Week 10 – Starting to line

Following up on the sketches from last week, I was now taking the animatic and starting to do my line work to make it appear more clear and smooth to the audience.

I started using a schedule at this point in time, as it’s never too late for improvements, and felt it helped me organise and manage my time easier resulting in more efficient work progress. See below for my work schedules and how I felt keeping them simple would help me keep a straight head and focus on my work.

I used a lot of this time to fix the Nyxer creature design and make it look more believable in anatomy, also taking my time to taper off the edges of the legs and shoulders, realising at this point I was most likely doing things wrong as I’d been too ambitious and done too much to handle. However, i persevered and fixed the creature, then moving onto the Anglerfish Child’s lines and adding the detail of her clothing.

Above is an example of how it looked whenever I took my feedback into consideration and changed the anatomy and posing of the Nyxer creature in my animation, arching its back more and making it actually bend down low to the ground as it growls, giving it a much more exaggerated and dangerous effect than the below example of before when I first animated the creature and only bent its head down a little. In the video above, as you can see I also made small notes and sketches to help me get the posing correct in a less detailed manner.

In this example above of my “before” animation, you can see how much less effective and confusing it is to the example prior. The tail moves in a confusing way instead of in an arc, the back appears to want to rip through the skin as the front legs bend and the head dips and the body unexpectantly elongates, pushing it back legs back and its front legs forward, making no sense in anatomy and believability.

I also took this time to completely erase the drawings of her eye and fix them using appropriate references, resulting in a more believable and better looking eye, though i still struggled with the eyelashes as i wanted to keep it simple yet also realistic to a point. See below for the references I gathered, noticing how the eye slants down at the top and goes up along the bottom to then meet at an acute angle and make the eyelids, which I found by taking video reference of my own eye, seems to close over on the eye whenever you look down. For this part I also took a video reference of myself progressing from a neutral face to frowning, as I needed to see how the eyebrows worked alongside the eyelids whenever someone frowns.