. I'm sure there's a mathematical definition of what constitutes
a "simple" shape versus a "complex" shape (for brevity's
sake lets just say Nevada is a simple shape, Texas is a complex shape), but
basically use simple shapes, and try to use as few shapes as possible in
the total drawing.
(5-11-02) / Force vs. Form by Ed Hooks
CRAFT NOTES
"Further Consideration of Force vs. Form"
Recently, I was re-reading a
transcript of a Don Graham class at the old Disney Studio. His subject
was the importance of animating force rather than animating mere forms.
He rightly pointed out that if you draw the form of a leg and then another
bunch of forms of legs, it might all flow together as a moving image, but it
will not stimulate the audience emotionally. To have that effect on an
audience, you must animate force. And force is most often something that
originates in the character's thinking and emotion.
Don Graham was a brilliant man, an ace in Walt's deck. I wish I had known
him, and I wish Disney Studios would publish all of his class notes. I am
told they are all residing in the Disney library in the Burbank studios.
If you know somebody that knows somebody with pull at Disney, you might pass
this particular newsletter along to him...PUL-EEEZE PUBLISH THE LECTURES!
Anyway, regarding force versus form, Graham said the correct thing about its
origin being in thinking, but he stopped too soon. And thinking in and of
itself is not enough for successful storytelling. You must also have
scene construction that includes obstacles, actions, objectives and negotiations.
As I mentioned in a previous newsletter, the bookends of human life are brain
waves -- i.e. thinking. Medical science can keep hearts and bodies alive
mechanically now, but when the brain stops, that's the end of the
party. This is more than a simple observation. It is a
profound connection between all humans, something that we all have in
common. It doesn't matter if we are talking about Mother Teresa, Osama
Ben Laden or Tom Cruise, we all come into the world the same way, and we exit
the same way. We are all part of the same family. Though we may
disagree with one another about the best ways to spend our time between
entrances and exits, we are hard wired by nature to recognize in one another
the very attempt to spend the time. And that attempt manifests
itself as the force that Graham was talking about. To
paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a body is just a body is just a body, even if it is
an inert one. The thing that causes us to pay attention to one another as
humans is force -- the way we go about living and spending the time.
Acting is doing!
Though all of us humans have thinking brains -- making us all part of the same
family -- the kind of thinking we do varies from person to person.
Because each of us is an individual product of our genes and environment
("nature vs. nurture") therefore, the key to successful character
animation is in understanding the character's particular sense of life and
personal style. Pluto and Mickey Mouse were both humanized animals,
with human-type brains. But Pluto's brain and style were more dog-like
than human. Mickey was a normal human boy in every way except his mouse
ears and disappearing tail. Pluto was always a dog. Once the
animators understood this, they were good to go. If Mickey Mouse had
gotten himself stuck on the flypaper the way that Pluto did in the famous
sequence, he would have handled the predicament altogether differently.
(Reminder to myself: One of these days, I must write about how and why we
humanize animals in animation. A dog in our U.S. culture is a pet and a
friend. But I visited Western Samoa some years ago, and in that culture
the dogs were viewed as oversized rats. The locals threw rocks at them
and were horrified when I wanted to feed the half-starved strays.)
THE THINKING CHARACTER IS NOT ENOUGH
It is not, however, enough to simply make a character think.
Thinking qua thinking is not inherently theatrical. Because
Disney's contribution to animation was the thinking character, some animators
figure if they can just make their character's appear to think, they are home
free. Not so. You can see people thinking all day long over at
the 7-11, and that doesn't make a good story, nor will people pay to watch
it. What you need for successful animation -- particularly feature
animation -- are thinking characters that express emotionally for a theatrical
purpose!
Walt Disney based his early features largely on fairy tales like "Snow
White", and those stories had obstacles built in, sort of like a
blueprint. He had only to apply thinking characters to the already-
conflict-charged story lines, and voila! Today's animators frequently
must invent scenes from whole cloth rather than mythic tales, so it is
necessary for them to understand classic Aristotelean scene construction --
actions, obstacles/conflict, objectives, empathy.
(5-28-02) / Animation advise/exercises by ILM&Pixar Animators.
How do I become a better animator?
