I had a fun day/evening yesterday. I decided to apply the stuff I’ve been learning in the animation (Procreate Dreams) class I’m taking. After that adorable hedgehog tutorial I thought what can I do with one of my Intober Monsters? And this is what I came up with…

Behind the Scenes:

If you don’t know… For several of the Inktobers over the years I have played around with these monsters that I made from various shapes. The shape was the prompt I used each day for the Inktober challenge.

In 2018, I created 31 monsters.

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In 2019, I updated those monsters.

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In 2022, I took 7 of the monsters and practiced making them have various expressions.

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This was the starting point for my animation project. I thought Cousin Whatchamacallit would be a great character to play with…

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Next I had to redraw everything in digital, changing the way I typically work.

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A different mindset, for sure,… this time I needed to create it more like a paperdoll project…

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My main goal with this animation was to learn and practice drawing in a paperdoll mindset, and then what can I do with the pieces. I had to time the hair, eyes, and mouth perfectly on different tracks to keep the expression in time. Probably not the smartest way to do the animation, but this was an experiment in, Can I do it? And do I remember what I’ve learned?

Now, instead of noodling with this project… I’m going to jump to the next project and try to have an idea of the animation first, then draw the pieces. Probably the smarter way to do it anyway, heh.

Anyway, I was just so happy to have done this in such a short amount of time, a little less than a day! That I just had to share it.

Previous Attempts at Animation:

My Dot character saying, “WOW!”, took FOREVER because I drew EVERY frame in a vector program, which uses a different way of drawing (Bezier curves) and was a steep learning curve. I think it took a month? Oh, it took me almost two weeks, from this post to this post. Here she is, cute little Dot…

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Ok that’ll do it for today. Hope you have a great rest of the week.

Until next time…

~nic