Merry Christmas 2021!

Hey! Christmas time is here! Again!

This time I wanted to go in a different direction, featuring Autumn in the winter. She's never heard of Christmas in her entire life and finds herself completely enthralled by it.

I've had some issues with this at the beginning, but after trying to overdo the composition, attempting some kind of rendering, and worrying that the storytelling element is lost on the viewers, I told myself to "keep it simple, stupid" and to trust that the viewers will get it, so I hope you do.

I also wanted to share the process of the artwork here:

Last minute additions to the art was the branch that the ornament hangs from and the snow.

I'm glad that she was able to be featured for the Christmas art! Using an autumn-based character for a winter piece is a pretty good combo. ("Nightmare Before Christmas" proves the mash-up works.)

Anyways! I wish you all a Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas!

May Animation Practice - Armor Hand (Final Animation for 2021)

Oh man oh man oh man, May's animation being posted in November? What gives?! What's up with that?

Actually, here is what's up with that. Life has gotten in the way too many times this year for me to keep up with monthly animations and since I'm a full six months behind, I'm calling it quits for the rest of 2021. There's no way I can catch up this far into the year.

I do have animation plans for 2022 that doesn't involve making animations every month, but I'm not sure if I'll go through with those plans.

I just wanted to give out that update; hopefully it won't be too long for you guys to see another animation from me. Now let's talk the animation that I do have, right now!

You know how in Marvel films they have the actors wear these weird markered suits while filming so that the actual suits are CGI'd on top of them in post production? That's the idea for this animation. I wanted to try my (literal) hand at that, but with 2D animation.

It's not super polished, but I think I got a decent end result.

What do you guys think of my robot hand armor prototype? The boys in the lab just finished working on it yesterday; Tony Stark's gonna like this one.

I had a work-in-progress version of this animation that I showed to a couple of people, and one of them described it as "rotoscoping," which I didn't think of it as such at the time, but after seeing the finished end result, I guess I can agree that it is rotoscoping.

This animation was originally supposed to be longer, but as with all ambitious animation ideas I had for this year, I had to cut it short. The second part of the video was me shooting out a laser from the index finger and etching out a happy face on the wall behind the hand. Oh well!

The animation was also to serve as a stepping stone for other ideas relating to creating animated elements on top of recorded video footage. That is something I still want to experiment with, so who knows? Maybe I'll work on and post something similar to this some time in the future?

Thanks again for every one who's been following me on my journey to creating monthly animations for this year! The purpose was to push myself and give myself more animated mileage, and I think I've done that! See you in the next post!

Happy Halloween 2021!

Halloween is back, which means another round of Halloween art!

Something that I came to realize is that every time I use Sally and Mandy for the Halloween art, Sally is always on the left side and Mandy on the right. I don't know why that's been the case; it's just a coincidence.

And because Mandy is always on the right side of the drawing, we always see the left side of her face facing us, which is a side I hardly draw in general.

It's just a minor detail I wanted to point out.

Anyways, Happy Halloween!

April Animation Practice - Interrogation

Hey! So good news! I got myself a new laptop, which means I can continue with my digital art and animation shenanigans!

And with that, comes gooder news! I finally finished April's animation! I can't believe how slow and stubborn I was to finish this one! Of course, it's not in a completely polished state, and I was very close to publishing it in an incomplete state early on, but I found a groove with the animation and was determin
ed to finish it in a more presentable state, hence why it took forever to post it. But it's here!

The main focus with this animation was animating with video reference. I didn't trace from my recorded footage; it was just all about referencing the acting, movement, and timing.

Here's the animation:

The part that took waaaaaaay too much time to animate was the part where the bad guy walks towards the tied-up guy in the foreground. Ugh, what a headache, but I like the end result.

And of course, how can I say I recorded video reference and NOT post it along side the animation? Here's the video of me acting it out! This was recorded before I did any animation.

I recorded about 12 takes before choosing take 11 as the primary reference for the animation. What do you think? Do you think I can fare as an actor? Ha ha ha ha, probably not.

Geez, I can't believe I'm about 4 months behind for animations! The next few animations are going to be extremely short or simple looping animations for the sake of catching up. Of course, with this year's theme of being experimental, I'm going to make sure that the upcoming shorter animations will be something different for me to produce.

