TL:DR- style and design stuff I guess
1) I have no idea. One day, you just find people are talking about ‘your style’, and you sit there and say you don’t have one and look confused. I have no real idea of how or when it happened to me, and I would say even now that I have several different styles. Also, the idea of 'sticking with a style’ once you’ve found it can actually be dangerous. Even if people like something, you mustn’t feel like you’re restricted to it- it will stagnate, and you will as well. My SKIP design method resulted from pushing the lines to their extreme, stretching and pulling and pushing everything as far as I could, to the point that it was uncomfortable, but only when I had gone that far could I see where it felt right and pull it back. If you don’t push something to the extreme, you’ll never know how far you could have gone.
Evolution and art go hand in hand; if you stop trying to change, to push yourself and improve, then you’ll go extinct. Change can scare people, and they might not like it; you might explore new methods and tricks that simply don’t work for you, but mistakes are the best way to learn. Some of my best pictures have resulted from mistakes- I remember during foundation year, when I was doing some very precise work with a dip pen, I sneezed and my ink spattered across the page. I almost cried, but then I saw it sort of looked like a cat freaking out. I finished it off as the cat, and started over again for the actual piece. Both were far better than the original would have ever been, and the cat was by far my favourite of the two. I still have it at home somewhere.
2) When I draw feeling I draw movement, and when I draw movement I draw feeling. Animators have to be constantly aware of what happened before and after the split moment in time that they are drawing- why is the cloth moving that way, how are they going to land on that foot, what vowel are they saying with their lips, how are they saying it, why? Why is the biggest question to ask when you are drawing something. You are drawing someone who is shy- why are they shy? What sort of shy are they? Is it gangling and awkward, are they curling in on themselves away from the world, or do they simply not want others to know that they are afraid? In one of my acting classes I was told that the best way to portray an emotion in a scene is to try to be the exact opposite- someone who is scared will try to look brave, and as a result seem even more scared. As long as you know the motive of a character- what the character wants, and why they want it- you can do anything.
Motive drives everything, and that includes lines and shapes. With Hare, I wanted to express menacing resentment- in other words, his prerogative is to look mean, but the drive is bitterness. So, imagine what that emotion looks like, feels like, then think about how humans express it physically and combine the two. The result is everything is hooked over and slouching with the chin jutting right out in the front, like a moody teenager trying to make a point that he plain does not give a shit about posture or anything else. The shape is curling in and around itself with hooks and snarls- even though it still reads as aggressive, when you analyze it an abstract way, it is still defensive. He is creating a barrier against the world around him with his own construct.
Silhouette is very important in character design, but it is equally important in character acting- if you can tell what the character is doing by their silhouette, it’s a good drawing, if you can tell what the character is feeling by their silhouette, it’s a great drawing.
