HI MELTS im a huge fan of your works! Everytime i watch your animatics I feel like there's new details to appreciate and learn from. Some art questions floating in my head (i would treasure any answer you have to give, I save advice from favourite artists and it's served me thru the years) How did you teach yourself efficiency in art? I feel like that's not often talked about, and it's super important for storyboarding and animation. Like your hijack of the northmost animatic.You (1)
Hi thank you for the ask!!
I don't think I've consciously decided to work on efficiency as a skill? There's still things I do that are very inefficient (bad habits... and lack of knowledge about the programs I use... there's definitely tons of time-saving features I'm neglecting)
But as for efficiency in deciding what to prioritize when drawing, I think it might just be a sense you build up over time, like when you draw a character enough times you know what details/shapes are essential to keep and what's free to change. Doing timed gesture studies help with training your mind to put down only the shapes that give the most important information right away imo. Also live sketching in public, since people move fast you're left without the luxury of constant referencing and so you have to pick out key features super quick
When it comes to storyboarding, because there's so much drawing involved, you don't want to exert too much energy on redundant frames... though i still indulge too much sometimes o(-( anyways I don't think its so much choosing specific frames, it's more of drawing a new frame only when something new is happening. action -> reaction -> action and so on... and because the frames go by quick, it's important to keep everything instantly readable (there are ways to lead the eyes to where you want the viewer to look at through composition, background, poses, lighting)
ALSO also a lot of the stuff I draw isn't post worthy, so like even if it seems like what I post comes from an efficient process there's the tedious work of ugly drafts, wrong proportions, erased mistakes, cut shots, deleted sketches that build the foundation of the stuff I post. So I guess my advice is don't worry about efficiency and revel in the process of trial and error? There is fun in discovering for yourself what works and what doesn't. Efficiency will come with time+practice
@xiulric I did not see the third ask before posting asjkdfhsjddhf 🤦🏻♀️
ok for the flight sequence, I had a good understanding of how to draw toothless because I drew him obsessively as a teen (as well as hiccup and jack lol) and that's by studying screenshots and the artbook... Living with cats helped a lot too. I also looked up skydiving videos as reference.
I basically always do study sketches to get the hang of drawing a character. First drawing of them never looks right and that's normal even if it's embarrassing to look back on sometimes 😭
For kaeya's bartending animation I compiled a lot of reference videos and picked out the movements I wanted him to do, and then put the footage together. I reduce the frame rate of the footage to 12fps and have it on a corner of the canvas for reference while I draw (I don't trace over it because the anatomy/proportions wouldn't make sense on kaeya, and I still need to apply animation principles for the movement to feel smoother. I adjust the timing and spacing sometimes so it feels better)
when I'm really stuck on poses and can't find anything online, I just take photos or videos of myself and reference that! And yeah a lot of my drawings start out bad and they look bad until they don't 😭 gotta have faith in the process












