why mickey wears shorts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.