“Let's see...anything that involves animation will help
you. Definitely try to do mechanics exercises...such
as making characters walk here and there...doing
things...picking up objects..walking
upstairs...anything creative you can come up with will
help to start with. Then, outside the computer...the
number one thing is...observation. Watch
everything...how everything moves...watch animated
films...watch people in different places, coffee
places, whatever...but watch how they talk...they
move...anything is going to be gold reference for us
animators. I hope that helps man.” By Carlos(ILM)
Well I'm not sure what the typical class teaches now so
forgive me if I'm just regurgitating what they've told you.
If you've mastered the bouncing ball and the flower sack
exercises you can move on, but walks are always good
to practice regardless of how good you think you are.
Walks are the basis of how to build character and that's
why there done. You may have done a walk
but have you done a real "character walk." A walk that
embodies the essence of who this character is and what
he or she represents. Walks, as said by Richard Williams
are the most difficult thing to accomplish and that's also
why you have to practice them.
That being said there are other things you can try as well.
I'm not sure what materials and equipment you have at your
disposal but I might suggest taking a sample of dialogue from
a show or movie. Preferably something with a range going
from sad to happy, or angry to reflective. Just something that
has a change and is entertaining. Always think in terms of
contrast. Animate a short piece to that.
If you don't have access to the necessary equipment for that
then there's always pantomime. Come up with a little bit of
business for a character to do. Again make sure it has some
range to it. No matter what you have the character doing realize
that they are a character and filled with emotions. This is what
makes your characters believable and come alive. You can move
them around all you want, but what your looking to inject is that
spark of life, that's what will make your animation stand out.
If your stuck on a character pick something from your favorite
comic (if you have one.) Just pick something you like because
you'll be spending lots of time with it.
good luck – ron zorman
(5-30-02) /
Gesture/ By Ed Hooks ML
CRAFT NOTES
"WHAT CAME FIRST? THE GESTURE OR THE EGG?"
For years in my workshops
I've been teaching that the gesture preceded the spoken word in human
evolution. It seems self-evident to me that we didn't spring out of a dust
cloud spouting Shakespeare. Now I discover that this view is actually
controversial among linguists. Some Big Thinkers, like Noam Chomsky,
would beg to differ with me evidently. There is a new book out entitled
"From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language" (Princeton University
Press) by Michael C. Corballis, that is attracting a lot of attention because
he is professing some of the same things I have been saying all this
time. Let me tell you, it is darned disconcerting to wake up one day and
find out that a long-held view is considered unorthodox. But I'm standing
by what I teach. Let me tell you why:
Nothing is more important to the contemporary animator than gestures. In
fact, if I could point to one single aspect of animation that is consistently
subject to improvement, it would be the use of gestures. It is not that
gestures are used incorrectly; it is that they are not generally used in an
innovative way. Facial animation is actually pretty sophisticated
nowadays, especially since Paul Ekman has contributed so much knowledge and
research to the field. But the face does not act alone! Many
animators seem not to know what to do with the rest of the body once they get
the face done, and so they sort of vamp with these generic poses. I strongly
contend that improvement in this arena of secondary animation will be a
hallmark of development in the next and more sophisticated wave of the art.
SOME RANDOM NOTES ON THE USE OF GESTURES:
1) A gesture is not simply an illustration of the spoken word. It speaks
of an inner emotional truth and can even work in juxtaposition to the spoken
word. Michael Chekhov ("Lessons for the Actor") taught the
Psychological Gesture, which is something I also teach in my workshops.
Actor Anthony Hopkins, for one, is a big proponent of the use of the
Psychological Gesture.
2) A gesture should not be equated with mime. Mime is what actors used
before talkies. Charlie Chaplin's early work had mimetic qualities
because he did not have words at his disposal.
3) A gesture is more
than simple physical movement or behavior. It is purposeful and has a
motivation. Biting ones fingernails or moving ones lips while one reads a
book is not a gesture; it is shadow movement.
4) A gesture can be used to create in the audience a complex emotional
reaction. The human sense of sight is many times more powerful than the
sense of hearing. Therefore, if you have your character gesture in a
particular way, it creates an impression that may well over-ride whatever the
character is actually saying.
5) Humans are
hard-wired to gesture. It appears to the observer odd and not-quite-right
when an actor, whether he be animated or live, does not gesture.
6) The gesture precedes the word. I was once hired to do a parody of
baseball great Joe Damaggio in a training film. I studied his old
Mister Coffee commercials and discovered that he consistently got gesture and
word reversed. He would look into the camera and say, "Let me tell
you what I think." -- and then he would tap his forehead to illustrate
where the thinking was taking place. Actually, the tapping would come
just slightly prior to, and overlapping, the line. Joe was nervous and
ill at ease in front of the camera, and so he did his gestures by the
numbers. Say the line, do the gesture....say the line, do the
gesture.... It was funny as hell once you saw what he was doing.
