Weight

 

    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 into issues when drawing his tube as I'm not used to working without a proper stabilizer for long consistent brush strokes. I was hoping that I could just use the line tool and bend it accordingly, but I wasn't able to figure out how to get a steep enough bend (I spent over an hour looking into it and I was just got wicked frustrated with the whole thing), so I ended up having to hand draw each line without the stabilizer which resulted in fairly mess inconsistent lines. Topped off with finicking with ways to lighten the workload once I realized how long the animation was going to be by the end of it, the end result ended up being pretty messy despite learning from a lot of my prior mistakes.

    That being said, I finally felt like I had some control over Toon Boom and the prospect of handling the following walk cycle project felt far less intimidating than I originally feared it would be.