Look forward to that!

Hiatus

Hey, so some lame occurrences occured.

The desktop I was using completely died out on me. In the weeks leading up to it, I've been enduring a steady rise of freezing and crashing until it reached the point where it froze/crashed (as usual), and then it went into a boot loop of no return.

So I'm out of a way to continue working on animations and digital art for the time being. I've been saving up to get myself a good, powerful laptop, but I haven't reached the point where I can comfortably purchase a new computer.

Until then, stuff will be on hold. I'm not sure for how long. I'll go back to finally working in my sketchbook and might be back with some interesting sketches and pages.

Just wanted to throw out an update on things recently. I don't like having too much silence around here, but I hope the work I've posted or will post makes up for it.

Redesigned Doji Pocket Logo

Hey! For awhile, I've been thinking about reworking the current Doji Pocket logo, which looked like this in case anyone forgot:

I've had this as the logo for what seems like a long time, but after giving it a good long look one day I decided it's time to hit the refresh button on this old thing. Why?

The typeface for "Doji Pocket" is pretty outdated and inconsistent in its line weight all over and the visual weight of the word bubble is a bit awkward; it's this one massive object balancing on top of this smaller object, which can be weird for its placement in certain situations.

Now the tough part for the new redesign was creating the new typeface for the Doji Pocket wording since I still wanted it to be round, fun, and bouncy. It ended up being a combination of that with my personal handwriting, which I feel l fall back too much on with a few logos I've created for my personal projects.

Without further ado, here's the new redesign!

Knowing myself, I know I'm probably gonna go back in and adjust some little things here and there, but overall this is the design I'll be using from here on out!

March Animation Practice - Insult to Injury

Back with another late-as-hell animation!

The main focus for this one was to animate a character walking in a z-axis path, like walking from afar to close up to us. I've never animated a walk cycle like that, and I think I've made a decent first attempt? How do you think I did?

And of course, those are my vocals at play for both characters.

I sort of gotten a grasp of animating a walk cycle going towards the camera; I know there's probably a small couple of details I missed for doing a walk cycle in general, but overall it doesn't look bad, off-putting, or too unnatural.

Welp! Off to start on April's animation!

Quarter of a Century Old

Hey ho! Today's that day again!

Can you believe it? I'm now a quarter of a century old!

Let's celebrate that with this pretty cool-looking quarter!

On an unrelated note, I'm launching a new cryptocurrency.

February Animation Practice - Real World Escape

February's animation? In June? How late am I???????? (Don't answer that)

Yeeeeeah, I know I'm very late on this one. AND on top of that, I have to do March, April, May, and June's animation to be up-to-date.

What can I say? Things have gotten pretty busy these past few months. Now that the dust has kinda settled, it's time to go into TURBO MODE.

But before I do, I want to present February's animation! Shot in my own room!

I'm still set in being experimental for this year's set of animations, so for this one I wanted to execute the idea of a digital character going into our analog world, which involved some stop motion work.

The animation/camera work for the stop motion bit is pretty rough, but I wasn't aiming for perfection; I wanted to try something new and see if I can pull it off, and I think it's pretty competent!

Just like with January's animation, the original idea/length of the animation was longer in concept, but I had to cut corners to speed up the process. Even after that, I had to go in and cut out even more corners to really be able to have a finished video for today's posting.

The stop motion part was heavily cut short to save time while the 2D animation's original beginning had to be entirely scrapped in favor of something more simple and easier to complete.

The final video wouldn't exist if I didn't have my brother and friend helping me out with this one! I had my brother to help snap the photos while I had a friend of mine help out with some video editing work, so a big thanks to those two!

Now I'm off to start March's animation!

Have a Daisy

Hey! As I'm sure you noticed, the monthly animations have been put on hold.

I'll get back to them once I get things in order around here.

Oh boy, that's a ton of catching up to do.

In the meantime, I drew up a neat drawing of Daisy! I'll also throw in the process of the drawing from beginning to end.

I had a bit of a breakthrough some time ago when it came to developing the personalities of certain side characters and Daisy was caught in the cross fire.

