Shortimations (Patreon): Weakness revealed! (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description: 

Did you know that abby's ears are erogenously sensitive to the point of hypnosis? Neither did Princess Lil's Diagora, but they're about to find out together! 

The Rant: 

This was a lot of fun to do!

I'd kinda planned on Abby's weakness being her ears for awhile, as best exemplified here (art by Darkhatboy): 

The idea being that her ears are so sensitive, you can basically fondle them into a climax that leaves her in a hypnotized submissive state. Rinse, lather and repeat, but you have to be careful not to overload her, which will wake her up. 

The thing is, I didn't really have any ideas for animations, because its Abby. Anyone willing to exploit her like that (i.e. Gale, Nabby, etc), wouldn't really need to manipulate her. They could just take her instead, and its not like the end result would be any different. On the flipside, none of Abby's kinky friends are dominant enough to really attempt to do something like this without her permission. In character, anyway. And its not like she wouldn't just do whatever they want, for characters she likes anyway.

That's where Diagora comes in.

The two have something of a belligerent sexual tension in Princess Lil's Dungeons with Shorties stories (you'll have to be a patron of her to check it out) and Diagora is the right kind of petty and domineering to take advantage of it. So she gets to be the domme in this situation! (Still gotta bribe Lil into doing a vignette of this)

As for the animation, this was actually trickier than I'd anticipated. For starters, the first version very much didn't work:

There's a danger with puppet/symbol animation (and really, animation in general) of not planning properly and diving into the weeds to early. I'm usually better about this because storyboarding is my bread/butter, and my animatics tend to turn out like key frames anyway. 

the problem here, is that I got so obsessed with creating puppet assets, that I didn't really consider the core animation underneath, so this animation feels jank. It doesn't have the strong silhouettes of the second version, What Diagora is doing to Abby's ears isn't as clear, and you can barely see her, which defeats the purpose if you don't already know who she is (which, sidebar: is why you rarely see me draw anyone in identity concealing kinkwear). So, back to the drawing board:

Much better. You get to see Diagora in her entirely, the silhouettes and motion paths are much clearer, and Abby is way more expressive (despite being hypnotized)!

From there, much easier/better to make assets (though, probably should have fleshed out the inbetweens more):

It was only after this step that Lil pointed out a couple of flaws:

• Diagora is really muscular (she's normally chubby to a similar degree as Abby without Abby's lack of height making her seem even chubbier)
• Her elbows reach down to her pelvis

The former was due to anatomical reference; characters I'm not 100% familiar with, I tend to default to average human musculature as reference to keep proportions accurate:

• 6-8 heads tall for average heights, 3-5 for cute/chibi characters
• Elbows reach the bottom of the ribcage, hands reach the thighs
• Legs are 1/2 the body, with knees being halfway

There's a bunch of other similar shortcuts (the eyes are the vertical center of the head, the ears are the horizontal center, from the side, for example), that you eventually start playing with as you become more familiar with the character you are drawing (which is why Abby lacks elbows, while Diagora has them by necessity). For a non-Abby example, It's also why Rae has gone from this:

To this:

And also why she shows up so often; I'm just really comfortable with drawing Rae (whenever I don't forget her gills/hide them under her arms and bust).

Which is something I need to do/get better at with Diagora, since they'll be co-starring together soon!

As for the elbow, well, that was a mistake on my part. As mentioned in my notes on shortcuts, the elbows shouldn't reach as far as they did. That was a mistake on my part, because the animation moved well enough that I didn't pay attention to it being so long. 

Fixing it was NOT fun.

But I'm happy with the final result. Sadly, no clothed variant because Diagora's outfit is complicated enough that the result's just not worth it.

Look forward to more Diagora (and [SPOILER]) studies in the future!

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!