Hi everyone,

I forgot to post that my break was last week, so: my break was last week. It was nice to not hunch over my tablet for a while, but I did feel a little anxious about my progress. This project is about halfway over but it isn’t halfway finished. I think this is partly because I keep finding myself spending time on parts of the process that aren’t actual animation, like drawing lots of different backgrounds and objects and experimenting with character design. Today I spent two hours messing with brush settings on Photoshop without even realizing it.

here are some tree type things, plus everyone's favorite, mushrooms

At this point I’m fairly sure that my animation won’t be as long as I projected in December. I do still have many weeks left, but I know my pace won’t match up with my original end goal. For some context on why I think this, two years ago I spent a month taking art classes at Otis College, and I spent 24 hours a week animating with a professor present to help me with each little problem that cropped up. I made several short animations, but none longer than one minute and all very simple. This was the first animation I ever made:

I don't even have the actual video, just this extremely shaky video I found on my phone. That animation was meant to exemplify stretch and squash, one of the basic principles of animation (I only got halfway to making the circle into frog before I had to move on, so I forgive you if you can’t tell what it is). Here’s another short that’s slightly easier to parse:

 Now I’m committing less hours per week than I was while at Otis, and I’m also using a drawing tablet rather than a Cintiq, which is a bit harder for me to adjust to. But the main reason is that my interests have shifted. Usually when I make art, I don’t like to plan it out. I mentioned before that I chose to make my color script less detailed because I didn’t want to tire out my ideas. That happens often when I make thumbnail sketches or plan projects, and this was the most planned art piece I’ve ever undertaken. I’m not surprised that I’ve gotten sidetracked by the individual aspects of this project (mostly character and background design), and I haven’t lost enthusiasm, but I do wish I could’ve kept my momentum going. However, I’m actually not too disappointed because I’m still intrigued by all the facets of my project. I’m also very glad to learn all of this about myself now rather than after, say, deciding to major in animation. Of course, I’m not going to stop animating, but I think the end result will be more exploratory and experimental than I previously intended.