#spritemancer

I'm curious, for the gijinka designs and such, do you have a design all planned out beforehand, or do you make it up as you go?

hi, glad to hear I could point someone towards JuiceFX! I'd also really recommend looking into Spritemancer these days, it's made by the same dev and is sortof a collection of a bunch of his animation tools that he's created over the past few years. It has most* of the features that are in Juice FX, albeit in a different presentation format, but the biggest pull of the software is its ability to work with more than 8 layers at once by far lol. My most recent animated piece was juggling ~60 in one project by the time I was done with it, lol. In regards to the gijinka designs, thanks for asking! It really depends on the design, but more often than not I have a few rough elements and forms planned out in advance with the help of some thumbnailing sketches and figure out the rest of the details as I go. Pixelart and nupastels share a similar limitation in that they are both media that doesn't do well with overly finnicky details, so a lot of my early design work tends to leave those out and focus on shapes and volumes that I can block out in a poser app like Magicposer with relative ease. Generally I prefer to do a sketch if working with poser apps after the posing to block out a few of the details prior to rendering, but sometimes I will just skip the step to save time. I was able to find some of the early pose explorations for the Sandslash cultist, so I included those below for reference.