Julia Pott

Julia Pott, an animator and illustrator, is one of my favourite artists at the moment. I have spent a great deal of time recently watching videos of hers on YouTube. She has animated music videos for some of my favourite artists such as The Decemberists and Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, which is how I first discovered her work.
She is British with an MA in Animation, currently living in NY, USA. She was names one of three 'animators to watch' by Creative Review in 2013. She has a blog in which she posts very interesting and useful videos and sketches, to give an insight into her work process.

I absolutely adore the aesthetics of her drawings.  She creates images with basic line drawing. There are very few light effects or shading employed. I would like to emulate this, both because I like the look, and also because I can imagine it would be easy to animate for a beginner! The animals are not realistic, but have kind of distorted anatomies. They are stylised and cartoonish, but still maintain most of the recognisable physical attributes of the animals they are based on. This allows creative licence with character design, which would be great for me also. She uses what some would consider imperfections of her animation technique and turns them into positives.
Her animation is based in a world that is like real life, only better. Scenes and characters are recognisable and relatable even though many elements could not exist in the real world. It gives an element of fantasy and the abstract to her work. The viewer accepts what they are seeing in front of them because the abstract is presented very clearly and continuously. I think I would like to be able to create abstract imagery like she does, with colourful, patterned backgrounds and objects that emphasise different moods in a scene and to add more visual interest. I particularly love the example of using anthropomorphic animals as the characters. Her work is something I would love to emulate, without copying exactly. I know there are many elements of her animations that I will transfer into my own narrative.