Encouraging your child to be creative may be the very best gift you can give 
her, I think.

I'd suggest you get her a copy of the basic version of the software Anime 
Studio from Smith Micro. It's really very easy to use, it's not awfully 
expensive, and it comes with some good starter content. Despite the name, 
it's good for almost any kind of 2D animation. You can import your own 
images to animate, it's got good vector drawing tools, and it can even 
import some 3D content (OBJ format, I think) and give you a 2D 
representation of it.

For traditional animation, I highly recommend "The Animator's Survival Kit" 
by Richard Williams. It covers 2D cel style animation, but it's got stuff 
that's very useful for any animation medium. Another old one I like is 
"Timing for Animation".

Manga art on paper, which is the art style that Anime derives from, is 
traditionaly done with brush and ink or brush markers. If you hunt around 
you can find some nice felt tip brush markers that are made with the Manga 
artist in mind; they'll come in sets of varying thickness, with black and a 
couple of shades of gray.

For general study in drawing, you can't beat "Drawing on the Right Side of 
the Brain", by Betty Edwards. There's a companion workbook you can get for 
it that's pretty good, too.

I've found a lot of good art instruction books at my local used bookstore 
(Half-Price Books is the chain I have access to around here) and they're 
always pretty affordable.


"Jeremy "UncleHoot" Praay" <jer### [at] questsoftwarecmo> wrote in message 
news:4abb70bc$1@news.povray.org...
> My daughter loves to draw.  Honestly, at 11, she might already be able to 
> draw better than I can.  That's not saying a whole lot, though, but I 
> think she has potential.  She LOVES anime, and that's where her artistic 
> interest lies.  She wants to be an "animator".
>
> When I was younger, I loved to draw and paint, and perhaps I could have 
> developed that part of myself, but instead, I decided to take a much more 
> practical view of the rest of my life, and went into the computer field, 
> essentially guaranteeing (I hoped) that I would have a job somewhere.  Do 
> I have regrets?  A little.  Do I think I made the wrong choice?  No.  But 
> what I do think about is that I could have still mixed-in some art classes 
> in high school and college.  Instead, I went all-out geek, and only took 
> "geeky" classes: programming (obviously), math, physics, chemistry, etc. 
> That's what I regret.
>
> But as for my daughter, she may have more potential than I did.  She will 
> likely never be a Salvador Dali, or Hayao Miyazaki, but perhaps she could 
> be a Yoshitoshi Abe (one of my favorite animators).  Or maybe she'll 
> change her mind when she's 16.  Who knows.  I just want to make sure that 
> I encourage her in the mean-time, and if she does choose to take the 
> artistic path, I'd like to know what that entails, but I don't know 
> anything.
>
> Any advice?  Tips?
>

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