August Animation Practice - August Heat

I know, I know, I finished this one really late. I hated the fact that this one took waaaaaay too long than normal to finish, but it went through a lot of revisions to get the movements right.

I hope it paid off.

(Be sure to right click on the video and set it to loop since it's, well, a looping animation)

Normally I take a break for about a week or two and then start on the next animation, however this might be a back-to-back kind of situation. September's animation will definitely be a more simpler one to do (I hope.)

Do I like the end result for this one? Kinda, yeah. I tried to rush it in the process just to finally finish this one. I especially like how the melting animation turned out at least.

In case you don't live in California, things have been really hot these past few weeks. We're in mid September currently and the weather has kinda gotten better? I say kinda because we're currently going through our 23,572,357,264,848,234,681,786,908,135th forest fire right now.

Originally I was gonna use Danielle for this animation, but since the whole melting thing is very silly and Mr. Ridiculous is a silly character, it just seemed like a better match.

Stay cool everyone!

July Animation Practice - Biking Witch

Glad you all are comfortable with Autumn from the last post because she's the center point for July's animation!

(Be sure to right click on the video and set it to loop after playing the video.)

I wanted to do a simple loop for July, but didn't know of what at the time. Luckily, this character's creation came at the right time to give me a good idea for a loop. I thought animating a character riding a bike on loop would be pretty easy, but of course from someone who hasn't animated a bike rider before, it was more complicated than I thought.

I like the end result though! I had to do a minor edit before posting because the background scroll in the first version of the animation was too fast so I had to slow it down so it looked a bit more natural.

Overall, good to see this new character get the animation treatment so quickly after creation!

New Character/Style Sketches - Autumn the Witch

For the longest time, I've wanted to expand the kinds of styles I draw in. Some of those experimentation in style have been kind of apparent in some one-off drawings I've posted before, like some of the birthday drawings I've posted for the last few years.

Keep in mind that the way I draw my characters for "Propinquity" and "Class of 2422" is the way that I have always been drawing my cartoons for many, many years; it also doesn't help that I've only been drawing those specific set of characters for the longest time as well.

Of course, I do have some characters outside of those sets that I've created that are visually different, like with the "Mr. Ridiculous" story project, but I'm still hungry to expand my horizon in my personal projects when it comes to character design, visual style, or storytelling.

It might be too early to reveal this one, but I wanted to share what I've been working on lately since this character is featured in July's animation practice (which will be posted tomorrow.)

Meet Autumn the witch!

Here's some progress sketches I've done of the character. Initially I explored different styles that I like from different artists until I reverted to a simpler style that has more of a resemblance to how I used to draw when I was younger; this style is almost like a throwback.

Of course, since this is pretty early in this new story project's development, some things might change or evolve the more I work on this, but I really enjoy the direction this is going in so far.

June Animation Practice - Android Repair

Hey, I got this one done with decent timing! We're still in the first week of July!

After looking through my list of characters I haven't animated yet, I initially decided to take care of two of them at once: Kate and Kevin. However, the two are from different story series and it wouldn't make much sense to mix the two right now (even thought they both take place in the same universe), so I replaced Kevin with Robert.

I've animated Robert before, in case anyone forgot that.

Despite advancements in A.I. and technology in the future, androids still need human assistance for repairs. Robert's always open to help Kate out, and the results are shocking

This one took me about a week to complete. I really wanted to finish this quickly so I sort of rushed the rough animation for this one. I totally paid the price for that since it was more difficult to do the final line work, with unadjusted timing for certain movements and placements of certain elements being off after refinement.

I like how it came out! I really try to make time to do the final line work and color for these animations since the end result looks like completed animation for television.

Speaking of which, I've thought about using one of these months to go back on an old monthly animation to either redo it or to fully complete it. Not sure if it's a good idea to do so, but we'll see. After all, we have have six more months left for 2020!