Book Review: ROUGH DRAFT by Mike Yamada and Victoria Ying

Mike Yamada and his wife Victoria Ying have pretty impressive animation credits for a couple of young artists: He’s worked on Puss in Boots, Kung Fu Panda 2, How to Train Your Dragon, Flushed Away, Monsters vs. Aliens as well as a bunch of live-action films and she’s worked at Disney Animation on Tangled, Paperman, Wreck it Ralph and Frozen. So, when they write a book about Visual Development, it’s time to pay attention.
2011-2013 rough Draft: The Collected Art Demos of Mike Yamada and Victoria Ying ($20+shipping for the paperback version or $15 for the ebook) is a slim volume of only 46 pages that gives a great introduction to the field of Visual Development (Vis Dev in industry slang.) The book is split into two parts: Part One – Ideas and Part Two – Case Studies.
Part one gives a brief introduction to the world of Vis Dev including the many roles the Visual Development Artist plays in the early stages of an animated film, helping to create the “look” of the the film. There are sections of research, how to match the lighting of your world to the needs of the story, and a step by step look at their painting process.

Part Two follows the Vis Dev process from start to finish through three case studies taken from classes Yamada and Ying taught at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, California: Snow White set in Feudal Japan, Pinocchio set in Tibet and Peter Pan set in the South Seas. Seeing how the pair worked through each of their concepts, changed the design and developed the color scripts for the projects is really an eye opening experience and could be helpful to traditional artists as well as animators. I found the color scripting sections the most interesting, how the changing dominant colors in the sequences followed the progression of the story as well as how certain colors become identified with different characters. Although I'm not an animator, aspects this concept seems to be applicable to any sort of of illustration work, especially if you are working on multiple pieces to illustrate a book or story  (I just ran across this same concept in James Gurney's (Dinotopia) painting book Imaginative Realism. ) After reading and studying Ying's and Yamada's work, I definitely have a better feel for how to relate the colors associated with certain characters in my work with the appropriate feelings I want to evoke. And there is so much more: how to develop props and do set dressing, creating characters who seem live in the same world, and how incorporate parts of your reference pictures so that your work feels genuine without being a slave copy of the original.

If you are interested in animation and Vis Dev in particular, Rough Draft is great little book well worth the price (hey, the book is self-published so you are supporting some awesome artists.) For more of Yamada’s and Ying’s work, check out their blog site Extracurricular Activities – they update regularly with tips, product reviews and thoughts on being an artist.

If you are interested in further reading about Visual Development/ Production Design, check out Hans Bacher’s Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation (2007) which I will review in a future post.