Planning Stop Motion

Today I had a little think about which GIF idea I think would work best as a hand drawn stop motion animated GIF, the choices were mainly narrowed down to the full body GIFs of my character as I think theres something really satisfying about drawing out my little guys whole frame by hand, and it would mean I could achieve more of the detail like his eyes and hair etc but on a smaller scale. In the end I went with the idea where hes dancing and his leaf falls off and he has to pick it up again. 

I love the charm that this movement had, it was so satisfying to draw, although its really hard to think how many body movements need to be made to make the whole thing look realistic. I decided to draw him in pro marker as it was the closest purple I could find to the colour he was in the digital GIF, I for once decided consciously to not give my character an outline where usually I would as I've come to realise I think that sometimes this can make my drawings look a bit too childlike or cartoonish. 

Although I really like the flat quality the pro markers given my character, I've since seen other peoples hand drawn GIFs that have been done using coloured pencils and I really like the shaky, obviously hand drawn aesthetic of them, so maybe I'll stick it out using pencil next time, its just in my head I always think pencil drawings look too messy when I do them?

These are a few of the frames from my flip book kind of version of the animation that I made, I traced them all from the same beginnings of my character using a light box which is the first time I've ever used one BUT I will definitely use one again. I always thought there wasn't much point in them and that I would be sort of cheating if I traced them, but I realised during this brief that they're both necessary, especially for this kind of repeated drawing and accuracy needed for animation, and that its not cheating if I'm tracing my own work.

I scanned them onto the computer and edited them ever so slightly in photoshop just so there were no pencil or eraser marks, and then it literally took two seconds to make an animation out of them, and now I know how easy it was I'm even more relaxed for my 3D GIF making as I know its essentially the same process. I've definitely become more adept at working with computers and especially photoshop during this brief which I'm thankful for.