When animating, I prefer to start with gestural lines, incorporating volumes and the Loomis method, before progressing toward a more polished look later in the animation process.
This series of drawings below demonstrates the process very nicely. Notice that they are using red lines for their initial sketches. Working with color lines at first will make it much easier to trace your work and create the cleaner line art version later.
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Start your animation process loosely, and don't hesitate to draw expressively. It's far more important to focus on nailing the timing and overall poses early on, rather than capturing every small detail of your character right away. This approach will help you effectively create keyframes for the animation (we’ll cover keyframing in the next class).
Complete a full pass of your animation roughed out like this. Our next lesson on Keyframes will help further illustrate the correct process to find your main poses and overall timing during this first pass of animation.
Eventually, when the animation is ready THEN you can create a new layer over top this layer and begin creating tie downs where you clean up the lines and add details.
Finally, once that process is done and everything looks finished. At the very end, you can start filling in the line work and adding color.