Hey Dude, First Off Let Me Say Im A Massive Fan Of Your Crazy Creations And Hope To One Day Be As Good

Hey dude, first off let me say Im a massive fan of your crazy creations and hope to one day be as good as you on the wacky animation front.I was wondering about your drawing and animation style in 2D flash, what would you say has been most important to developing your style in both drawing and the animation? The one thing I keep reading about time and time again is life drawing, however your stuff is so off the wall and far away from reality Im not sure quite how important this is to you? cheers

Life drawing is a great thing to do, and if you have the option of doing it you probably should. But it's only useful if you apply what you learn there to how you normally draw. Life drawing itself isn't a useful practice, it's giving you an opportunity to USE a useful practice, which is studying and getting an understanding of whatever it is you want to draw. This is super important, whether you're drawing a human figure or not, regardless of how simple or unrealistic your art is.The way I see it, when you draw you're doing some combination of:1. Drawing something based on your own observations of what things actually look like. Not necessarily with a realistic outcome, but you looked at a real thing to work it out.2. Drawing a pre-established symbol of what a thing looks like. Either a way of drawing something that has evolved within art culture, or something that has been directly appropriated from another artist. Many of these have become "things" in their own right, like Mickey Mouse gloves or anime eyes.3. Drawing an abstract symbol, where you only know what it means from seeing its usage, like a love heart, or crosses in someone's eyes meaning they're dead, or all the letters you are reading right now.

(Look up Scott McCloud's "picture plane" or Charles Peirce's "Trichotomy of Signs" for people that have thought about this sort of thing a lot more.)And basically, unless you're relying entirely on that third type of drawing (which would be pretty rare), you're going to benefit from knowing what things actually look like.The first type of drawing benefits, obviously because you can draw realistic things when you want, but also so you can draw stylised things that aren't made from mashing other pre-existing styles together. You can look at a thing, decide what YOU like about it, and emphasise that. You can draw something instantly recognisable as what it is, without it looking like anyone else's drawing ever or having to be realistic.If you are unable to work this way, and make all your art by mashing together other people's designs, then I think it's actually impossible for you to ever be a better draughtsman than the artists you're borrowing from.

The second type of drawing benefits from observation and understanding as well. Firstly, because if you're playing around with an 'established way of drawing something', you're playing around with someone else's observations. And if you're ever going to draw it as well as the first person, you need to understand what the underlying observations are, otherwise you will lose the essence and it'll look a bit bad, for all the same reasons that a traced image by a 10 year old looks a bit bad.And Secondly, because sometimes you're gonna have to use the symbol in a way it hasn't been used before. For example, you might have a cartoony way of drawing hands that you picked up from somewhere, and then you find you have to draw those hands holding scissors. Your life will be so much easier at this point if you understand how to construct a real hand, so you can translate that to your cartoon hand. This sort of thing is especially useful in animation, because you constantly have to draw things from unexpected and annoying angles while they're in motion, and when you're working with story you'll find yourself having to draw who knows what, as opposed to exclusively what looks nice. Comic artists would of course have that issue as well.Symbols are limited, and when the symbol you need doesn't exist, you need to turn to the real thing. And if you don't fully understand the real thing, then you're going to copy it badly, like when you try to copy the noises of someone speaking a language you don't know. Anyone who actually speaks the language would go "lol what are you doing".