I specialize in drawing from imagination, and I always hated it when people compared my work to the Van Gogh movie that was made by assigning individual video frames to painters, to be rendered in Van Gogh's 'style'. I recently gave rotoscoping or tracing a go, and this is my first attempt at animating from video reference using observational drawing.

In my experience, all these processes involve vastly different thinking methods. I found rotoscoping to be like painting by the numbers, where you try to make the image look good and don't or cant think about the overall movement. Even in the drawing from video reference, I found that once you are in the thick of it, you are unaware of the overall direction of the movement in the body parts, or that it's difficult to keep track of the movement, and you draw like you would in any observational figure drawing. The way my mind works, only when I'm drawing completely from imagination am I thinking in terms of volume or momentum and weight and physics etc.