Hey All!

This morning I had two ideas… one, to have Willow come closer and slowly get bigger (so that we can see her expression when she lands – she’s dizzy), and two, that I could animate Willow’s descent from the tree with the samara seed backpack… here’s the rough idea…

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Then I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t some niche thing… because the spinning seeds I’ve seen in real life are one-winged and drift down nearly horizontally, which would have me drawing Willow from a completely different view… basically we’d see her face towards the ground and her sides spinning past us… not that great visually, really.

But I had seen this one seed in my search, but then couldn’t find any more reference photos.

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Only one reference photo started to make me suspicious, so I kept digging. Hours and hours later… I started to finally see reference photos of that kind of samara seed. By searching for Winged Dipterocarp Seed, Dipterocarpaceae, Shorea Seeds, Gyrocarpus and Wings of Meranti Seed… not sure what the common names are because they are from trees in different countries than my own. But they do exist! Wahoo. Now I had more reference photos.

Now to figure out how the ‘wings’ look from different angles… my trusty kneaded erasure to the rescue…

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I’m currently cleaning up the sketches and figuring out how the ‘wings’ look from each angle…

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That’s all I have for now. Today is Friday, how is it already Friday? Anywho, I plan to work on this over the weekend, hopefully I’ll have something closer to finished by Monday… see you then?

Until next time…

~nic