I'm a 2D wannabe

The Ken Southworth Basic Animation Kit

2012-01-24T19:55:00.006-06:00

Nowadays it seems like there's a new online animation school opening every week. But ten years ago no such thing existed. If you wanted to learn animation and didn't quite merit Cal-Arts you were on your own.

So I was very excited when I was at a convention, perhaps around 1998 or so, and happened across a table selling "The Ken Southworth Animation Videos." Ken Southworth had a long career at a number of studios including work on prominent Disney and Hanna-Barbera titles and now he had made an instructional video.

For $29.99 you got a booklet with discussion of animation principals and full-page keyframes ("extremes") he had drawn for you to copy and use in doing the animation exercises.

And... you got a video (in glorious VHS) showing him showing you how to do it! All hand-drawn on paper of course.

Pedagogically it was a bit spare; a half hour of video instruction wasn't quite enough to clear up all the mysteries of the process for me, and curiously it started out with the most complicated exercise first, but I appreciate that he was trying to get some practical information out there.

Here, after all these years, after many aborted attempts, are my "Ken Southworth Basic Animation Kit" exercises. Thanks, Ken, wherever you are!

There are two more "Ken Southworth" volumes after this... I bought those too all those years ago and I may yet do them!

Inkwell Images, the producer of the Ken Southworth videos, doesn't appear to sell them anymore but they do have an assortment of other interesting animation instruction books that you may want to consider.

the LEGO panic of ought '11

2011-08-03T17:28:00.000-05:00

More fast gesture drawings.

Five of the people in a gi-normous line waiting to get into the LEGO store at the mall yesterday:

Several of these are attempts to capture a walking pose:

These people were not going anywhere:

more heads, no agnes

2011-07-28T13:16:00.000-05:00

Faces seen at yet another chamber music concert.

gone in 60 seconds

2011-07-26T16:16:00.001-05:00

For what is probably the fifth time in 20 years, I'm attempting to do Kimon Nicolaides' book "The Natural Way to Draw". I'll never get around to three hours of drawing with a nude model every day but I'm aiming to get the flavor the curriculum.

A big part of it is lots of quick gesture drawings. Behold, the first batch:

putting on their concert face

2011-07-17T19:15:00.000-05:00

Seen at a cello recital today...

basically Beethoven

2011-07-11T13:12:00.000-05:00

I went to one of the "Basically Beethoven" concerts at Fair Park on Sunday.

First up was 16 year-old pianist Sahun Hong, playing music by Handel, Schubert and Pokofiev which was basically not by Beethoven.

The main event was Dallas Symphony violinist Gary Levinson and pianist Daredjan Baya Kakouberi performing Beethoven's F major and C minor sonatas for piano and violin which were entirely by Beethoven.

I'm afraid these are not very good likenesses of the violinist. Male, 40-something, trim, gray fly away hair... you get the basic idea.

new sketchbook, old art

2011-07-05T18:56:00.000-05:00

It was "free" day at the Dallas Museum of Art. They actually have a pretty nice collection. I saw Van Goghs and Monets and Picassos and even a sculpture by Degas. I didn't know he did sculpture.

Mostly I looked but I did sketch two objets d'art.

A Greek funerary figure, c. 330 BC. His casual pose would work better if he had hands and feet and a head.

Henry Moore's "Reclining Mother and Child" 1976. It's a close call but I think he did better on the mother than on the child.

the last page

2011-07-03T17:34:00.000-05:00

It took me six years but I finally filled up a sketch book. To close it out I tried landscape again.


Sunset-lit clouds across White Rock Lake.

Interior of boathouse at the lake.

This drawing is from last year but shows the boathouse across the water on the left.

Good-bye old sketch book!

I'll try to do better with the next one!

mice are nice

2011-06-25T13:24:00.000-05:00

severed heads

2011-06-24T17:06:00.001-05:00

I just drew heads where I found them today.

humpbacks

2011-06-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

More sketches of hunched-over people, and others, at the mall.

mall creatures great and small

2011-05-01T12:55:00.000-05:00

"Jungle Jim" was at the mall showing children his collection of strange crawling animals.

This is an albino frog. You can tell because he's white.

Tired shopper, dorsal view.

