#movement study

Oh, that one was tricky. I started it as a challenge study. I said to myself “Keep it simple, A.”. And in the middle of the process I have a thought “Something’s not right. They looked like they were cropped out of cardboard". And they did. Because once again, I couldn’t keep myself from overrendering.

What would I do differently if I could redraw this? Well, first, I would check the composition. Even for a study piece, even before drawing the first figure. Why? Because right now I can see the problem is mostly here - lacking focal point, correct figures but not working as one illustration.

But guess what? I like my rendering here. I really enjoyed sculpting with bright colors and I’m so, so proud of the way I made those.

I started animating a bit this past year, but then, had to take like a 3 month break bc of school so I got out of practice :/ Now that I’m back at it again with more time to (and while I am still a beginner animator) I figured I’d share some tips I learned today with anyone trying to learn too! and I found something that really helped me was focusing on FOUR KEY FRAMES of an action:

So first I was trying to draw this hair blowing in the wind. But I didn’t really know how the hair was going to move properly, so I just kind of drew it how I thought it would look with as much detail as possible. But the detail was taking over the movement. 

So I started again, this time only doing one form for hair instead of three. It was better, but I was still getting caught up in details like the hair strands. I decided from here to just focus on the shape of the hair.

This one was a bigger step in terms of simplificaiton, but It was still so so for me in terms of movement. I wanted the hair to feel less rigid. So, I settled for a different approach. 

I began with just making four frames of an animation with no inbetweens. I focused on (as mentioned before) Four key frames. go simple.

So together, those frames playing would look something like this: 

(some of these are not the exact frames but you get the point)  it’s focusing on points that make the motion seem realistic even without it being full of frames and detail!

So then, what I did was just add the in between frames! 

Now one thing I remembered was how/where to draw them. You draw in between frames, well, in between key frames. for faster parts of motion (like when the hair goes up fast) I drew them about halfway in between each key frame. I really only did about two (of about 23 frames) Then, when the hair gets the lowest and highest points- THAT’S when it’s the slowest in motion, so draw more frames, and make them closer in distance to eachother! kind of fade from slow to fast if that helps. It’ll give good weighted motion

I also felt that I wanted to add a couple more in between frames, and also speed it up, and that was my final! 

I am not a professional obvs but I wanted to record my process to motivate myself to keep going, and to also help others out too :)) this whole process was over about a day of just sitting down and trying. so really not that much! anyway, hope this helps, go animate and have fun!!!!!

Before:

After: