ANIMATORS AND CARTOONISTS DRAW on their talents every day, bringing colorful characters to life in a world where anything is possible. If you really love drawing, have a vivid imagination, a continuous flow of ideas, a tireless creative streak, and a willingness to work hard, you just might want to pencil yourself in for a career in animation and cartooning. Interestingly, a great deal of animation and cartooning is steeped in reality. Artists who create the best cartoon characters are those who can draw lifelike people and animals that seem to jump off a page or out of a movie screen. The characters appear ready to walk right into a viewer's life. How does an artist accomplish this? By having an eye for detail. These insightful cartoonists study the shape, size, and structure of the human body, as well as the bodies of animals, birds, and all living creatures that they might one day want to capture on the drawing board. In their minds, top animators and cartoonists have recorded thousands of human gestures, reactions, and expressions. They are keenly aware of the way people and animals move. Add to that, meticulous observations about the forms of endless objects around us, and you have the makings of magical creations of a surreal world where animals talk, plants cry, trees move, candlesticks give advice, and people fall off cliffs, get run over by steamrollers, and fall out of airplanes - only to live to tell the tale. This ability to draw reality precisely allows an artist to start distorting that drawing, contributing twists and turns, and blends of fantasy that seem perfectly plausible to the viewer. Elongated heads, stubby legs, pronounced wide-rimmed glasses, strange walks, and peculiar postures - all spring from the imagination of inventive animators and cartoonists as they give their characters distinctive physical attributes that will make them stand out and become memorable. They add movements, actions, and voices done by experienced actors who express the personalities of characters just as the artists envisioned them when these drawings started out as simple circles, triangles, and lines on a sketchpad. The test of an animator is to be able to draw a character that conveys feeling and emotion to an audience. A challenging career with limitless possibilities, the field of animation art requires you to be willing to start at the bottom and work your way up. This could mean years of developing someone else's ideas and concepts before you get a chance to show what you can do on your own. On the other hand, this field is growing so rapidly that there is a chance you can get your breakout assignment sooner rather than later, as artists with a fresh view are sought to create innovative work for multiple media, from magazines to computer games, comic books to commercials, animated television shows to major motion pictures. This new Careers Ebook contains a wealth of unbiased information about an occupational field, based on the latest national surveys. Careers Ebooks cover attractive and unattractive sides, opportunities, education necessary, personal qualifications required, earnings, descriptions of different job specialties, first person accounts by those in the field, and how to get started; including practical advice on what to do now. There are live links to schools and colleges, associations, periodicals and other sources of reliable information.