One of my great joys is to keep my sketchbooks alive. I used to keep up with it a lot more when I was much younger, or even before I had a family. Sometimes it's easy to get overwhelmed with getting your footage done for the week, or getting everything done for the day so you can spend time with the family, whatever, but I have really been relearning old lessons recently of how important it is (to me at least) to keep a sketchbook alive. It keeps me watching and observing... and not just drawing, but really SEEING. Something I want to have in my animation is observed moments. Meaning, I want things to be observed and not just made up out of my head. Observed, then caricatured. How can I do that unless I am studying and observing? I think we all tend to get comfortable at times and develop bad habits of drawing things a certain way without considering other options. Or even something as simple as looking at what happens to the shape of the back when someone sits indian style as opposed to in a chair. There is something truthful about finding that uniqueness to every moment in life. Something that makes us go, "oh yeah, I've seen that!". It breaks down the barrier with our audience and helps to convince them that these are REAL characters. Because they are...
