Children’s art in media: fully-colored, stylized but recognizabke figures with backgrounds and aesthetically textured and messy crayon coloring that
Children’s art in real life: an anguished disembodied head floating on one side, a massive sea of amorphous red scribbles taking up half the paper, ‘SAM’ written in enormous shaky letters overlapping everything, partial figure of a dinosaur abandoned before drawing the legs
in a movie this would be a fully-colored crayon drawing of a ranger standing in front of an arch that said “Jurassic Park” but instead it is two dinosaur skulls floating in the abyss while a ranger’s head is swallowed by his own enormous speech bubble and I adore it
Part of my job is literally making those dumb kids drawings in film/tv AND LET ME TELL YOU, the reason why they’re never like actual kid art is because 1. None of us art goblins remember what weird shit kids think of when they draw so we rely on bad reference images and the random stuff we remember drawing 2. We have so much muscle memory that it’s legit difficult to make ‘bad’ art 3. It’s a legal nightmare to use actual kid art most of the time so one of the dept art goblins makes it 4. The colour is because it adds contrast and draws the eye; usually we’re working with nice art supplies with a full spectrum of colours and trying to tone it down to look as bad as possible but failing miserably because it’s just not in us to do it.
This is the funniest fucking professional problem I can imagine.
I’d love to see the results of like… trying to commission children to make art for film and TV. “Draw a happy family!” “Okay!” [chird churns out three weirdly proportioned humans and a yellow amorphous blob with a speech bubble shouting something unintelligible] “Oh uh… it’s very. Nice. Can you tell me who the yellow person is?” “That’s Spongebob. The family is happy because he came to their party.”
