2018's Animation Project:

My big goal for 2018 was to learn animation, so let's see how I did. I bought a good, comprehensive textbook on animation, I read it over the summer, I poked around a bit with Clip Studio Paint's animation features, I downloaded the new update to Clip Studio Paint with enhanced animation features... and on December 27th I finally had time to try to animate something.
And I hated everything I did!
I erased and started over about four times, trying simpler forms each time. Finally I just mapped the path I wanted my creature to take with just a dot that represented its head. Once I got the dot to move through space attractively, I put a spine on it. Hated how that turned out. I couldn't get the entire thing to follow believably from one frame to the next. So I went back and erased that, replacing it with a shorter, straight spine for the neck to the limbs. I thought about the placement of the limbs in relation to the path and motion of my creature, and ended up with... kind of a short-stemmed flying lollipop.
But that actually looked fairly decent. It moved in space, growing as it came closer, shrinking as it moved farther, dipping down as the wings came up, and appearing to be propelled up and forward as the wings came down.
Now, adding detail so that it actually looks like the thing I want it to look like... I am so far off model. I've missed something terribly important but I misplaced my animation textbook over the holidays. I'm considering changing my logo to the flying lollipop. I need to make it slow down at three key points, but I think I've reached the limit to the number of cels I can add to my timeline. So I have a few separate problems to solve – I think the off-model thing isn't so terrible, since I can redraw each cel and fix that, and besides, things do get a little stretchy when they move. But the slowing down and pausing needs more cels, and I'm not quite sure how to get the program to add them in for me.
All this and I haven't even tried to export or upload anything. Uploading can't happen quite yet anyway, but any day now the contractors will come out and finish connecting the fiber optic. I am beyond excited for this. I'm going to have to get over my nervousness about being on camera so I can actually make and upload videos.

So I'm going to keep plugging away at it and once it's possible to upload video without timing out, I'll post my logo intro on YouTube and link it here.