Layout for the January animation! (Patreon)

Hey ya'll! This is the rough of the animation for this month! I'll be spending the rest of the month working on fleshing it out and adding complexity but I wanted to give ya'll an idea here of what to expect. I also wanted to just start sharing some of the things I've been learning as I work on this. I'm still very early on as far as learning animation goes but I think that it's always valuable to share any lessons you learn, early or no.

In this case, the biggest thing that I learned was avoiding getting too detailed early. It's been a struggle for me in the past (as I'm sure it is with most artists) but if you make the mistake in animation it really stiffens it up. You can see that halfway through the last scene the level of detail changes quite a bit: I stopped drawing the claws, I stopped drawing the ears, I stopped worrying about making sure the forms and contours were perfect. I'm going to revisit the last segment again and most likely change the angle, but I feel the weakest part of it is that I didn't push it nearly far enough because I got too caught up in those details instead of worrying about my arcs. I know from illustration and design that as you start to tighten things up you can start to lose a lot of the life from the original concepts and drawings, so to mitigate that you typically push it much further than you actually want it to be in the end. This gives you room so that when you're cleaning up it doesn't turn into cardboard. It's much easier to pull something back if you push it to far than it is to push it further if you are too reserved. I got the idea to start talking about this stuff from an incredible animator whose work you should check out, Patrick Stannard. He has a Patreon where he talks about some really interesting animation related stuff. If you've got an extra dollar consider throwing it his way!

I'll be trying to put more text with each of these Friday posts to sort of give people a better idea of my thought process. Thank ya'll!