Talita and Bip Animation (Patreon)

I don't normally do public posts here, but I already posted this as a gif to social media and Patreon seems like a nice place to drop a polished full-rez video and talk more at length about animation.

I don't animate very frequently these days, but I used to fill up post-it pads with flipbook animations as a kid. This last burst of gifs has been me finally taking the dive to learn how the animation features work in Clip Studio Paint EX, and I'm surprised how much I still enjoy making characters run around! I've kind of avoided animating this past decade because none of my art programs made it very easy, and as a time consuming medium to begin with, it was rarely worth the effort.

I'm extremely interested in creating figures and places that feel like they have a real weight and physicality to them, and comics are certainly the fastest way for me to tell a visual story. But there's something so magical about adding motion... the amount of information and character acting you can fit into a piece is so much denser in animation than a comic page.

I don't think I'll be doing a lot of animations like this (this took about 20 non-continuous hours, goddamn am I great at procrastinating on writing) but I'm very happy to have a program that lets me make them so easily again. Yes, I did feel a bit of regret about making my protagonist a hexapod while I was drawing frames for this, but I like how it turned out. The shoulder rotation as she turns her head I'm particularly fond of. It also kind of got lost in the fast scramble at the end, but she puts her phone in her pocket:

This one goes out to the people who keep asking me how she puts her pants on. Talita's arms are longer and more flexible than they look.