ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT challenges for me as an artist was to learn how to simplify my drawing style. Early in my career my work consisted of large scale lithographs depicting weeks of painstakingly complicated imagery. Spending days and often weeks on each print wasn’t uncommon for me. But if you asked me to whip up a simple cartoon character, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Fact is, simplifying my drawing style didn’t come easily. I was literally thrown into the world of cartoon animation when asked to join an animation team at a local production company. They already had an established series on a popular cable network channel (Dr. Katz, Comedy Central), and my job was to design and animate a pilot for DreamWorks. It was a nice way to get thrown into the world of animation, resulting in a very diverse artistic direction for me. I embraced the challenge.

The next several years provided me the experience of designing and animating several successful television series and animated content for the Internet. We used Flash for everything, including storyboards, animatics, character and background design and, of course, animation. We were a paperless studio and Flash was our Swiss army knife of software tools. As Flash matured with each version, my skill level using it was maturing also.

Strict deadlines and cut-throat delivery dates meant working fast. Working fast meant keeping the drawing style simple, which I became very good at through practise. Not unlike a classical musician ending up performing children’s pop music, it was my fine art training that helped pave the road to cartoon animation.

Ironically today, I am considered a cartoonist and character animator as opposed to a fine artist. The ability to draw with simple shapes and lines did not come easily to me. Admittedly, I continue to find it a challenge creating graphics that are iconic in style. To break down an image into a few simple shapes and have it still be appealing and even the least bit amusing is a daunting task. Sometimes I can nail it in a few minutes of sketching, other times it can take a few hours of pushing and pulling shapes until I think they work together. All too often my efforts get tossed aside and spend the rest of their lives stored onto a cold and dark back-up hard drive. Being asked to author this book has granted me the opportunity to choose some of the more successful designs as feature topics for the sole reason that they help make the book more visually appealing. What you don’t see are the hundreds of failed attempts and design blunders I have created to reach this level in my career. There does exist an island of misfit characters where the majority of habitants are the result of my own handiwork.

Michelangelo was once quoted as saying “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” As modest as he may have been, his perspective on design is timeless. Apply this thinking to your own approach when designing anything from a character, logo, background or even a website. All the best details are there in front of you; it’s everything else that needs to be removed.