More Style Help

 For All Designers:

To those of you who are still confused about the style, I have added some artist's blogs to use as reference:

Pete Oswald:
http://peteoswald.blogspot.com/

tumblr:
http://peteoswald.tumblr.com/

(note--the blog is old because Pete switched to tumblr. Still, he does have some posts on his blog that are worth taking a look at. I posted some gems of his below.)

Shane Prigmore:

 http://shaneprigmore.blogspot.com/

Gems from Pete's blog:

Hotel Transylvania  is a great example of the simplified shapes we keep talking about. Look at Dracula's body below. He has a clear, simple shape that doesn't need too many details to translate well:

His face is also very expressive, but still pretty simple in it's overall shape:

Again, back to Cloudy--this guy is basically just a distorted oval with a head on top, but he moves in that toony style that we are going for:

Manny is also a great example of a solid, simplistic design:

 More Mayors:

Madagascar is another movie with emphasis on bold shapes. Take a look at this deer. She looks like a deer, but there is much more emphasis on the design/stylization rather than her being anatomically perfect:

From Shane Prigmore:

This stuff is all from "The Croods." Although Shane puts a lot more detail into his line work, if you look at his pictures and blur your eyes, you can see the basic shapes come through. Test that on your designs. This is what I mean by "emphasizing the shape"

Square sloth, neat rounded, bulbous tree:

 This guy is just an elongated rectangle.

 Look at this cat owl's makeup (specifically the one on the bottom.) It is literally two rectangles merged together, one vertical, the other horizontal. Nice and simple!

The same goes for his humans--they are bold, cut-out shapes:

**We are getting a lot of this, which is beautiful, but not what we are looking for:

Nope! Too much detail, not enough stylization.  We want this:

Hopefully this clarifies things! :) Thank you, everyone! You are doing an amazing job!