Replicating the simplest of things can teach you a lot about your tools and concepts. For example, I wanted to work on making cleaner looking 2D animations with Blender grease pencil, and instead of finding some complex animation to work with, I found a clean simple animation. You would expect that I could pull off a simple stick animation on the first try, but the results here are after many attempts and starting over from scratch; building on what I learned from the last iteration. Also by picking something really simple, I was able to iterate fast, and build on the lessons from the last iteration.
This got me thinking about music. When I was a kid, there was an electric organ in the house that had all sorts of fancy features, but I had no idea how to use any of them. But if someone would have told me to play something like Marry had a little lamb, and showed me music theory of how songs are built, and then had me slowly add on embellishments to the song, I probably would have been much interested in music at a younger age. First you play the song, then you turn on the drum machine and play along with that, then you add a fill, then you add the simplest of solos after the fill, then slowly add a left hand accompaniment. This sound way more interesting than: "play this song until it's perfect, then move to the next song to play perfectly."
Back to what I'm actually trying to do here, which is create clean looking 2D animations in blender.
- use a lot of layers, separate out your objects.
- use edit mode to move stuff around cleanly (as opposed to redrawing)
- use basic shapes that can be drawn cleanly.
- create a material with fill and stroke, so you don't have to clean up overlapping lines.
- plan out your animation before you start; this is probably the most important one.
- just keep playing with GP until you figure out how it works.
- have your character work in the dark, it's much easier to animate.