And so I adopted that as my hook into the parody. It was one of the most
successful short acting gigs I ever had. The client was roaring and
rolling on the floor with laughter.
7) Stage actors
learn early on that "acting has very little to do with words."
Same is true of animation. Animators involved in feature animation
receive the recorded lines of the script and then animate them, a procedure,
which invites an over-emphasis on the spoken line. I realize I lack
sophistication about this process, but isn't it true that, in early animation,
the animation preceded the word? I'm not sure where it got reversed, but
I'm not totally convinced it was a good thing from an acting
standpoint. Communication begins with impulse and gesture, not with
word.
Maybe it is just a useless academic debate about whether gestures preceded
words in evolution. One way or the other, we got to where we are today,
and the 21st century animator has the chore of balancing word with gesture in
animation. Well, looking five or seven years down the road, I am
convinced that artistic growth rests on a deeper understanding of the
correlation between physical and verbal communication. The expectations
of the movie-going audience have been raised to such a level that it would be
impossible for animators now to turn back or to falter.
(6-5-02) /
Picking a school
-My thoughts on choosing a school.
(6-6-02) /
Acting/ By Ed Hooks
-Another useful tip when considering emotions is that most
people
COVER them! You can sometimes convey the strongest emotion by having
the character trying NOT to show it. This is the type of thing you
see in more sophisticated feature animation, and I think we'll be
seeing more and more of it in the future. This is how you get
emotional complexity in a character. That, plus refining
correlations between facial expression and gestures.
(7-7-02) / Acting/ By Ed Hooks
"What Creates Laughter"
Walt Disney wrote a
now-famous letter to Don Graham in 1935, outlining the kind of training he
wanted the Disney animators to have. Number three on the list, after good
draftmanship and knowledge of character, was "Knowledge and appreciation
of acting". Amplifying, Walt explained that the Disney animator
"... should know what creates laughter (and) why do things appeal to
people as being funny." I think that dictum is as important
today as it was in 1935, and I'd like to take a quick run at it.
Stage actors learn that comedy is, basically, drama caffeinated. Drama
Plus. You can't make good comedy by simply trying to be
funny. If you think you're funny, there is a good chance the
audience will disagree. A good comedy moment, if played with lowered
stakes, ought to work on a dramatic level. The celebrated live
action director Mike Nichols, said in an interview I read a while back that
when he is directing a comedy, he let's the actors get all the laughing out of
the way at the first read-through of the script. Then he instructs them
to forget for a while that they are working on a comedy at all. He has
them first discover what is true, and then the comedy will take care of itself.
Consider for a moment my personal favorite animated comedy character, Wile E.
Coyote. This is a sick animal. He has one foot inside the
institution if you get my drift. This guy gets up every morning and
thinks about only one thing, namely getting the Roadrunner home for
dinner. He has no moderation whatever about it, which is what makes him
funny. On one level, a perpetually hungry coyote isn't funny at all,
right? It makes you want to leave him a dish of Alpo or something.
But when the animator ups the stakes and renders him so perpetually hungry that
he becomes obsessive for the bird, we in the audience enter the realm of
comedy!
Walter Kerr, the late New York Times drama critic, wrote a classic book
(it's out of print and well worth searching for) on this subject entitled
"Tragedy and Comedy". In it, he repeatedly correlates the fine
line between tragedy and comedy, pleasure and pain. He cites, for
example, the tragic figure Oedipus, who killed his own father and married his own
mother. When he discovered what he had done, he put out his own eyes and
banished himself from Thebes. Kerr observes that this is for sure
tragedy. Oedipus makes his way blindly out of town, blood streaming down
his cheeks, a miserable hulk of a human being. It's not funny. But,
if on his way out the town gates, he were to pass another guy coming
into town that has also killed his own father and married his own mother
and had put out his own eyes -- it would become comedy! One Oedipus is
tragic. Two Oedipus's are funny. The reason is that we laugh when
we cannot tolerate any more pain. We simply can't integrate or accept the
idea of two Oedipus's!
