It's been a while. Really it's been to long, so last week, during my session break, I got down and animated this squirrel cycle that I'd been thinking about for weeks but couldn't get to. Any way, this one differs from all the other cycles in that almost half the drawings are traced straight from the book. After I traced the key frames, I did my best to draw my own in-betweens. THAT'S where the challenge was.
Of course I think this looks like the best of all the tests I've done yet, but having the keys already done is like using training wheels. This is how animators would learn the craft back in the day, and I'd
figure I'd give it a shot.
This one took me longer than the others, and I learned a lot from it. Mostly I learned to put my money where my mouth is. Because it's one thing to understand artistic concepts in theory. It's a whole other level to be able to practice those concepts.
Just about all of the drawings are solid, although you can see a few much in-betweens. The hands in the in-betweens near the middle get a little to big, and some of the head movements are off. Actually, the head almost looks like a bobble head on the torso, which I don't think was the intent of the study. I had a hard time keeping the egg shape of the head; I kept wanting to make it a sphere. Sometimes the legs would be an issue, like in the middle of a stride, but for the most part, they work.
The most important part of this study was to make sure the body parts moved with the figure and I was surprised how many of them hit pretty close to the mark. None of the in-betweens were as solid as the key frames, especially the 10th and 12th drawing, but some of them got close, like some of the first few in-betweens.
Overall, not a bad study; it is very fluid. I messed up when I didn't animate these last few weeks, but now I'm going to get back into it. I want to do some other, more specific tests from the Preston Blair book, but for now I'm going to focus on starting my next animated short. I've been thinking about it for a while, but I'm not going to give any of it away yet... I will say that it should be done sometime in April and I will be posting studies and tests for it on my tumblr. http://bubscartoons.tumblr.com
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