I have aspirations of doing a lot of short cartoons on a website (sort of a la joecartoon.com) and the problem is that my drawing and animating skills are weak. As I've posted before, I've bought a few books and I practice a little each day. I got to thinking about what exactly it is in my drawing ability that limits me. I decided to try to imitate somebody else's drawing in KM to see if the program (or more correctly, my lack of expertise in using it) is what slows me down.

The answer is a resounding "no."

http://demo.voikos.com/animation/cavedude.html

The above is a quick (under 10 minutes) rendition of the little caveguy in the daily cartoon on this site. This is NOT a traced image. I flipped back and forth between KM and the image of this guy and just tried to draw what I saw.

I think, especially for an under-10-minute drawing, that he looks pretty good. This tells me a couple of things.

1. KoolMoves is an incredible program that actually makes drawing easier. I couldn't have done this by hand in under 10 minutes and have it look this good (especially before I started studying the subject).

2. What's really holding me back isn't KM or my ability to draw with it. It's my lack of experience visualizing a character and seeing it clearly enough to, in effect, copy the image in my mind onto the screen. At least, this is what I think, given the success of this little experiment. So this is the skill I'm going to work hardest on in the coming days. If any of you better artists have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them. (Like techniques to improve this skill, or maybe that I'm completely wrong, or whatever.)

Thanks.