#animationtip

If you think you’re some amazing artist you won’t improve much, you need to know your weaknesses and work on them.

Go at your own pace and all that jazz but you need to look art your art with real objectivity, don’t let your personal art style keep you from improving.

What makes your art style bad? what makes it good?

Is it the only style you can draw in?

Make a short animation of your favorite anime picture reference for the character design is fine but try to make it a completely different pose as the pictures you’re basing it off of.

After you do that you’ll see exactly what you need to improve on, you’ll see what is hard for you to change when you use a different art style.

Try it out for yourself, it’ll be a really fun exercise for you.

Stop over using smear frames, they are awesome and can be very helpful  but if somebody is just lets say picking something up at regular speed maybe it’s not the time to use it.

An easy way to make sure you’re using them right is to imagine what would it feel like if whatever is being smeared as directed at you.

If it would hurt you then its going fast enough, usually something with that much speed to actually cause pain is fast enough that it may not be clearly visible to the naked eye.

Of course this method doesn’t work for any object but is good for working with character animation.

But smears are not the only way to show speed, changing up the framing of something can help too. instead of doing the part that needs to be fast with smears you can take that frame that’d be used for a smear away and make the last frame on a 3 and maybe even the one before that a 3 too.

And lastly remember that smears are supposed to make the animation flow better you’re not supposed to tell they’re there and in a lot of anime they are reserved for special occasion and not used as much as in american cartoons.

Don’t just use them because you don’t wanna have to draw all the frames because it might take a long time.