My finest drawing of a duck, so far.

fiction cats

2011-05-01T12:31:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Nancy Beiman's storyboarding book "Prepare to Board."

One of the tasks is to make up four different cat characters.

movin' on up

2011-05-01T12:28:00.001-05:00

March 18. More escalator riders at the mall...

At auction this next drawing will be called "Man trying to find 'YOU ARE HERE' dot on mall directory."

The acoustics of a shopping mall are such that you really can't tell what the pianist is playing, but he looked like he was hitting the right notes.

Tree-top view from the train platform as I wait for it to whisk me back home...

my new year's resolution...

2011-05-01T12:08:00.001-05:00

...to draw something every day didn't get very far.

In junior high shop class I was pretty good at drawing mechanical objects, but those were very rectangular objects.

I'm pretty sure my cat had six legs on the day I drew him or I would not have drawn him with six legs...

You want deep? I'll give you deep. This is a drawing of the camera that was used to take a picture of this drawing of the camera that I use to take pictures of these drawings..

I drew these in blue pencil thinking I would go back someday and refine them. Yup.

woman of mystery

2010-12-29T14:28:00.001-06:00

Who is she? What message awaits on her cellphone? Is that carpet she's sitting on really clean?

I'll never know the answers, but she was at the airport and stopped moving long enough for me to draw her for what may be my last drawing of 2010.

a recliner in the park

2010-10-11T13:12:00.001-05:00

Another outdoor excursion, trying to figure out colored pencil technique.

Illegal dumping in the park... now immortalized in art.

There was probably more to this tree at one time but it must have gotten knocked off in a storm.

Sunset over tree tops.

Post in water.

Colored pencils have a bit too much texture for my taste, and what a hassle when you have to fill in a large area! However, you don't need to water them.

bee on a flower

2010-10-07T18:21:00.001-05:00

I've been reading a book on Monet and how he liked to paint en plein air, outdoors, rather than in the studio. No paint here but I had these colored pencils sitting around and took them to the lake to see what i could do. The results were pretty lame. This is the only one I dare show.

I'm not color whiz. At my old job in corporate video I went thru about a year of doing everything in shades of gray just to see if anyone would notice or care. Nope.

animals are such poseurs

2010-09-30T12:46:00.002-05:00

About 13 years ago I was taking a drawing class and the live model didn't show up so we all got on the train and went to the Dallas Zoo to draw animals.

I didn't get back to try it again until two days ago:

That's either a penguin or a killer whale. The signage wasn't clear.

It's difficult to draw a termite mound and make it not look like a "marital aid".

This Blue-Bellied Roller perched on a twig just a couple feet from me. Probably waiting for an opening to peck the flesh off my skull.

I don't know why the Ibis has such a long beak. Something to do with opening envelopes.

Mr. Gorilla struck a nice figure drawing class pose. I'd say this is my double-plus good drawing of the day.

The Dallas Zoo did a big expansion to give the large animals more roaming space. The down side is that they tend to loiter at the farthest away reaches of that space. I should have brought binoculars to see the elephants. The giraffes would come up close, however, because you could feed them lettuce at a special station.

Andean Condor doing a Bela Lugosi impression.

This tortoise barked at me.

The Barton Springs Salamander has no eyes. This saves money on mascara.

By this drawing my 2D brains were worn out. Thus ends a day at the zoo.

10 short sketches about standing on an escalator

2010-09-21T18:51:00.006-05:00

They're only on the escalator for about 20 seconds so I did this to practice observing quickly and then drawing from memory.

just skip it

2010-08-24T16:59:00.003-05:00

Skipping rope is twice as fun with half the body parts.

Yet another one-afternoon wonder for an 11 second club animation challenge.

run, ball, run

2010-08-22T20:12:00.005-05:00

I scratched this out this afternoon. This is a "rough", not a finished clip.

fat and flat

2010-07-23T11:57:00.005-05:00

From my latest excursion to the mall, more quick sketches, inked in Flash this time.

no stopping

2010-06-07T21:57:00.003-05:00

For International Drawing Day 2010 (I think) I tried two things I haven't tried.

