This here folks is a sort of tutorial/notes page I put together for myself and for other artists that might be struggling with this. It sums up what I personally feel are the most important of the many many principles of design that exist in art. For me, when I learned this I was like, ok, NOW it all makes sense. It kinda brought a bunch of pieces of the design puzzle together. So here it is, in it's essence. Most of these are my notes, but the stuff in the lower left corner is from Ben Caldwell's blog, that he posted at some point, that came from notes he got from dreamworks.

If you wondered how the heck they do the amazing work and character design in movies like Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, etc...this is it! Well, sort of, there are a lot of other things to know, and it would take way more pages than I feel like making to explain it all, but this is the essence of what I feel is most important, and while I do not always succeed in applying this in my own work, at least I'm aware of it. Hopefully more artists will be too now.

As a quick aside, many artists apply this idea, and it can be used for realistic or designed art, at the extremes of what I call a sort of "design line" you have on one end J.C. Leyendecker, who has amazing realism but with a nice sense of design, and on the other the king of Shape design, Nico Marlet. The man is awesome! If you want a example of the best of the best in design, he is IT! Anyway, that's all for now.