Hey Colby.
I was going to say, first nail the mechanics then work on the cartoonyness. But then I recall that you did already nail the mechanics part 🙂
OK the next step for you is to look at the reference, find those key poses and then push it and exaggerate. If he is leaning forward a little. What would it look like if he was leaning forward a lot? (you also need to tweak the mechanics of the reference to achieve this.
You are not copying the reference, you are using it as a starting point.
I had a teacher once tell me that is the “idea of the pose from the reference, it’s not the pose from the reference.” (when you are doing this kind of thing that is). That same teacher also pointed out a tonne of things I was missing when we were trying to do move matching. (trying to copy the reference as CLOSELY as possible).
One thing I try and do when I’m watching some animated shows is watch for the body mechanics and then try to reverse engineer what the reference would look like. ie, I don’t mean imagine yourself acting out what the animation looks like, imagine yourself acting out what the video reference would actually look like before any of the poses would have been pushed. Then you can go, “oh they acted out something like this, and then turned it into that.”
I hope that makes sense.
