do the inchworm

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

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

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...

accidental sasquatch sighting

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

one-legged jumps

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!

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.