Back on Track

  Hello, my many (zero) blog readers. I hope everyone had a great Christmahanukwanzikka. I had a great one. I gave many gifts and it felt good. For some reason, this year I was bombarded with GREAT gifts. I've never really cared for receiving gifts, and usually tell everyone not to worry about getting me anything. This year nobody listened.
   Anyway, on to what this blog is really about: Cord's pursuit of animation excellence. I have a very beautiful, and far too giving girlfriend, who for Christmas gave me a custom built, top-of-the-line, superfastawesomepretty computer. The thing is a beast. My old computer was a used hand-me-down with 512Mb of RAM that I got for free from a school. Needless to say it couldn't run ANY software without pooping it's pants and falling apart. Hell, it took ten seconds to open the start menu.
   Today I used my new machine to do several quick exercises in Flipbook, something I could never do with the old one. I normally prefer animating on paper, because trying to draw detail with a Tablet is like trying to draw detail with a ten foot crooked stick. But drawing right into Flipook is great for knocking out exercises while quickly making corrections and learning from mistakes, without worrying too much about how well it's drawn. I definitely feel like this new computer is going to help pull me from the animation dry spell I've been experiencing.

This is an exercise from a Jason Ryan webinar about timing and spacing that I watched today. This isn't from my brain, I copied all of his frames to help me feel out how he does it. I learned a lot from doing this.

The bat exercise made me want to try other fast movements, like smear frames.

In this one, the  character drawings are ugly and downright embarrassing. But I wanted to focus more on the movement of the ball (which I'm pretty happy with).