Walk this way!

Hi everyone! i took me a little while, but as promised here's the tutorial on a walk. It took me some time to get this one done for ya'll, i started teaching at CalArts this week. It's been a fun so far, but a lot of work and prep time. It's only helpful really. It forces you to make sure that what you think is right is really right. Cuz if you show them how to do something wrong then it'll come back to bite you in the butt later.
anyway, i chose a natural relaxed sort of walk to do for you guys. There are more than one method for planning a walk but the one that seems to work best for me is starting with your contact poses (key number 1 and 13). It's a dynamic way to start you walk. Starting with the "down" or the "up" is difficult and an akward way to start a walk. Art Babbit did it that way, and it worked for him but i find that for me the contact is much easier to understand. The second thing to think about is your beats and tempo. Mark on your x-sheet how fast you think he/she should be going. generally one step on a relaxed walk is 12 frames long. Which is more difficult to do because it means trickier charts. but we want what's best right? If you have less time than you'd like, you could put the walk on 16's so you could use 2's but then your walk is going to become a bit labored looking.
So anyway, I start with the contact drawings... you can either then put in the down or the up drawing. I find that i like to put the down in first... not sure why, maybe cuz i feel like i need to see that weight down first before i can do the up. anyway, once your up's and downs are in (key's 4 and 10) then you put your break down inbetween 4 and 10. This is KEY! it's ALL in the breakdowns! you can change everything in your walk by simply altering your break down, for good or worse. in this case i played it naturally. I tend to treat that breakdown drawing like a 3rd favoring the up. ya know? It gives more time in the up, and less time on the down which gives weight to the character.

Now the tricky part about walks is that you have 2 sets of charts. Your horizontal path and your vertical. Your Horizontal, meaning the distance length wise he walks should always be even. 100 percent! Even steven...
But your vertical charts are quite different... you can check out how these charts parrallel the drawing, but note that the last inbetween in a slow in or slow out is always on a 3rd in this case. As i've said before this isn't necessarily always the way it needs to be, but when your stopping and starting constantly like you are in a walk this IS the way to go. The reasoning for the 3rds is because if you put it as an even you would have even space inbetween your second to last inbetween and your key. That's very very bad when you are trying to convey weight.

Well, i hope that satisfy's every for a little while! I'm having fun doing these so i hope you all are still enjoying reading them. what i gave you today is more a template... because obviously there's a whole other element to walks that i DID NOT cover and that's character. This is a base template of understanding in which YOU need to caricature off of once you understand it. It's like, Picasso didn't start doing abstract (essentially caricature) until he knew how to accurate draw things. same is true here.