It's April Fools' Day

Happy April Fools' Day! This morning I thought this was the day Caesar was killed, because I forgot about the ides of March, but nope. I was wrong. It's just the first day of April.

So I finally have a walk cycle to show you! I made a couple but this one’s my favorite:

I still need to work on how the weight is carried, and obviously the figure isn’t detailed, but I’m happier with it than I was with earlier ones. That was the last one I did, and surprisingly it took a lot less time—hopefully because I’m getting better, but that remains to be seen.

I always struggle to get the correct up-and-down motion of walking. I forget how legs are positioned at the height of the stride and as a result everything looks a little off. This time I bit the bullet and used a guide the whole way through, and that saved me a lot of annoyance. I had a book on the basics of animation laying around and it had some very helpful tutorials, and also this less-relevant but still interesting explanation of how to draw a dancing alligator.

And as I’m writing this I see that the book also has instructions for animating a dancing hippo. Kind of an odd niche but I like it. Anyway, if you’re curious, this is the reference I used to help capture the bobbing motion:

In addition to walk cycles, I’ve been drawing lots of birds because I like it and I want to. I like the idea of a trio of birds bobbing after my main character, but I like drawing them much better than I like animating them. They’ve gone through a lot of iterations, but I think these three pictures give you the gist of it (the first drawing is from a while ago, maybe three or four weeks).

Do you think I should change their names? Claude, Henrietta, and Noam (thanks Nithin) were also in the running. FYI, despite having traditionally gendered names, these birds are agender and reproduce asexually.  It's just that when I looked up gender neutral names, Laundry was at the top of the list. Laundry.

I really liked this background from last week (that I posted Tuesday (I think)):

It might be the first one that came out looking almost exactly as I intended it to, instead of veering off in content or color or whatever else. I drew a few more scenes from that same environment. 

I don't know what I did wrong with my brush settings, but I could not draw one clean-edged line in this. Everything was a little blurry. I think I made the picture small enough that it's hard to tell, though.

My original idea was actually set in a swamp, so I was thinking about that a lot in October and November. However, the story kept becoming too similar to Over the Garden Wall, which I love but which I do not want to plagiarize. So instead I redirected, but I’m glad that I’ve been able to work some of those initial thoughts into my current plan.

That’s what I’ve done this week that relates directly to my project. Admittedly I’ve been doing a fair amount of drawing and animation that has absolutely nothing to do with my SRP, and I keep getting sidetracked and trying out different Photoshop tools (specifically, I spent a while messing around with brushes while I was drawing birds). I feel like I should retitle this blog Doing Some Animation, and Some Other Stuff, and Playing With Photoshop Aimlessly. 

So I’ll leave you with that.

ALSO: I keep forgetting to mention this, but there’s a science fiction short film called World of Tomorrow that I really enjoyed (and apparently it won an award at Sundance, so if you don’t trust my recommendation maybe that will convince you to watch it). The way it uses color is similar to how I imagined I would be doing in February, and to be honest, after watching it I kind of wish I was making something weirder. I watched it with our very own Molly Ono and it’s on Netflix. Go forth and see!

And a second ALSO: Okay, I checked and I misread Landry as Laundry, but my point about gender neutral names still stands.