Drawing with a ball-point pen (no way to fix mistakes) and never lifting the pen once I start drawing. So they're going to look rough.

slow moving targets IV

2010-05-27T12:04:00.003-05:00

More sedentary mall-goers. Even the duck was dogging it.

I was a dallas jury foreman

2010-04-01T15:27:00.011-06:00

I just came back from jury duty. A DUI trial. If you ever get arrested for DUI, do it in some previous decade before the invention of the police car video camera.

Here are some sketches from the two day event. These are NOT desperate criminals, these are Dallas County juror candidates.

The guy on the bottom ended up on the same jury as I. I found it difficult to not stare at this body shape and wonder how it worked.

A big chunk of the first day is spent waiting idly for things to get going.

OK, this guy was a desperate criminal

Our court reporter:

Mr. Prosecutor was hot, but I didn't draw him that way:

mall bunnies

2010-03-29T17:39:00.009-06:00

Another trip to the mall, this time to see "How to Train Your Dragon 3D". A bit over-chatty, but pretty good.

Here are the gesture drawings of passers-by. I'm trying to justify spending $10 on a movie by getting drawing practice in on the same trip.

In the food court...

A well-fed mall cop...

I don't like big butts but they stay still longer than the skinny ones.

There were baby bunnies in a bin...

duck! turtle! duck!

2010-03-25T17:48:00.008-06:00

On my excursion to the mall to see "Avatar" today (just getting around to it) I brought my sketchpad along to try some drawings. These are gesture drawings, not studies, this is what I could get in a minute or two before the person walked off.

I'm not real brave about this drawing in public stuff. A person on a bench seen from behind is a frequent theme here...

There really was a duck riding a turtle in the fountain at the mall...

... apparently trying to re-enact scenes from a "B.C." comic strip

How did people go to the mall before the cellphone? There seem to be more people talking on phones than in the stores.

I used to be better at this quick sketching. I need to get back in shape.

how... did i do that?

2010-03-20T12:38:00.006-06:00

I'm cheating a bit, this 2D image is not a hand drawing or even a result of a vector artwork program like Adobe Illustrator. This is a "procedural material" that renders my version of the Indian head from the old TV test patterns.

The 3D program Animation:Master has something called "combiners" that make patterns with a pair of colors. Among those are "spherical" and "grid" combiners and by combining those in various ways it is possible slice and dice them and get results quite different from the more usual uses of procedural materials, such as creating a wood grain texture.

It's not the easiest way to make an image like that, nor the best, but I just tried it as a demo of how far one could go with "combiners".

Here's the Indian Head in place. The test pattern is also procedural materials.

strum strum strum

2010-03-05T10:09:00.002-06:00

My attempt to capture a guitar in just three lines.

Onward I draw, no?

2010-01-02T19:42:00.004-06:00

For Palindrome Day in America I have attempted to draw the defunct Harmon-Ising character "Bosko" looking at himself in a mirror.

This brings to mind a passage in "The Illusion of Life" where the answer to "How do you draw Mickey Mouse's head from the top?" was "Don't try to draw Mickey Mouse's head from the top."

better than one

2010-01-01T15:17:00.003-06:00

For the new year I resolve to draw more and draw better.

Here's "more". A quick go at sketching human heads without reference.

mystery caricature #2

2009-12-19T01:57:00.002-06:00

Any guesses?

to see what he could see

2009-12-18T02:49:00.003-06:00

A desperate, knock it out in ten minutes and get it into the mail, Christmas greeting card for my brother and his family. Last year I made individual cards for them but it went unnoticed so I'm not going to great lengths this time. I'm not even going to worry about the fact that bears do not have long floppy ears.

They're not "art" people. The answer to most questions around their household usually contains the the words "hiking" or "skiing".

So what fitting gift accompanies this picture of a bear going over a mountain?

Four pounds of trail mix.

mystery caricature of the day

2009-12-07T19:15:00.003-06:00

SNAP!

2009-12-04T23:03:00.002-06:00

I recently finished a long stint on someone else's 3D project. I did this tonight to see if I could still draw.

Nope, guess not!

you've got to be a football hero

2009-10-05T11:21:00.006-05:00

A quick sketch for an online drawing challenge about five years ago.

Topic: "the warrior"

I knew everyone else was going to be doing medieval fantasy armor so I was going to be different. Still didn't win though!