This is also why
we tend to hear sick jokes so soon after a national tragedy. People can't
integrate the pain, and so they laugh. I recall the day that John Kennedy
was assassinated. I was in the Air Force at the time, stationed in
Washington, D.C. When he was killed in Dallas, I was waiting at the
Andrews AFB to catch a plane to Florida. All the air traffic was grounded
on my end because Andrews is the presidential airport, and I was stuck there
until they brought his body back from Texas. Between the time the Air
Force One departed Dallas and the time it arrived in D.C., I heard the first
"dead Kennedy" joke, right there at the presidential terminal.
(Okay, because I know everybody will be asking me, I'll tell you the
joke. Question: 'What's Jackie bringing back from Dallas?' Answer: 'A Jack in
the Box'.) At the time, I was shocked at the bad taste of
such humor but, after studying comedy for some years, I have come to see how
that happened. The country was in shock, suffering with a pain so deep it
could not be fathomed -- and so some people, overcome with grief and fear,
resorted to jokes. I was standing there in that terminal with soldiers
after all, and this was their commander in chief that had just been
assassinated. In a sense, it was sadly understandable.
Empathy is the
key to eliciting laughter from an audience. You want the audience to
identify with what is funny on screen. This was Charlie Chaplin's great
contribution to comedy. He first came to the U.S. as a Keystone Kop but,
from the start, he was a lousy Kop. For the Kops, the humor was
slapstick. They slipped on banana peels, crashed into trees, whatever,
and that was the comedy. Chaplin slipped on the same banana peel and was
embarrassed by it! The audience empathizes with the embarrassment.
The humor is not in the slip; it is in the reaction. We humans love
to see ourselves imitated. It is fundamental to the way we learn how to
survive, and it has a name: mimesis. We take a particular pleasure
in seeing ourselves reflected on stage or on the screen, and that is another
key to comedy. Who among us has not slipped on the banana peel at one
time or another? We all are embarrassed, and that is the point of
empathy. And so we laugh.
Chuck Jones, in "Chuck Amuck", relays what he learned about comedy
from Tex Avery. He said, "animation is the art of timing, a truth
applicable as well to all comedy. And the most brilliant masters of
timing were Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Landdon - and Fred (Tex)
Avery." He was right of course that timing is an important aspect of
comedy, but he over-simplified things by suggesting that timing alone might
account for it. I've seen a lot of comedy with good timing but shallow
depth, and it doesn't resonate. Heck, the Keystone Kops had good timing,
but I just sit there and stare at the screen when they do their thing. On
the other hand, when Wile E. Coyote runs out of ground when chasing the bird,
discovering that there are about fifteen stories of air between him and the
hard ground, he sits there in the air looking first this way, then that way,
then at us. Then he rockets toward the ground. Cracks me up every
time. Yes, the timing is awesome, but it wouldn't work if we didn't
empathize with what it feels like to run out of ground under our feet.
This is a big
and important subject for animators, and I'll revisit it from time to time. One
thing for sure, though, that old guy Walt Disney could sure ask the right
questions! I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at some of those
Don Graham classes at the old Hyperion Studios. It must have been a heck
of a good time.
(8-11-02) /
Gravity/ By Ed Hooks
In response to reading the book, “Composing Pictures” by Don
Graham
The parts of the book that most caught my attention were the
sections
about gravity, graphic movement and, in particular, his analysis of
how our eye perceives things. That bit about thinking of the eye as a
fly that is flying around the room is really brilliant. His chapter
on the story board was also very interesting.
Mainly though, this book is so wonderful and yet is just slightly
off-topic for what I wish so much I could learn from Graham. I wish
he had more to say about acting, although I knew going in that he
would not.
The chapter on gravity has me thinking again about how to animate the
aging process. It is largely a factor of a negotiation with gravity.
Babies are totally at gravity's control, and then adults negotiate
the ability to walk erect, and then in old age, gravity starts
winning again. I believe that the word "grave" must somehow
come
from "gravity", in fact, but I can't prove it.
(1-20-03) / Drawing/
I went to the Mike Surrey(lion king animator 4 Timon) talk
at the tech musuem yesterday and although I was pestering him and he had to go,
I got some good reminding tips from him.
Go over 1 drawing like 20 times, thinking in terms of changing
individual part slightly, keeping what you like and discarding what you don’t,
whether it would be adding more twist or bend to the body to making a bigger
head or something to that extent. Then
compare your 1st one to your 20th, and you will have
yourself a very good modal.
Also reminded me about the contrast of curve vs. straight,
or a more general term, simple vs. complex, one side of the form would have a
nice simple rythmic motion, and the other side would have more complex and
overlapping actions…thus more contrast and more appealing to the eye.