Artist Research: Matt Groening

 Another artist research I will be doing is on the American artist Matt Groening. Matt is an animator who created The Simpsons and other cartoon series such as Life in Hell and Futurama. Matt started drawing early but he focused entirely on journalism since his college life from Evergreen State College. He then moved to Los Angeles where he secured a job at Los Angeles Reader. Matt soon afterwards started adding Life in Hell comic series which it greatly expanded on his career and became synonymous in the cartoon industry.

 Matt Groening is mostly famous for his The Simpsons series, I will be focusing on this particular series and how the animation is carried out.

Art of Simpsons (2013-2021) Available at: https://characterdesignreferences.com/art-of-animation-4/art-of-the-simpsons (Accessed: March 2021)

 The Simpsons art style is particularly simple as it follows geometrical shapes such as circles and spheres to make up the shape of the character. This allows the shape of the character to remain consistent. In other words, when the character remains consisten it is much easier to animate and therefore have much smoother animation.

 The Simpsons early animation video shows hand drawn and early designs on the character, but as the series progressed onwards, most of the animation shifted towards digital processing and now every character has a uniform shape.

 What I can learn from Simpsons and Matt Groening's work is the fluidity of the animation and the character design. Although I do not want all of my characters to look virtually the same, but however I would like to follow something similar into the developing process of my animation.