I think this came out of my year as a high school band director in the microscopic west Texas town of Sanderson. The school only had about 100 students so every boy HAD to go out for football no matter how pathetically scrawny he was. Technically not required but I'm sure the peer pressure was enormous. Of all the boys in my band exactly one was not on the football team and thus able to be in the marching band during football season.

That was Martin (mar-TEEN), about the only person in that whole town with what might be identified as having wit or cleverness. One Friday night he asked me if he could lead the band in the school fight song.

"Sure" I said. The game was just about over. The "Eagles" were losing again. It didn't matter and the band didn't really need a conductor for that anyway.

So, he gets up and does the best parody of conducting I've ever seen. He's giving cues and dynamics and everything, too. Imagine Stokowski doing a fight song for Fantasia but funnier. I wish I had film of it.

I have no idea what became of Martin after that year. I hope he got out of that sleepy town.

do the inchworm

2009-09-27T13:48:00.004-05:00

What can I animate in the time it takes to bake a pizza?

An inchworm!

The ink and paint came later.

Now that I look at it I think I should have made him a bit flatter where his front half touches the ground. That would have suggested solid contact more. And I should have done some squash wrinkles in his middle when he's scrunched up.

shoe too

2009-07-19T19:26:00.002-05:00

Another go at drawing a turn-around of the cartoon shoe.

First I drew a plain rectangle doing the diagonal rotation I wanted. Then I drew a shoe to match the perspective of the rectangle on each frame. Then I cleaned that up and slapped some happy paint on.

the turn of the shoe

2009-07-16T01:46:00.003-05:00

I decided I needed practice drawing the classic cartoon shoe so i did this turn-around as a little exercise.

That's followed by a new rough walk-cycle which was what convinced me I needed practice drawing those shoes.

Still chippin' away on that walk cycle stuff...

three kitty cats

2009-07-07T11:00:00.006-05:00

OK, I lied... they're all the same cat.

accidental sasquatch sighting

2009-07-03T12:36:00.002-05:00

My first attempt at quickly roughing out a 2D walk cycle.

one-legged jumps

2009-07-01T21:06:00.007-05:00

The fifth Animation Mentor assignment was do three jumps with a one-legged ball. For this 2D revisit of the task I drew a one-legged torso somewhat like the "Norman" character in Eric Goldberg's recent book "Character Animation Crash Course".

The legs were the hardest part of this one. I redid many of the drawings several times to try to get them to maintain approximately the same proportions from frame to frame.

I also did a brief CG test of jumping motion to quickly experiment with timing and posing. I regret there's nothing quite as convenient as IK legs in hand drawn animation.

When I compare my hand-drawn animation to my original 3D version of the school assignment...

... I miss all the little jiggles and squetches I was able to add to the CG character.

In CG (Animation:Master in this case) if you want to adjust your squetch you just have to move one slider or shift a few bones. Try to adjust your squetch in 2D and you have to redraw the whole character, not just once but on many frames. Some of the CG squetches are so small i don't think they could be done in drawings.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

Drawing Day 2009

2009-06-06T16:40:00.002-05:00

A time-lapse drawing for Drawing Day 2009

It's like watching Polaroids develop!

I now return to animation...

jumping ball with overlapping tail motion

2009-05-06T03:11:00.004-05:00

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.

why mickey wears shorts

2009-03-21T13:20:00.005-06:00

As I was trying to draw some legs on a simple character it occurred to me that putting Mickey mouse in shorts wasn't just for modesty's sake.

If you look at a typical flat-colored rubber-hose style appendage as in "a" it's rather ambiguous as to which way it is really bending.

But if you add that pant cuff just a little bit down the leg as in "b" or "c" you get a clue as to the intended direction of the knee.

Of course, there are lots of times that Mickey doesn't wear shorts, but then they have to work harder at drawing him with real articulated knees.

vertical jump test

2009-03-14T00:55:00.004-06:00

This is really just a preparatory study for a more complicated exercise I'm working on, so I didn't spend any time doing cleanup on it. I'm working on a character jumping forward and I did this to simplify it down to just the up and down motion.

obstacle course with anticipation

2009-02-16T12:29:00.002-06:00

A squetchy ball jumping (with anticipation) thru an irregular obstacle course. My 2D re-make of the third AnimationMentor assignment.

