Let’s make a rubber hose animation!
One of the most important parts is the style of the character art before it even moves.
Take a look at some of the design elements common to those good old school characters.
easy shapes for bodies, like circles humans may have more complex bodies
humans have very caricatured head shapes curves instead of sharp points
simplify, simplify, simplify
You can see my people sketches are getting close, but not quite there yet.
You’ll have to draw your character a couple of times to get used to the style, and try
different ways of drawing body parts until they look like they belong in the 30’s.
Over here I’ve done the show mascot, Scribbles, in rubber hose style.
Look at how easy it is to go too far away from the style.
Adding the hair tuft immediately makes the toon too modern, as does the triangular shaped
nose versus a circle.
Once you have a character design, it’s time to start animating.
You don’t get to be lazy with rubber hose animation, because if you truly want to use
the style you have to draw each picture by hand.
No puppets and no tweens.
I mean, you can cheat if you want but you’re going to get Night in the Woods instead of
Cuphead.
Start with something simple like a looping bounce.
Rubber hose characters are usually bouncing to the music.
Begin by drawing the character at the top of the bounce.
Now draw the character at the bottom of the bounce.
Copy the first picture and paste it to the end.
Expand your bounce frames to where you like the timing of it.
Now, create an empty frame halfway between the top of the bounce and the bottom of the
bounce.
Draw the middle position.
Copy your drawing and paste it in the middle of the upward movement to complete the cycle.
With only three drawings you can make a rubber hose loop.
It’s easy to change up the timing a bit.
To make the loop super smooth, draw the drawing halfway between each of these poses.
That means in the end you’ll have five pictures for the loop.
Even if you are not making a loop, use the method I just explained for drawing actions.
Draw the first key pose.
Draw the next key pose.
Then start making pictures in between those poses to connect them.
You can see how it works in this Flip the Frog cartoon.
Pose.
Move to next pose.
Stop.
Moves to next pose.
Stop.
And on and on and on.
A note for experienced animators - rubber hose animations don’t use much easing.
Spacing is fairly linear even during crazy movements.
To make up for no easing, everything is animated on ones and characters stop for three frames
at resting positions before moving on.
So those are basics, but the great thing about rubber hose animation is how trippy it is.
It focuses heavily on visual gags and silly wriggling noodle-ness.
Let’s make a shocked expression.
Draw an exaggerated pose.
I’m going to do the heart pounding out of the chest bit.
You can do bug eyes, flailing arms and legs, all sorts of crazy things.
Do a slightly different redraw of that same position.
Loop those two pictures and you have the comical rubber hose surprise effect.
Next take your default art and draw another frame getting ready to move into the extreme
pose you just made.
Add one in between frame.
Here’s the animation so far.
Feel free to keep going from here.
While you’re drawing, keep in mind the following tips about the rubber hose animation technique:
No smear frames.
While spin lines existed, smear frames weren’t invented until the 40’s.
No subtle movements or acting.
Use big, exaggerated actions.
Everything flows with lots of in betweens.
For lip sync, VERY articulate mouths, wide open circles, smooth movements between mouth
shapes.
Of course sometimes there’s no lip sync at all.
Be crazy.
Next let’s do finishing work to the bounce cycle.
The character’s outline should be slightly thicker than any detail lines.
In this case you do want to include any main body pieces in the thicker line, even if they
are inside the character.
If you’ve already drawn your character, you can go around the main lines again with
a thicker brush.
In my case I’m starting with a sketch, so I’ll do the thick outline and use the thin
one wherever it’s needed.
Next add color, or stick to grayscale.
For maximum authenticity, don’t use gradient fills, only solid fills.
Every area of color should be surrounded by a black outline.
Add a background.
Ideally you would make the background by hand with watercolor or acrylic paint.
I slapped in an old digital painting.
Tweak the color settings a bit.
Add a shadow.
For the final step, the problem with drawing digitally like this is the line texture of
an inked paper drawing is, well, a bit more textured.
So to roughen up the animation apply a film grain texture over the animation.
You might have to skip this step if you only use drawing programs and don’t have video
editing software.
Choose multiply or overlay as your blending mode, depending on the feel you want.
That’s how you make rubber hose animation.
If you’re interested in more animation tutorials, browse through the links below or visit the
Scribble Kibble website.
Have fun drawing!