Character

For this assigment my plan is to use 2D animation and I wanted to come up with a new character design that would be simple and easy to animate. To keep with consistency I measured my character as that was the scale I would be using to block out the walking poses.

I have also realised that scale is harder to keep when drawing a side profile from a front or quarter profile.

Reference and First Draft

Here is the reference I initally used to help block out my poses.

Blocking out is kind of fun and frustrating at the same time. This was mainly due to the fact that I have difficulty copying myself and so concistency can sway a little bit. I think my blocking looks alright but there was something bothering me about it. I was trying to keep in mind that my character is a female and the poses just didn’t seem that feminine.

Reference 2 and Final Draft

I decided to take a video of myself walking in the way I was trying to imagine my character walking. I wasn’t interested on how the upper body looked as it was the legs that bothered me so much.

I also took a picture of the gap between my own feet when walking.

From gathering those I was able to discern that the feet on my poses were too far apart and that I was lifting the leg too much when moving foward. Therefore I made the changes to my poses and they look much better. I also thought of doing the walk from a front view, however that would only happen if I had the time.

Animation

So the plan with this animation is to have the character walk across the screen, so I put my two blocking images together so get a look how it will all look. And thankfully it did look like a walk so it on to the drawing part.

 

I used the side profile concept of the character to get a good baseline on how the body was going to look and used that for each of the poses.

At some point when each pose was done, I ran through the animation to see how it looked, and it was weird. It worked but just didn’t look right to me. So instead I put the frames in one place, that way rather than walk across the screen the character is walking in one spot. I really liked this so I kept it. Should be easy enough to change it again if I wanted to.

For this animation I was working in 3’s.

Draft

Have to say I am pretty pleased on how the draft turned out.

Updates

When running through the animation I was noticing that something was off, and by going through it frame by frame I noticed that the back foot is drawn bigger than the front foot in a few frames. Because of this is was making the back foot look like the front foot at times and was offputting. Therefore I went back to the frames and edited the foot when necessary.

The next update was to add the colour. This was supposed to be simple but a problem did keep coming up. When using the fill tool sometimes it wouldn’t work, this is because the lines aren’t properly connected. It was such a pain when this happened, like it could be a really tiny gap and it wouldn’t work. So I had to keep going back and forth drawing and colouring whenever this occured. Happened more often that I would have liked.

Improvements

To improve with this I would add more detail in the clothing to make it more realistic and I would do a better job with concistency as some features are drawn differently (more noticeable on the face). I would also do some animating of the arms. The way it is now is because I wanted a feminine walk, however more skill would be shown if I animated the arms.