Feast your eyes on the imaginative work of Brown Bag Films Toronto (formerly 9 Story) Animator, Ryan Cole. And read more about his thoughts on how to filter through and find inspiration.

What do you do at Toronto?

I’ve been an animator here on several seasons of several shows since 2014, including Wild Kratts and Numb Chucks and currently I’m working on 3 Amigonauts. I’ve also done demo work between seasons and have been employed as a stunt animator for two different shows (Wild Kratts & Numb Chucks).

Favourite medium (at the moment) to work in?

I fluctuate between different types of traditional media and digital. These past few years I’ve been more committed to digital work, since it’s more versatile and easier to correct and archive.

Thoughts on inspiration? Like where do you find it? What or who inspires you?

Today it’s kind of hard *not* to find inspiration, it’s everywhere. Art is basically in our lives all the time now, even when you’re not an artist. It’s in posters, film, TV, advertisements, it’s on the very ground tiles we walk every day. Even nature, which just sort of puts itself together, has done it with an eye for detail that landscape artists desperately struggle to imitate.

And speaking of artists, there’s so many! I think the toughest part of being inspired is trying not to be overwhelmed by it. I have a lot of heroes in comics and animation, and they don’t all draw like one another, in fact their styles often conflict with each other, and there’s always this worry that taking inspiration from one means forsaking the other.

I think sometime we’re *too* inspired, and that we should learn to counterbalance this with a good workflow and a want to see the end result, more so than how that result *should* look.

As for who/what inspires me, they tend to change. Right now I really enjoy the dynamism present in a lot of Japanese animators, like Studio Trigger’s Yoh Yoshinari, lately I’ve been looking back at nostalgic TV shows and trying to isolate what it was about them that really struck me as an artist, so I’ve been trying to imitate lesser known artists like early Dragonball head-of-animation Minoru Maeda, and on the closer-to-home side I’ve been a longtime admirer of Disney artists Ken Duncan, James Baxter, Eric Goldberg and fellow Canuck Nik Ranieri. And of course with the new Samurai Jack season starting up soon (sorry to date this!) I can’t not bring up Genndy Tartakovsky!

Examples of Ryan’s work can be found here!