NabbyMatics (Patreon): Lil Nabbed (Patreon)

Edit: 

• Special note: because this was a semi-spontaneous gift (see below), this is as complete as this was going to get!

Synopsis/Description: 

 A gift for a gift, as Princess Lil finds herself with some down-time and a surprise guest in her recording booth!
Thanks, Lil! 

The Rant: 

A gift for a gift!
Princess Lil's an author and voice actress who I've recently had the honor and fortune of befriending, and just as I tend to do fun little gifts for my friends, so does she! I was surprised a few days before Christmas with the voice clip you guys hear in this animatic, and it was so smexy, I couldn't leave it alone! I had to do something! So, here we are!

Luckily, from a narrative standpoint there's not too much thinking for me to do. Lil lays out a pretty clear narrative of what Nabby does to her, in a pretty organic way, so, from my end, its just about sussing out which poses will best communicate that.  I pretty much had the major composition in my head, and there isn't implied to be much moving, so I had a lot of leeway with posing.

The hard part was mostly getting out of my own head and just expanding on the major poses I'd thumbnailed out. 

Sidebar:
This is actually the finished version of this. Animatics are normally works in progress on the way to the finished animation, but the larger the project, the harder it is to spontaneously see to completion, and a lipsync animation is just on the far side of "do-able," especially for my particular production schedule (one comic and two animations per week)! So, I don't really have the time to take this any further (rough animation, clean animation) without putting Wednesday and Friday content on hold for a few weeks, so this is as far as this goes!

Back to the rant:
Knowing that the animatic was going to be the only version of this, it was hard to get out of my own head and just draw. At first, I did nicely a nicely rendered version, with clean lines and lighting of the major poses, but something was off about it for me.

that version! 

Part of it was that I started rendering it late into a stream, and along the way, I lost enthusiasm for it, but it was too late at night to take a break, and I didn't want to disappoint stream, so I worked through it and rendered it. It might just be me, but a lot of my shortcuts were very visible to me: over-rendering the shadows and lighting to compensate for poor perspective and anatomy. It looked too clean to not be further animated, either, and so I ended up not liking it and rebooting from the thumbnails again.

Instead, I looked up animatic styles I enjoy watching on their own merits, particularly the animatics of Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, and decided to adapt that way instead.

Some of those animatics:

• Rise of the TMNT Opening
• TMNT 201 training session 
• Before/After Comparison 

Once I resolved that the flow between poses would be the major draw, I went back to the thumbnails and redid them in the style you see above, which actually allowed me way more poses than in the first version of the animatic.

Would I like to revisit this? Yeeaaaahhhh... in a pipe dream kinda way. The time allocation is such that it just wouldn't be worth it at this point, especially given how social media metrics work. Peeps would see it for a day or two and then forget it. Some might like it, fewer still would retweet it. Not really worth it, for how much time I'd have to put in. Or rather, how many other things I could make in that time instead! 

Still proud of it, though, and I'm honored to receive such a gift worth regifting in the first place!

 What do you think? Let me know in the comments! Your feedback lets me know how I'm doing! Thank you for your continued support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder! 

-Saunter!