Includes a brief bit of "drybrush" motion blur drawn onto the frames with ArtRage Studio's "crayon" brush.

Rigorous physics simulation has taken a back seat here to trying to get the overall flow right. Some these bounces are weightier than others.

This is mostly two's with some brief one's. Not all of the bounces are full Preston Blair-style bounces; they seemed to be killing the momentum of the ball in spots.

damped pendulum started with a hook

2009-02-06T15:04:00.002-06:00

A brief exercise in oscillating motion and slowly coming to a stop. This is all on twos except for the very last swing which was just too small to inbetween so it has a couple of fours in it.

red balloon, lead balloon

2009-01-26T10:24:00.006-06:00

My hand-drawn, 2D interpretation of the second Animation Mentor exercise: the light ball, heavy ball test.

My goal was to make the light ball so light that air resistance is a major factor in its motion.

This is animated on ones, twos, threes and even some fours and fives. One surprising discovery was that more inbetweens did not necessarily make the light ball look smoother or lighter.

I recall when I was in elementary school that every year they would show us Albert Lamorisse's "Le Ballon Rouge" (The Red Balloon), which I guess was their subtle way of teaching us it was bad to beat up on red balloons.

rotating cylinder

2009-01-06T21:49:00.001-06:00

A rotating cylinder turning in perspective. A brief exercise in trying to be accurate.

I used the usual vector drawing tools to make smooth lines but no 3D modeling is involved here. The rotating box on the upper right is an "overhead" view to help me guesstimate the changing profile of the cylinder as it turned.

Pretty close.

swishy cow tail

2008-12-30T21:52:00.005-06:00

Twenty years ago I tried to draw something like this in Deluxe Paint on my AMIGA computer, but the overlapping motion was too much to wrap my mind around. So this is progress, right?

music: Brandenburg Concerto #6 Mvt. 3 by Bach, performed by the Advent Chamber Orchestra, licensed for this use under the EFF Open Audio License.

with every christmas card I blight

2008-12-18T18:31:00.006-06:00

I don't send out actual Christmas cards anymore, but when I send someone a gift I sketch out some quick personalized scribble to attach to it.

Here are a few I cranked out today with the ulterior motive of practicing my generic cartoon character construction:

for my nephew who wants to be a pilot

for my niece who has started learning clarinet

a Boxing Day card for one of my non-Christmas celebrating friends

bouncing ball 2

2008-12-10T00:03:00.002-06:00

Ok, here's some actual new animation. The squetchy bouncing ball. I did this all on "twos" (two frames per drawing at 24 frames per second) just to see how that would look. The contact frames look a bit sticky on two's but I think it works.

The strobing isn't as bad as I expected. To investigate that a bit further I did this little turn test on a cone. One is on ones and the other is on twos. Can you tell which is which?

Not a dramatic difference, is it?

squetchy jumping can

2008-12-06T22:48:00.004-06:00

A quick warm-up I did a couple of years ago. I thought it would be quick. It took several hours.

That may not look like a big deal in 2D, but it would be a major hassle in 3D to try to rig a cylinder to do all that deforming.

Big mistake I just noticed: the can is bigger at the end than it was at the beginning. I'll do better next time.

hey coach...

2008-09-22T11:12:00.005-05:00

A few drawings I made in attempts to coach some people on animations they were doing. Not wildly successful attempts, just attempts.

my sister's birthday

2008-09-21T13:48:00.002-05:00

Two quick sketches I made for my sister's birthday card:

"The blackberry crop failed this year..."

"So I'm sending you my peach jam instead!"

I notice I've got the feet in an impossible position in the first drawing. Maybe I'll get it right next year.

stewardess pouring a drink

2007-12-26T16:38:00.000-06:00

I brought my sketch pad with me on my flight to Minnesota for Christmas thinking I would get some drawing done on the plane. This gesture is all I got around to, however.

I haven't posted much 2D here recently because I've been consumed by a 3D project which, for better or for worse, is nearing completion.

some Goofy angles

2007-09-27T17:35:00.000-05:00

John K continues on with his animation course by having people draw different views of a model of TopCat. I don't have a TopCat sculpture but I do have a Goofy phone...

so I used that as my reference.

