huh

I have some hours before work so I’ll use them to actually detail why I’ve found CSPaint to be so efficient for bastard-aligned painters who like to take shortcuts.

This will seem familiar to most of you guys, but this functions a little bit different from Photoshop. It turns everything you draw on the layer into editable curves, but retains the aliased smoothness of an ordinary raster layer. Practically a cheat to access the whole suite of amazing tools CS offers for lineart. Such as:

The vector eraser is The Best™. You can be as messy as possible and this tool erases the excess. One pen-flick and it’s done. Much faster than cleaning it up by hand. You can also tweak the settings of this brush to encapsulate more/less lines as you erase but that’s getting a little more involved. Anyway, last thing:

Maybe the only thing better than the vector eraser. There are multiple settings, but these three are the most handy. You can smooth wiggly edges, connect broken strokes, and tweak the width/weight to exactly how you want it. This also has a ton of settings you can play around with. It’s great!

Smells Like Teen Magical Girl

“Hey Princess, am I strong enough for you now?“

“Why…“

hello i am here today to not lose track of the art cheats i have discovered over the years. what i call art cheat is actually a cool filter/coloring style/way to shade/etc. that singlehandedly makes art like 20 times better

80’s anime style

glitch effect

glow effects

adding colors to grayscale paintings

foreshortening ( coil )

foreshortening ( perspective )

clipping group (lines)

clipping group (colors)

dramatic lighting ( GOOD )

shading metal

lighting faces

What is smearing? Smearing is a multitude of techniques used in animation to bridge two or more frames to create the illusion of motion through methods like blurring, warping, distortion, and a few others.

I wanted to start of with a fresh animation to demonstrate some movements.

It looks like it can definitely use some extra information to convey the motion of the sword. This is where we starting thinking about how to smear the object(s).

The most common approach that I’ve noticed that animators take, especially newer animators, is that they warp the whole object. As in they have a point A, and a point B, and then they just have a “mass” of implied motion in between those points.

Here’s a still shot

It works quite well with objects like swords. So here’s what my attempt looked like.

It definitely helped explain the movements more, but I’m not sure I liked it.

Thankfully there are other “types” of smears that we can look at to try to see if they fit in this particular animation.

The next one I wanted to try was “speedlining.” This is basically when you distort the edges or add speedlines to the edges to make the object appear in motion.

Here’s an example

and the still shot:

notices how the edges appear more sketchy. This one is really common and it can be executed in different ways.

Here’s my attempt

I really like this type of smearing, even though it still lacks some of the motion that the first iteration lacked. The speedlines really add character to the motion that would otherwise be missing in a normal warp, but I still needed that smear to bring it to the point where it needed to be.

So here’s what some call “doubling.” (and just as a side comment, I don’t think any of these have “official names” other than just smearing)

Here’s the still shot

This was a really well executed smear which I don’t think would have worked the same if you would have just warped the faces.

Here’s another slightly different execution

with the still shot

It’s like a distortion mixed with doubling, and that’s what I like about smears.. you can mix and match things you feel would work in the particular scene.

So here’s my mix n’ match smear.

Not the best execution, but for our purposes I think it works well.

Motion blurring is really powerful as well. Film uses it all the time, as does 2d animation. Notice the force of the impact being pronounced with the added blur at the head.

Here’s the still shot

There are a few other smears I thought were interesting because it just speaks to the way our brain interprets these frames without even considering the logical implications of the individual frames.

Here’s one example

I don’t know if you caught that, but here is the still shot:

The guy has a knob for a hand. It works so well, you don’t stop to think about implication of that hand’s morphology. 

Here’s another one that doesn’t make too much sense.

Like what is this

Supported by the help of Patreon

So I’m not going to pretend that I am the best animator, but there are a few things I learned that some people may find useful.

Basic shapes.

Seriously, use basic shapes when you start a complex animation! They help tremendously with establishing the movement of form. If your object is in the same plane throughout the movement, keep the size of their parts the same.

If you look at pro animators, their first starting point is almost always something lose and messy.

Add a little.

Don’t go overboard. Just add a few things on another layer. Again, you are just worried about the transition of form in the animation. Just use simple shapes. if proportions begin to be a problem, just copy and paste the part you are animating and morph it a bit.

Finish up detailing.

If there are a lot of things to worry about, just keep adding them on separate layers. Don’t try to draw everything in one go, it almost never works to your favor.

Ink and fill with color.

If something does not look right to you, you can always go back and change it on that particular layer. 

That’s pretty much the basics of how you would want to plan your animations. There are a lot of other things you need to worry about when animating, but that’s what I wanted to say about form.

Disclaimer: Art isn’t a science: there are no definite proofs, there is no “correct” methodology, there are no facts. That’s not to say there aren’t cool ideas for you to explore. I don’t claim to be the best animator, I’m just showing you what works for me.

OK, so we want to start animating a character. One of the most important things about characters are the faces. It can really throw off a perfectly good animation when you see the face deform into something you can’t even recognize. What we want is consistency, but how do we get that? Well I can think of three ways : Make face guidelines, generate a 3d animation and rotoscope it, or get a clip from real life and rotoscope that. I’m just going to focus on the first one for reasons I’ll explain later.

You should start with a rough sketch, I like using simple shapes, but a lot of pros just go straight into outlines of the major forms.

OK, we got a very basic construction of a head (eyes, mouth, neck, etc). Now to keep our parts of the head consistent relative to eachother, we can add another guideline to help us (I used a triangle).

Now I made up some hairstyle and eyes on the first frame. Then I applied it on the other 3 keyframes and added inbetween frames to make it smoother.

