My grandfather was a Painter and as a kid he would hand me a panel of Calvin and Hobbes or Tintin to copy while he was working. It really gave me an appreciation for what simplicity could do. What Bill Waterson or Herge did with a simple line here or an addition of two dots there to change a facial expression or add movement to scene was like magic to me as a kid. And my grandfather used to say the longer you look at something the easier it gets to compress all the information of a complex world into a few dots. Basically these artists brains were running highly optimized compression algos.