Mipha's journey in animation (Patreon)

Here's a breakdown of how I animated Mipha's turn around.

1. The first thing to consider is how a femmenine body turns around, after imagining it in my head I ended up with this pose. I recommend looking at references but I wasn't feeling like doing that so I just imagined a 3D render of a fem bod and drew that instead. The face, hair and arms shouldn't be here in this phase as the only thing I wanted to consider was the turning of the body, everything else will come in later. Btw this base will be useful to keep some consistency between drawings so doing this actually saved me some time instead of figuring out each part of the turn for the next frame.

2. Mipha doesn't actually have hair, she has a shark in her head so the tail sticks out like a ponytail and the fins look like long threads of hair on each side of her head, after thinking how something like that would flow with the turning I winged it and drew it frame by frame. The position of her arm is based on some artwork I found of her with her arm on her chest, giving her a meek and shy appearance (because she looks like she's closed off to everyone). Her forehead gave me trouble so I started to draw it too in the next 3 or so frames to keep that consistency.

3. After al that pre work I made a last layer to draw clean linework and finish the animation. My favorite part of it is definitely how her "hair-like" fins react to her whole body turning. I'm still getting a hang on animation's 12 principles like arcs and anticipation but to practice stuff like this, no matter how stiff it may look at first, gives me perspective on how to get better at it next time.

If you liked my breakdown of this animation and read the whole thing then thank you very much! Feel free to try doing something like this if you ever try to animate. Knowledge should be shared more often and replicated 💜