Livin' Underground

Breaking my Tumblr hiatus for five minutes because I was playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown game and got stabbed in the face with Raph and Leo family feels.

Full dialogue under the cut since there are a LOT of screencaps. Also, please do not reblog and tag as ship.

So to answer some questions, yeah this is all traditionally made! Its composited digitally and the two animations are layered on top of each other, but the individual frames are physical drawings. In fact, here the are!

I however did not make the animation rough traditionally. That I did on TVPaint, and then printed out. Luckily for me, my oil pastels were opaque enough to layer over the printed ink without letting any through. This is the original animation:

The frames themselves are rendered on A4 paper and are quite detailed.

Once I had finished all 27 frames, I scanned them, and put them back in TVPaint to align the animation (by using that little cross in the corner) and edit out some scanning errors as well as fill in the rest of the black for the background. I ended up with this:

THEN I decided that I wasn't satisfied yet, and wanted to try out some alcohol markers. This animation I made on paper first, before rendering with the markers.

This is a non comprehensive look at the frames. Alcohol marker stains through any paper it's placed on, so the pencil frames ended up getting marked, as you can see in the image to the right. I ended up duplicating and mirroring the animation, and got this:

Then I decided it might be cool to use the scan cleaner function to remove the white of the paper, and layer this animation over the other one. Which is how we ended up with this:

A realization.

All of this is pretty simple and easy to do so long as you have a printer/scanner, and even if you don't, all you need to do paper animation is a pegboard, ideally a light table, but in a pinch you can just hold your paper up to a window to see the frame behind it.

I'm really touched by everyone who's said they've been inspired to animate because of me, I encourage it!!! Animation can be fun and experimental and weird, and it's a deeply deeply rewarding artform. So please get out there and mess around with paper and make some animations. Compile your images on gif makers, or Firealpaca, you can do it even without fancy software too!

as you can tell, I was totally normal about one specific 03 turtle as a kid. Bunch of screencap redraws from the show.

It's not easy being a single dad of 4...

The OG meme

um. hi. long time no see

I like drawing eldritch horrors on my birthday

Beanie Sample is here!!

A character can only be as intelligent as its writer. Donnie is supposed to be a very smart turtle, yet I—a very dumb human—am supposed to write his dialogue.

The issue I have with writing Mikey’s dialogue:

An issue I have with writing any of the turtles:

Don't try to write a smarter charcter with great smarts. Try to write them as having great experience. Like, you don't have to know how a couple of chemicals react together to create the polymer needed to make the drug needed for a cure. You just need Don to know which chemicals react and how. He doesn't need to explain the reaction. He can stop short of explaining things and simply tell his brothers what he needs them to get, or from where, etc. Trust your readers. We know he's smart. We'll trust you if you have Don say something is necessary.

Think to all the different shows. Don might spew technical jargon sometimes, but mostly he's shown tinkering or building something. He's a scientist, sure, but he's mainly an engineer. We can wave Donatello at any problem and believe that he'll fix things, but it's really the nuts and bolts of welding and wiring that he does. He "does machines." If you know how to use a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver, if you've ever put together a cheap piece of furniture or cooked something to a recipe, you know what you need. Just replace some terms and now Don isn't making packaged ramen--he's slowly melting the base formula before he adds the spice pack, aka the explosive compound, to make his smoke bombs.

For Don, remember that he's curious about everything. He wants to know how everything works. He's in permanent wonder over the whole world. Show him taking things apart or trying to put them back together as practice.

yo !

NEW fan art

I did a thing and I’m locking in on this au despite being swamped in work because I am very smart.

I’m making a Lone Raph and Hatchlings toddler AU, screw it. Details below if anyone cares

Commissions open! ⭐ Link ⭐