jumping ball with overlapping tail motion

My hand-drawn 2D interpretation of the fourth Animation Mentor assignment.



I've committed a classic art school student mistake here... making the assignment more complicated than it needed to be. The actual assigned task was just to animate the ball doing three jumps with overlapping motion on the trailing tail, all from a straight side view.

Trying to draw this from an angle made this mega harder. In CG the computer handles perspective and character size and volume for you automatically. In 2D that's a battle you fight on every frame.

The falling block was an off-topic addition too. If you watch it it does a nice little bounce as it hits the ground, but if you're watching the block you're not watching the ball and tail, which was the real object of the assignment.

Drawing that solid block in perspective as it tips over was a time-eating challenge, and I could have gotten a better result, faster by animating it in 3D (with Animation:Master, of course) and rotoscoping that into my drawings. Which I will do in the future if I need any tumbling solids.

I'll give myself a passing grade on this. I don't think this would be "A" work but I think it shows successful overlapping motion.