Just Have Fun!

Sometimes you have to remember to just have fun!

Attitude, Design and Silhouette

Don Bluth's 3 key ingredients to making a good drawing.

Represent Something More Than Just a Cartoon!

Another great thought of the day from Don Bluth's Seminar this week. Make your drawings represent something, a feeling, an emotion, an idea, something more than just a cartoon!


(click to enlarge)

Preplanning vs Improv

Lately I've been debating at least in my own head about whether it's better to go with your first instinct and the power of the original idea or to sit down and calculate what you want you really want out of an image. With spontaneity you might miss out on a really great fleshed out idea. You could be spending hours on hours on an idea that just isn't as good as if you would have really worked out every detail before starting on the final version. However you can really loose a lot of inspiration, looseness, fun and carefree feeling to an image if you over work it. Alas, I do not have an answer yet myself. I'd love to know what your thoughts are. As of right now I have a couple projects that I'm working on that are pretty planned out and a bit more fully thought through, and a few that are just, here's an idea, here's some paper, let's go. I suppose it's finding some sort of happy medium.

Exaggerate and Make Them See It!

Great advice from Don Bluth today! Realism doesn't always work, and details sometimes pull you away from the focus.. so exaggerate and make them (the audience) see it!

Too Late Update!

Time seemed to really fly by today!

Here's a couple great videos to watch

A music video featuring the animation styles of Miyazaki!


and a great little student film I stumbled across today over at cartoonbrew.

'Manfred' an animated short by Arjen Klaverstijn from Arjen Klaverstijn on Vimeo.