✧ lemi melimoni ✧

First thing I do before drawing a single thing is reading the whole script. What i'm doing while i read is understand the episode. what are the themes, what are the characters motivations, what are their relationships. all that good stuff. Why I do this is so i can gather inspiration before i actually start my scene.

What some people do while reading the script is make rough scribbles next to it. roughing out ideas you get while reading so it doesn't lose you before you forget it.

i personally don't do that cause of my second step.

My second step is doing rough sketches. this is where i scribble out my ideas, i make them messy and kinda unreadable to some other then myself. the goal for this stage for me is going fast, so you do not need to make it pretty!!!

If you make it pretty now then you'll get real disappointed when you have to delete and change it later (which, 75% of the time will happen)

Why i do this is to really get the staging down, character expressions are usually for clean up.

First thing i do is take a screenshot of the script, select and crop it into the timing im imagining then i sketch out everything. if in the middle i realize i want another panel in-between others i would scribble it in the corner and reorganize all of the panels when im done roughing everything out (thats what all the thick lined panels are lol)

When i read everything over and i feel like it's right, i start clean up! sometimes i even get a second opinion with my roughs, but for ii usually not I go to drawing the backgrounds. which is usually the fastest stage but i find myself overdoing it a lot haha. good part about this scene (fan & mephone scene) is that it doesn't have much to really any background detail.

Why i do this before drawing the characters? i find it important to get the scene before putting your subjects in it. you want your characters to feel like they are IN the scene not the bg is drawn around them (for the most part)

heres a better example of my bgs to characters. during this stage you're trying for angles and good composition

my tip for composition is the characters are also the composition! if a character is feeling small and sad then draw them small in the stage. it can really be as simple as that, but that isn't always the best choice. character, staging, expression, posing, angle are all just the tools to making the whole you never need to use every tool in every shot.

My next and last step is drawing the characters! What im doing during this is getting their expressions, posing and scaling down. usually my tip with drawing expressions is to have at least some part uneven, asymmetrical. perfect straightness can make your characters feel stiff. which is usually not what people are trying to go for.

for this type of animation (asset based) having perfect clean boards are not needed. that's why i draw fan like a sea shell! its a guide for the animators and designers, not a finished piece of art.

for some types of animation (like hand drawn) accuracy is good, but is also never needed! that is what layout artists are for usually in a team.

my tip is to use a brush that has little to no pen pressure and texture! when there's not pen pressure you dont need to worry about line consistency you can just draw the shapes fast and easy Fan1: im simple and fast to draw! Fan2: im so detailed and slow to draw!