You see how the eyes and mouth are within a certain boundary. This is really helpful to get it looking believable. Keeping the ratio is critical to make your character’s face consistent. Now remove the guidelines and you get a half-decent animation.

You can expand your animation to do whatever.

You can do all this relatively fast if you feel comfortable with drawing your characters. 

You can also use 3d. The problem with 3d though is that it takes alot of time to get assets made, rigged, and animated. By then you might as well render it and keep it 3d. I should say, a lot of modern day 2d animations do use at least some 3d. I’ve noticed it a lot with backgrounds and that’s understandable since you don’t want to redraw every single frame as the camera pans. 

As for rotoscoping, I think it’s a bit vacuous. Most of my favorite animations are done with exaggerated movements of different body parts to accentuate emotions (e.g. mouth getting bigger when angry or surprised). This problem applies to 3d as well, but if you’re skilled enough (and have enough time) you can make great animations that have this exaggerated element.

*This works for other “styles” that are more realistic.

The thing to keep in mind, is that the skull is a complex shape, and it follows that the face is also a complex shape. Having simple shapes still helps because those complex shapes fit inside simple shapes.

One of the most important things you need to worry about when you create an animation is the keyframes. Keyframe animators, are usually considered senior animators (in a professional studio) that decide on critical aspects of the animation. Each studio has different roles that keyframe animators have to fill, but generally speaking they are in charge of translating the storyboards into a fluid animation. Depending on the size of the studio, you may also find “regular” animators and in-betweeners. Since I come from a position of someone who does everything from the beginning to the end, you’ll be getting a more holistic view. Going into the animation hierarchy is really beyond the scope of this mini-lesson. I’ll be focusing on how you would want to handle yourself when you are creating keyframes for your animation, specifically keyframing characters.

 First you would ideally have a character sheet (to make your life easier, to make it more accurate to the vision of the designers or directors or… to yourself)

 I didn’t make one, but you’ll have to forgive me.

 I like martial arts, so I wanted to try animating a “jump spinning hook kick”.

The first thing you need to do is to make the “keys,” or keyframes. For those who don’t know what keyframes are, they are just points in the animation that define major movements and/or change in movements of objects (in our case characters).

So here we have the character:

We definitely want the point of contact to be a key.

And the landing.

Now that we have the major keys down, we can start breaking them up into smoother and more refined movements. We have to ask ourselves how does the human body move when performing this kick and to answer that question you would have to get references!

Keep adding keyframes at important positions in the movement, this you really need to develop a feel for.

I added another element to the animation to have the character seemingly be reacting to something (just to make it more interesting).

Expand on what the element is by laying out important keys (as you did before)

Now as a key animator you are in charge of laying out the length of exposures each frame has. If you’re working in a professional setting, you will probably get an X-sheet (or exposure sheet). This is a good time to start thinking which frames need to be extended and which need to be shortened.

I wanted to exaggerate the kick so I extended the exposure of the kick.

Now that you have a blueprint of where you want to go, you can start filling in the spaces where extra frames are needed.

Really once you have your point A and point B set, it’s fairly simple to fill in the blanks. The important part is getting point A and point B just right. Having a smooth animation is not as important as having good movement (imo). Part of the charm that Japanese animation has is the interesting choice of shots/angles/poses that make up for the lack of frames (in comparison to the fluid frames you would normally see in a Disney animation).

Keyframes can also be used for changing the backgrounds, and perspective lines more broadly. Although seeing hand-drawn backgrounds has become rarer and rarer these days because of how much easier it is to generate it with 3d software.

2d Animation Tips - Tracing

This seems to be a sensitive topic for many people, but I’d like to make the case for tracing to be an important tool for learning. In fact, I think tracing is one of the most efficient ways you can learn not just to animate, but to learn to draw more generally. This is more of general advice for people starting out, rather than a tutorial.

 If you want to learn to learn anything, you should start with the best. I found one of  yoh yoshinari’s many animations of yoko. The movement is pretty solid, but where would you begin with understanding his thought process? 

 I think it’s best to kind of reverse engineer some major forms to see the general movement so I first traced it.

 There’s quite a bit going on here. I tried to isolate the head movement

 And made a line of movement

From here you can try to use the form of the head to see if you can reconstruct the original animation, but I just wanted to keep the line of movement to make things less derivative.

 The movement is very rough and needs a bit of polishing and refining, but I think you can make it into a solid animation with a second or third pass.

 The bigger question is, did I make something derivative? Yeah, in some sense it is derivative. It wasn’t directly traced, but I took the line of movement from Yoh’s animation. The better answer is: it doesn’t matter.. because it’s about you learning rather than showing it to people telling them how cool you are for tracing another artist.

 There are a few things to be said here. If you are at a level where you can make solid animation with good composition ( and yes there is composition in animations just like there are in illustrations and movies), the dangers of making derivative work rise pretty quickly. Maybe there is a market and audience for people who can trace really well, but personally I don’t care for that and I assume others don’t care about that either. In other words: if you want to be known for your animations, you probably shouldn’t trace others.

 Just to break the taboo a little more, there is a guy by the name of Drew Struzan. He is a professional movie poster illustrator, he made covers for star wars, indiana jones, and back to the future .. just to name a few. He uses a projector to trace people’s faces onto his posters. He does this to maximize his time for what would take him days or weeks to do by eye. Is there anything wrong with this? I feel like there isn’t, and the reason is because I feel movie posters’ main strength and appeal are their color choice and composition. There are people who get paid to capture someone’s likeness and, sure enough, that is a talent that you develop with time and skill. I just don’t think Drew is paid for how well he can make the faces look exact.

 And just to touch on some of the drama of people tracing me, I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are people out there that think it’s ok to use my art for advertisements, and leak patreon stuff. It just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if someone traced an animation.