Drawing for Animation: Building an Animation-Ready Character From the Ground Up

Most people start their animation careers or hobbies thinking they'll produce high-quality, fully-detailed animation singlehandedly, right down to animating every last strand of hair and every tiny, glistening drop of rain.

Then we find out how many frames of that we have to draw per second and, no matter how much software might make things a bit easier, we start thinking with a little more sense.

While minutely detailed animation is beautiful and can be done by studios employing large teams of animators (or just a few really determined single or group animators with a lot of time on their hands), for every day animation it's usually easier to draw characters simplified to convey style and detail with minimal use of lines, highlights, shadows, or tiny detailing - allowing for more effective, efficient animation. Some like to take a detailed drawing and then render it down into something more simple to create an animated character design; when I'm working on a new character, sometimes I like to just start from scratch and build an animation-ready character from the ground up.

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