Non Animator Trying To Animate
Open Letter to Animating: Why are you the worst?
In recent events, someone has reached out to hire me to animate a short clip from her podcast. It's common for people to hear cartoonist and assume that means I'm an animator, so I told her my animating skills were very basic at best but she was satisfied with basic and still wants me to do the animation. I think it'll be a great skill to learn but, as I've always known it to be, animating is SUPER hard.
I've only ever used the animating features on Photoshop and perhaps using something like Flash or ToonBoom would make my life easier, but I'm almost afraid to abandon what I know to learn a whole new program.
So maybe you lovely folks of Steemit can help me out and give me some advice. As practice for the upcoming project, I decided to animate a quote from one of my favorite podcasts, "My Favorite Murder". The quote is: "Here's the thing, fuck everyone."
Some questions are:
What's the best way to handle the clothing? For the most part, the clothing stays still but in some instances, an arm will cover part of the lineart. Do I have to draw every clothing in every frame or can I draw the clothing once and just mask the parts that will be hidden in certain frames?
What's the best way to handle the lineart? I have a feeling I have to go back and redraw every frame but is there any shortcut lazy-ole me can take?
Should I make the plunge to a different program made soley for animating and if so which one?
Any general tips and advice you can impart, preferably for the Photoshop program.
Thanks for sticking around for another post!
As some of you may know, @drwatson has been blogging about the comic series he writing that I've been illustrating currently. It's a Lovecraftian horror comic and if you'd like to learn about the project I've been working on for the past several months, be sure to check that out.
Until then, you can find me at the following if you'd like to see what other recent art projects I've been working on:
Instagram: @la.fumettista
Tumblr: http://la-fumettista.tumblr.com/tagged/art
Twitter: @TheresaChiechi
Website: https://www.theresachiechi.com/
Until next time 👋
Wish I had some advice I could give you about animation but I know nothing. The cat looks really funny rolling around and I think the girls expressions are great. Are you on steemit.chat? It’s a helpful source to share your posts.
Not an expert either, but I think that you will gain from using a program meant for the task - I know that Krita (the open-source program I use for my drawings) - implemented some features like onion-layers etc.
Here is on of my daughters experiments made in Krita: https://steemit.com/art/@scarlet-rain/demon-flame
I know nothing about animation but everyone who knows something about it all talk about the 12 basic principles of animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_basic_principles_of_animation
You can't go wrong with the folks behind Walt Disney's magic I suppose...
The cat is definitely the highlight of the animation. I've never heard of steemit.chat, I'll have to check that out.
When you get there then you're doing to want to make the same username but new password. Then you can join different groups to view and share your posts.
Also, I wouldn't use the introduceyourself tag anymore. That's usually for your Initial and maybe secondary intro posts. You can look in the explore section to get an idea of which tags are trending.
That's awesome, well done!
Thank you!