Drawing and Animation Resources on YouTube

    So I meant to work on the next part of my series looking at the mechanics of the "Adventures in Middle-Earth" RPG, but I had a stray thought about drawing.  See, I suck at drawing, but for creating RPG material and Interactive Narratives it is very hard to do text only.  So I've always wondered if maybe there was some way of drawing "advanced stick figures" - simple, quick, basic drawings that would at least serve as workable placeholders for my projects.  And being me instead of getting the work done that I needed to get done, I decided to go chasing off after this random thought.  But, as is also often the case, I found some really good material.  So this is going to be another tutorial/ review update with videos about drawing and animation, should have ever wondered the same thing I did.  None of these are my works, I'm just linking to some great YouTube content creators, and a big thank you to all of them!


Gigantic
How To Draw A Face, 10 Flat Design Characters in 10 Minutes, Speed Drawing in Adobe Illustrator

    This is the first video I found that blew my mind.  It is amazing to see the range of characters you can make from just circles and squares.  This is a style that I think I can follow to make some characters of my own, and while the poster uses Adobe Illustrator (which is a professional, read: expensive, program) I think you could do this in LibreOffice Draw, the GIMP or Inkscape (all of which I have, because they're free).
    His channel has a lot of similar vids, including famous characters and animals, plus some random stuff.  Really great.
   
   
ZipUp
Vector Easy Flat Character, Illustrator Tutorial, ZipUp

    Similar style to the video above, but this one goes slower and is better as a tutorial rather than for inspiration.  The channel does not seem to be very active, only a few videos and the latest is a year old.  That's a bummer, the video is great.


Gamefromscratch
Free Game Art -- Full Game Kits

    One of the reasons I started looking into the drawing topic is because I'd like to design some games down the road, and while I want to make my own art, I have to admit that being able to use professional resources would likely be the better way to go.  This video has links to a bunch of sites, only about half of which I knew of before watching it.
    The site is great, frequently updated and talks about how to use a variety of engines and languages for creating games.  Really like this guy.


GDquest
[LIVE] How to make modular 2d game sprites

    Speaking of art and game design, this is a really cool livestream of making modular art assets.  It is pretty long, so I hope he'll do a more concise follow-up in the future.
    A great channel with lots of videos for Blender and GoDot, and a bunch of game design stuff.
   
   
Grant Abbitt
Rigging People | Blender | Quick | Beginner

    From static 2d art to animated 3d, this is a very cool video about using Blender for 3d animation.  Much more technical than I started with, but something to bookmark for the future.
    Fantastic channel with a ton of videos about Blender.
   
   
AlanBeckerTutorials
12 Principles of Animation (Official Full Series)

    Awesome video, one to watch every time before you start an animation project, packed with great guidelines for making the best animated scenes you can.
    Lots of other good animation videos, I like this guy.
   
   
freeCodeCamp.org
Pacman & Ghost Animation: CSS Tutorial (Day 17 of CSS3 in 30 Days)

    This video was mind-blowing, I have been studying CSS for about a year (so I'm no expert) but I would never have thought to create Pac-Man and a ghost using CSS Borders instead of line art.  And I did not realize how power CSS's animation effects could be.  One of my favorite videos for realizing you can use tools in all kinds of creative ways.
    This site just totally rocks!  A ton, lifetime even, of videos for web and programming in all sorts of languages.  A fantastic resource for any fellow noob programmers (like me) out there.


There you go, 7 videos and channels that I think are amazing - I hope that you can learn some cool things too!



You can find more tutorials and reviews I've linked to here