Brooke's Animation Depository

         Okay, so! The walk cycle! I was honestly more afraid of the difficulty of this assignment than the final dialogue one when looking over our list of projects at the beginning of the semester. Especially given how much I struggled with a simple turn I was absolutely dreading this one. However, after the relative success of the Weight project, I felt much more confident. I knew my limits much better, no longer had to worry about getting tripped up by weird Toon Boom brush issues, and I felt much better about working off my own created drawings over relying purely on reference. I still did struggle a bit with drawing Luz's legs consistently (legs are so hard, second only to hands TT-TT), but I was really happy with the consistency of her bob as well as how well her arm swings synced up with everything.     As I said before, I was much more aware of my limits by the time this project rolled around so I had decided pretty early on that I would be an...

      After the failure of the previous assignment, I attempted to change up how I prepped for the animation before committing to anything I couldn't fix like in the last one. I made some practices sketches of Hootie at different angles in the drawing program I was used to so that I would hopefully be more prepared by the time I went to draw him in Toon Boom. Due to him being a pretty simple character by design, I was hoping that if I did run into some troubles I did with drawing Luz that it wouldn't have cost me as much time to start over or fix any major issues. I also made sure to actually draw each frame of Hootie's head turn based on the proportions of the last rather than relying on references from completely separate shots. This made it much easier to keep him in scale with himself. As well as this, I had finally figured out the issue I was having with Toon Boom's brushes so actually drawing Hootie here was much easier.       I  did run int...

    I don't really want to spend too much time talking on this one. I had made some inking brushes in Toon Boom to use for drawing Luz's head to keep everything consistent, but unfortunately I was unaware that going back and forth between them reverted any adjustments to them (primarily size) so by the time I moved on to the second frame of her head turn (I was pretty okay with how the first frame of her head in profile turned out) I was unable to replicate the same consistent line quality which increasingly frustrated me over time. My main issue, though, was how committed I was to sticking to several sets of reference images I had from the show. Rather than adjusting proportions and features to each previous frame I was creating entirely new drawings that were mostly independent of each other. I had onion skin on, but I didn't trust myself to create a proper in-between of Luz's head based on my own assumptions. I certainly learned a lot from doing this one, but it was ...

      So this one had me a bit stressed from the start as, like I said before, I am horrible at drawing without reference and even then I am more less just directly copying an image verbatim as best I can. I had originally had wanted my lad to get up as the butterfly passed by and then plop down all disappointed, but the whole animation ended up taking way longer than anticipated (I am remember being pretty bogged down with other stuff that week as well. Still my fault for mismanaging my time, but still) and I ended up having to just settle for having him stay seated the whole time.      Having only animated geometric shapes up until this point, this assignment was also what made me aware of just how much I hated drawing in Toon Boom. The brush settings are out of the way and hard to access and they don't save on the fly which is something I've grown used to in my primary drawing program. This was less of an issue on this assignment, but ended up becoming a...

           I am still pretty new to digital drawing so I was pretty happy with how these came out. I mostly just try to copy other art directly from reference to get myself used to drawing on a tablet and I usually don't ever try to create anything from imagination as I would rather develop a better understanding of design as a whole. That being said, it was surprisingly fun to just draw off the top of my head to create simple little expressive lads without reference. 

    So I ended up completely forgetting about updating the blog this semester, but I am here now c:<! I remember having a pretty good time with this one. I didn't have to do much revising as most of my first-go assumptions when it came to spacing. I did find that I was bit quick to end the final swing of the ball, so I added that little "click" effect to create the illusion of some mechanism locking up and halting the ball which I think turned out okay.