Flour Sack

 If you've checked this blog recently you've probably assumed one of two things: 1. I've died. or 2. I'm alive, but haven't posted in a while. After making either of these assumptions you then probably wondered why I talk so much about animation but only post still drawings, and very little actual animation. You are right in your questioning, oh wise, judgemental one. But alas, I bring to you a gift. A moving picture. 

 See? I do animate on occasion. And shame on me for not having done so in so long. 

Anyway, I got a nifty new scanner which scans pencil tests very quickly and makes things a lot easier. Voila.

   Also, I'm giving ToonBoom a try, hence the watermark on the video. I like it so far, mainly because I can actually find help with problems I'm having with it, unlike Flipbook.

   That's all for tonight. I really am trying to stop focusing so heavily on other things and get back to doodling and animating. Damn life just keeps getting in the way. 

Boom

Just messing with Flipbook. Nothing much, but it kept me busy for a while. I'm in the middle of one of my oh-so-frequent creative blocks. Probably due to the fact that I can't scan any animation, which is a bummer. Anyway, keep on truckin'.

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).

Buncha stuff

 Haven't done much worth posting in a while, but I figured I could upload a few sketches out of the new sketchbook I've been keeping. Exhilarating, eh?

I did a lot of doodling at the Expo. Ideas, feelings, caricatures, etc.

When your dad's a taxidermist, a little animal reference is never hard to find.

And some more random drivel.

And hey, why not a bouncing ball I did today?

Shiny Robo

   Long time no post, but I feel like I'm making up for it here. Today I cleaned and colored an animation for the first time. It's definitely a lot more work, but hey it looks pretty.

More Robo

All finished inbetweening this little guy. Now I'm gonna clean it up and color it.

I'm having a lot of fun with this, because I'm trying to play with Squash&Stretch and goofy inbetweens. Lately I've been wanting to do work like John Kricfalusi. I've never done really loose, cartoony stuff before, and it's something I want to practice for a while.

Robo

I had a lot of fun today animating this little shot. It's all on two's, and so far only contains keys and breakdowns. I'm actually really happy with this one and can't wait to finish it tomorrow.

A Happy Squirrel

And why shouldn't he be? 

  An attempt at a double-bounce walk. I'm somewhat happy with it. Working on the tail right now (Overlap on a bushy tail and a double bounce is quite bewildering).

Funny Business

So, I've been working on this idea for a little while. Mimey here is trying to impress a couple of clowns, for whatever reasons a mime might have to do such a thing.

 

Here's the first bit of animation for the mime. 

For whatever reason, stupid YouTube uploads cut off the last couple of frames, which only show him land.

Any thoughts and critiques are very very welcome.

Dive dive dive!

Today I took the liberty of partaking in a mini-challenge over on the 11 Second Club Blog. The challenge was to animate a character on a diving board. I'm actually pretty happy with it.

Oh yea

I did attempt the 11 Second Club's May competition, but got promoted at work (unfortunately) and didn't have time to commit to it. I've been adding to it bit by bit, to be completed sometime in the future. Here we are so far.

Dragging my feet.

Well well well, in my last post I assured myself that I wasn't going to catch the summer bug and get distracted from my animated path. It happened. Don't get me wrong, I've drawn and drawn and animated a bit, but there are so many fun things to go and do in the sun.

A week ago, I moved into an apartment, leaving most of my distractions at my dad's house. So really the only thing to do here is animate. Which is AWESOME. In the past couple days I picked up Eric Goldberg's book and ran through three of his exercises on spacing.

I apologize for the quality, I need to find a way to darken these things.

In these exercises, I took Eric's keys and filled in my own inbetweens according to his charts.

Here, I took the basic idea of this chapter (using a large gap in spacing with enough inbetweens before and after to make it work believably), and applied it to Link.

Jump Update

Well, I've finished inbetweening the rest of this jump. I won't say it's finished, because there's a pop in the arms that I'd like to go back and fix.

A new jump

I'm doing another jump exercise from Richard Williams' book. I chose to use a chubby character to have fun with squash and stretch. Here are the key poses plus a few inbetweens at the start. Updates to come.

A couple of basic exercises with bouncing balls and overlap.

Some animation i did about a year ago.

I did this before I even knew what it meant to animate on twos.

And after that knowledge dawned: This was a small daily challenge I did for the 11 Second Club, an awesome website (linked at the bottom of the page).