The Bosko Bounce

2007-08-23T17:10:00.002-05:00

Slight detour from that dry bouncing ball stuff...

Famous animation director John Kricfalusi is leading an online tutorial in which he is endeavoring to teach classic 2D animation by copying examples from Golden Age animation of the 1930's and 40's. It sounds unlikely, but consider that great composers like Bach and Handel learned their stuff by copying note-for-note the works of older masters.

So maybe he's on to something.

Anyway, the first assignment was to do the bounce cycle in a clip from an old Bosko cartoon

Here's my semi cleaned-up effort; I haven't removed all the overlapping lines. This is all hand drawn (and damn, it took a long time to do), no computer "tweening" involved.

(Music created with Voyetra "Dance eJay 2")

The original clip is so foggy that I had to guess at several details. I get the sense that the feet are turning up to expose the sole of the shoe, so I drew it that way but it's just a theory. The sliding of the heels as he lifts his foot... it's in the original, whether they meant it or not, so I did that too rather than try to "correct" it. The major adjustment I made was to make the hips do more of a slow in/slow out at the top of their motion. I think it gives it a bit more weight to swing faster through the bottom of the arc. He still looks like he's hitting a rock at the top, though. I also exaggerated the lagging of the feet as the lift up and down.

I did this in layers so I could study and tweak the motion of each body part separately without having to erase over something that was already working:

By keeping things on layers I could also experiment with offsetting the timing of the body parts. Here the hips have been advanced one frame. I think it gives the head a more bouncy look:

John K says he's waiting for 20 people to do this lesson before he goes on to post lesson #2. I think I'm only the 10th, so there may be some delay. Back to bouncing balls...

update... Bosko in glorious nuanced shades of gray:

a side of dogs

2007-08-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

A few more stabs at developing a proper side view of the dog I sketched previously. I haven't really captured it yet.

But I've been reading John Kricfalusi's musings on teaching character animation and he's suggesting starting with a VERY generic rubber hose character, so I may do that rather than try to go with a unique distinctive one.

Pears and hoses, I can draw those maybe.

designing dogs

2007-07-30T14:39:00.000-05:00

Knowing I'll have to eventually draw something more than bouncing balls, I've been practicing headshapes in the style of the Preston Blair book:

And Preston Blair pear-shaped bodies:

I want to come up with a character that follows the generic construction principles but isn't a mouse, a duck or a rabbit. I've been thinking "dinosaur", but haven't got it "cute" yet:

And it's a bit too complex for quick drawing.

Something else I've been thinking of is a dog that's almost all head, kind of like Bandit on "Jonny Quest" but even less body.

Obviously this is all still in the larval stage. Lots of work to do.

Bouncing Ball

2007-07-28T14:40:00.000-05:00

My first bouncing ball of the new era. A bouncing ball with no squash and no stretch. This is all on 2's except for the last micro bounces at the very end.

I think the 2's made it harder to get a feeling of impact on the bounces. It's also difficult bringing the ball to a stop. The tiny adjustments you can make in CG are tough to do in hand-drawn.

I'll give myself a "B" on this one. :-)

Why 2D?

2007-07-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

I've been doing 3D animation for some years now, but I still admire the freedom of hand drawn character animation. I'm going to start repurposing what I've learned about timing, posing and animation principles while doing CG and see what I can do in 2D.

I will be using some 2D computer tools like Flash, ToonBoom Studio, Plastic Animation Paper and various paint programs to enable the process, but I won't be using any automated inbetweening powers they may have. This will be all about drawing by hand.

I studied at AnimationMentor.com in 2005-2006 and learned quite a bit, but did all my exercises in 3D CG. I saw a few students stick their toe in 2D there, but they retreated to CG pretty fast. It just wasn't possible to get a weekly assignment done well and on time in 2D.

But I don't have any deadlines now, so I'm going to start by redoing my AnimationMentor assignments in hand-drawn animation. This was my first bouncing ball at AnimationMentor:

I think I can do a bouncing ball in 2D. But full blown character animation wasn't far down the line. We'll see how it goes!