Fanimations (Early Access): The Mayor's mysterious Masking (Patreon)

Mayor Pauline aquires a mysterious mask from the Mushroom kingdom! How will this mischievious mask mislead our magnanimous mayor? 

The Rant:

So, I saw this piece by Imadeej on Twitter, and I HAD to do a Pauline riff myself.

The thing is, you guys know how "extra" I am. I couldn't just do a doodle; that kind of fidelity is just not my thing. You know what is my thing? Animation! (surprise, surprise)

Sidebar in regards to subject matter:
You might be wondering why you don't see as much "Pauline" as one would expect from a fanartist. That's kinda because Pauline isn't quite as "versatile" as the other Mario Princesses. She's only associated with a single location (New Donk City), doesn't associate much with the main cast (unlike Daisy and Waluigi for Peach, Luigi and Wario respectively), and isn't implied to travel much (unlike Rosalina, who can turn up anywhere in her TARDIS-I mean, "Cosmic Observatory"). So situations involving Pauline that don't take place in NDC tend to feel "contrived" rather than "organic." 

That's also why I didn't do more with the "Shygal" concept beyond just the mask (in addition to not having a lot of time to work on this). It requires additional context to understand the kink, whereas all the major beats of this animation (the mask latching on, Pauline fighting it and going limp, the glowing eyes) are pretty self explanatory without being so "extra" that it takes you out of animation. Also, didn't have time to do more than this (i.e. a wardrobe change and/or additional actions) AND have it loop properly.

At least Daisy and Rosalina have the excuse of being friends with Peach and the randomness of Mario Party. I'm gonna try to rectify that because this was fun, but it is what it is.

Back on topic:
So yeah, if I was gonna do this, it was gonna be an animation. I'd kinda already had the storyboards in my head, which helped immensely. I decided to go through a series of poses with minimal animation on each pose. To help with the "'minimal animation' on each pose" break Pauline down into a flash puppet with each limb (and certain extraneous elements like the hair and boobs) being its own symbol. You can see the overlap pieces in the gif below.

The other thing that doing puppets allowed me to do is simply focus on cleaning up once the animation was establisted and perfected. That being said, that much overlap is information overload, so I also filled the puppet parts with corresponding grays to make my life easier. It also helps that the various grays could be substituted with her actual colors when it came time:

the hard part was actually the lighting. In clothing with folds, keeping said folds, along with shadows, highlights and the like consistent is a gigantic pain. Not only does the lighting have to be consistent with its previous (and future) frames, but it also has to be consistent with the other elements on screen (i.e. the boobs have to be consistent with the torso, which also has to be consistent with the thighs). I think it worked out though!

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments, and thank you for your continued Patronage!