I'll admit, I've given some characters more development and attention than others and Daisy was just one of those characters that was left out...until recently.

I've been having a ton of fun figuring who Daisy really is and I wanted to draw up a nice drawing of her casually coasting on her skateboard while listening to music and browsing social media. I'm sure we'll see more Daisy around here once I get more free time.

January Animation Practice - Tennis Ball Storm

Whoa! Another late arrival! We finally have 2021's first animation practice starting with January, even though it's currently March. What can I say? It arrived late with style!

Lately I've been pretty bogged down with life-related nonsense, so I haven't been doing a good job at keeping up with the animation stuff lately. Because of that, I had to cut off a ton of what I wanted to animate in this one in order to get this done and posted. Included with the animation, I wanted to throw in some character design sketches and its original storyboard!

As mentioned before, I wanted to try and be more experiential with the monthly animations this year, which means I'll set out to animate different cartoon styles, use different animation techniques or processes, use different animation programs, and other such things. I'm aware that I stayed in a sort of comfort zone during 2020, and I want to try and change that.

Initially for this animation, not only did I wanted it to be longer than what the finished result ended up being, but I also wanted to experiment with using Google's Song Maker to do some sound effect work for this animation.

I also wasn't intending to bring this animation to a finished look as well; since I intended this year to try different things, I wanted to not aim for making a polished-looking product, leaving animations looking rough instead for this year.

I only brought this to a finished look because I didn't want to deliver an unfinished-looking animation after a two month tardy for January's animation.

All in all, this was fun. I liked the character design and style in this one. I'll be sure to start on February's animation asap so I don't fall too behind.

December Animation Practice - Moonwalking

Whoa! I'm extremely late with this one but here's December's animation practice (for 2020.)

This is the first time since April 2020 that I had to post an animation incomplete (and first time posting it almost two months late), so to make up for it, here's both the second rough pass and the first rough pass of this animation.

Second rough pass:

First rough pass:

I knew from the beginning that I was gonna late with December's animation so I initially wanted to do a simple loop; I went with animating a moonwalk since I don't think I've animated that before. Then I thought it'd be boring having just a moonwalk with no context around it so that's when I added the interaction between Aika and Marilyn. As I said before, I was busy behind the scenes with other things during this time and I was steadfast on reaching some level of polish before posting.

Ultimately, I realized that was never gonna happen (considering it's currently February.)

That's a wrap on 2020's year of animation practices! On to 2021!

Update on Things

Hey! Feels like it's been awhile since my last post.

I've been pretty busy with other things during this month. Because of that, I am very behind on December's animation practice. As a matter of fact, I just started on it yesterday! I'll be sure to speed along process on that so I can start fresh on 2021's set of animation practices.

Speaking of 2021's animation practices, I'm going to start being more experimental with the topics and things I animate for this year, whether it's animating in a new style or animating a new cartoon style. The monthly practices started as way to get myself animating and giving myself frame mileage and personal deadlines to reach, and for 2020 I've mainly animated things that's very familiar to me. And I've gotten good at that!

Of course, there were some new things I've done here and there in 2020 and 2019, but I want to focus more on new and experimental things for 2021. I'll explain myself more in-depth about it when I post January's animation.

Also, I'll be removing a couple of sub-pages here on the blog. Most notably the "Cartoon Archives" page and the "Austin and Jennifer" pages. If you're interested in seeing those old drawings, you can go through them by exploring the "drawing" label.

List of topics and labels are in the right sidebar below.

...and with that, I'll be back with a new animation soon!

Happy New Year 2021!

Marilyn is usually a 1950s fan, but she's willing to party 1920s style!

Now, my silly rule when it comes to making the New Year art is that I do not feature any characters from Class of 2422. Why would they celebrate our current day New Years if they live in 2422? That would be like us celebrating the New Year of 1776 in 2021; It doesn't make much sense.

However, I broke the rule this one time for the 2021 New Year art because I was running out of time and ideas for the artwork.

You might be asking yourself "couldn't you feature another female character dressed in flapper attire for the artwork?"

And to that I say, shut up.

I couldn't think of any other characters at the time that would enjoy wearing a flapper costu-

oh wait I could have used Sally huh