Once, or Twenty-Four Times a Second

   Why don't I do much fanart like I used to?

Fanarts of animated characters, I mean.

   I used to do many animated character fanarts, but then I realized, I just drew a character. A character that an animator had to draw 24 of (in slightly different poses) per second! You take so long, put so much love into your art, but even the highest ideal, having it be on-model, only matches that flash-by. There's other concerns on animation here. Fluidity of movement. Here it's just a still frame, so all you have to worry about is being on model. Figure, it takes me a few minutes to get the gist of a character down, about half an hour to make it not be off-model, maybe longer to finesse it if I really wanted to.

Case in point: I didn't take my time with these, as I only had 24 hours to do this entire comic, and even then I wasn't really paying attention what with all the other stuff that day, so, I guess I'm justified here? That's a well in the first panel foreground there, thanks for asking.

   What took me 30 minutes to do, the animators had to do 24 of, in a second. Doing the math, that means that animators are, on average, 43200 times faster at drawing than I am. That's how that works, right?

   With a character or prop or whatever up on cellulose, it flashes by like that. When it's down on paper, though, it's meant to be studied. An entirely different style of drawing between animation and non-animation? Well, quite probably. Out of Frank and Ollie's iconic twelve principles of animation, only three or four of them are really applicable to art and design. The rest are in the animation itself: timing, overlapping action, going from pose to pose...  Having the character act with their movement. With still images, as in a comics sequence, you can understandably only show part of a sequence of moment at a time. However, continuity doesn't matter nearly as much here, which definitely allows the artist to get lazy...

It's FORESHORTENING, guys. His head and everything. That's why  he's so... not tall-looking in that panel.

...but, it also allows the artist to make up for the lack of mime through unparalleled use of color and line, as well as specific framing: close ups, angles, backgrounds... There's a wealth of techniques to be explored.

   Solid construction of characters is important, like Frank and Ollie say. Characters must hold appeal to the audience. Yes. But comics has to separate itself from animation on other matters; with only one panel to work with, not animating frames in real time, you have to learn to utilize unique metaphor. A comic panel ofttimes must depict that which is not literally there. In animation, you can capture the sweep of the scene, action and reaction. But it is more necessary to squeeze action and reaction onto a single panel in comics, in order to preserve the timing that would naturally be there as part of animation's nature! Good animation requires exaggeration of movement, good cartoon (for want of a better term) requires exaggeration of spacetime itself!

As seen in the fact that I'm clearly not trying to pad out my lack of expertise in the subject matter through use of these images over and over again.

   To paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, the truth comes in 24 frames a second; lies lie there on the paper to be soaked in.

   In the whole, animated-characters-vs.-comic-art-characters fanart transition thing, I guess I'm just shifting my style of visual metaphor right now? Sure, that makes sense.

Yep, it's all right there in the- the metaphor there. Yep.