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!