Best Types Of Qualities and Skills In Art and Animation

 

What I imagine to do when making drawings and films is the best qualities and skills that make art and animation timeless and loved.

I've talked countless about what inspires me but in this post I will breakdown all of my elements. 

1 - Good Character Design And Expression

I'm impressed by alot of unique and influential animated expressions, characters like The Hungry Wolf, Brer Fox, and Prince John are characters with stellar expressions and are extremely well-drawn, it helps to make them more entertaining to the audience, while I don't mind less-menacing and more cutesy characters, these characters are important and useful for a more intense and complicated approach. 

When I was a kid, I always thought these designs were the hardest thing to ever draw, but I'm already mastering drawing these types of shapes and models myself.

Brer Fox is a brilliant character, his entire personality and design is inventive and masterful, you can tell I'm highly influenced by these drawings because they feel lively mixed with witty.

When I create a character, the main cast has to be characters that are easy to recognize and are memorable and simple. These are my 6 choices.

Each of the characters have different personalities. The majority of franchises I experienced mostly seen on TV and films do this too. 

My major problem is to not make the characters have modern tastes and annoying characteristics. 

Most of my characters are inspired by classic talents like for example Ox Fisher, is Billy Gilbert and Mike The Dog is Tom mixed with Pluto.

 

My characters have already had model sheets and list of expressions which is highly important if you want to move your characters in exaggerated ways.

2 - Gags/Slapstick

I was always irritated when somebody said that a cartoon was stealing gags from Tex Avery cartoons because I dreamt making cartoons like Avery but maybe that's not consistently the case, but it kinda does matter to me.

Gags matter in cartoons and can be more comedic than just pleasurable. 

The signs and sucker lollipop bits in Tex Avery's cartoons always caught me off guard because of how relatable the humor is. There was also a time when Disney animated shorts were full of creative gags, there was this one bit in a Donald Duck cartoon called Put-Put Troubles where Donald crosses a sandbar and when zooming rapidly, it opens like a zipper. It's such a fantastic gag that it made the cartoon more amusing.

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In terms of slapstick, something as funny likewise Tom and Jerry, and Three Stooges are proven examples, the sound effect department with these following franchises will always make me laugh. 

I'm willing to do the same, while not everything should be filled to the brim with hilarity in my personal opinion, it is useful and whenever it gets boring, it has to get better or else it'll become really dull and unwatchable.

3 - Storyboards

Storyboards are great.

I always thought that in most films they had scripts to follow, maybe that's not always the case as storyboards help make these films more understandable. 

Sometimes in aspects they would color these scenes in to make it more amusing. 

I really love this stuff, because it's pretty much the entire film but only scribbles and words. It's like a graphic novel almost.

I made some of my own storyboards. 

4 - Color Palettes

In my personal opinion, colors are the most important rule not just in animation, but in general. It's a style of artistry that is loved by everyone, it's the most powerful tool.

In mostly classic films, they're was always such a unique set of palettes used in different settings and it made for a more comforting experience.

I don't know why but today, everything has to look dry and gloomy as possible or otherwise standard colors that are cheap and normalized. 

Something like a centuries-old painting or any of the old animated film background artists have a more wider scale of realism and believabilty. 

If you wanna know what really hits me in terms of background and atmosphere, look into One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Maxfield Parrish.

While I'm necessarily more into drawing characters designs and not a total master of layouts and scenery, I do understand where I'm coming from when trying to draw and make something look nice as possible.

It's easy to tell where these characters take place, and how they interact in that certain circumstance.

5 - Actual Adventure

Pulling into another world always makes me feel excited because you never would allow to seek into it in real life, that's what I like about shows I grew up with, in most cases every episode or premise from one of my favorite shows has something to do with adventure and variety of stories. Whether it would be something like someone visiting the planet Jupiter, experiencing what the world could look like in the year 3000, riding on a camel in a dry hot desert, you name it, it can all be easy to watch stuff like that in true cinema fashion.

6 - Dancing/Music

I'm all for music and dancing, I literally go on the media and 80% of the time is just listening to music I like, there's also a wide section of impressive and flawless bits of choreography, whether a song I like or truly dislike, you cannot go wrong with a group of people dancing, it always good fun. 

7 - Something Like This

Characters with an expression like this and quick repeated frames of animation are really stunning to me. The scene with The Headless Horseman and Ichabod is some of the most flawless bits of dark cinematography I ever seen in my life, the whole film is a masterpiece in of itself.

I also think it's done well in other scenes, more similar to the train sequence in Wind Of The Willows. 

There's nothing wrong than a good wild chase here and there. Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes are masters of that as well, and hire really great animators to do the trick like Woolie Reitherman, and Ken Muse. 

That not only goes for animators that are ultimate masters with chases and wacky takes, there's alot of animators I admire that are expressive and genuinely talented.

Ward Kimball, Ken Muse, Ed Love, Walt Clinton, Hal King, Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Glen Keane, John Sibley, Milt Kahl, Bill Justice, Preston Blair, and Bill Roberts are among my favorites and are drawn to me the most just by the movement and character actions. 

I have discussed many of these animators in the past, I keep on researching which animator influences me the most almost all the time so what you've seen in previous posts, I haven't mentioned too much than with this post just letting you know.