Indy Cartoony Doodles

For the past four weeks I've been trying to find "my style." Personally, I feel I've been working way too hard. I kept thinking the whole time, "okay, I can't let it look Disney-ish. Can't let it look Disney-ish. No Disney. Disney bad." But then I realized, what's wrong with Disney? I loved it as a kid and still love it. I'm in school so I can one day have a career in Disney-ish art (I'm an animation major). So...why am I trying so hard to avoid it?

See, thing is, Disney-ish art is like anime. Professional anime artists work very hard and study anatomy and all the important skills necessary to be an artist. Yes, they draw the big eyes and little mouths and everything else that makes anime what it is, but they know the fundamentals behind it and have taken years to get to the point they are at. Same thing with Disney artists. If you watch "the making of the Lion King," you'll see the animators spend time on gesture drawings and studies on lions and other animals. They know the anatomy and how to draw the real beasts, then adapt that in with a cartoony style to make it more attractive to kids (and easier to animate). A lot of artists nowadays (especially here on DA) don't bother to study the actual anatomy of the animal they're drawing. Instead, they'll just adapt a popular style and never understand how the animal they're drawing really works.

To get to the point, I feel I've studied a great deal of different animals and am now comfortable enough to allow my style to become more cartoony. I'm not declaring this my new style, merely allowing myself to indulge in something less realistic, now that I understand the creature below the cartoon. I've never allowed myself to let it look Disney-ish, mainly because it's been a very popular style among younger artists. I always felt that people who drew Disney-ish work were merely copying the style and ignoring the technical parts...so I didn't want my work to look that way.

Holy crap, long description. Umm...I'm doing a color theory final project on just about everything I just said. This picture will probably be part of that project. I'm going to be doing a full-scale animation-ish thing using my dog, Indiana, as the main character. I'll be doing gesture drawings of him, studying his movements, creating a cartoony-version of him (like above), creating a sculpture of him, then animating him in flash.

To conclude, here's a cartoony version of my border collie, Indiana!


Indy Jones (C) Me.