The previous chapter was about some basic aspects of character animation, things you should learn and know by heart. With practice you'll notice that these principles will become second nature to you when you animate.

In fact, the next few recipes don't require much more than what we've already learned in the previous chapter: we're going to use what we've learned, and more than one principle at a time. We're going to apply what we know about timing, spacing, anticipation, asymmetric posing, squash-and-stretch, and a few new things that we'll see along the way.

Since we're going to deal with scenes are a bit more complete, it's strongly recommended that you read the Creating thumbnails with Grease Pencil article in the Appendix of this book. Planning is an often overlooked step when animating, but it's hard to stress enough how important planning is to help you make better animated shots. Along with planning, it's also crucial to look at moving references (record yourself, your friends, search YouTube, rent a movie, watch people on the street, and so on; whatever works for you) to figure out the mechanics behind the particular movement you need to create.