Animating Illustrations: Illustration 2 Animated

I enjoyed my first try at an illustration inspired by Rebecca Mock, so I decided to try another - this time applying the concepts much more to character animation than just a whole scene, as a chance to practice some animation without having to worry about creating a whole 40 seconds and having no idea how to do that well. I have used another piece of fan art so that I don't focus too much much on designing new things, and so that I can apply this technique to other peoples' designs if need be,

I have missed being able to focus so much on thicker lines, especially when doing smaller or more detailed images. It was fun being able to go fairly thick, although I would have to keep in mind the brush size when animating. I did these lines in Paint Tool SAI which gives me much clearer, crisp lines than in Photoshop, no matter what the settings.

I used the anime for colour reference, before upping the saturation slightly because I like working in much brighter tones.

I didn't want to use the same shading as last time or too many blurry elements on the character because that would make animating him a lot harder. I don't think it would have been as effective with my thicker lines anyway, so it looks better this way. I added a few cloud shapes before blurring them along with a translucent layer for the smoke.

This piece is animated fully in Photoshop rather than After Effects, since I don't think there would have been any way to get the effects that I wanted, except maybe the smoke. It was nice to try more hand drawn animation again, although I still don't think I could do a longer piece with more animation and really enjoy it. This was fun though and I would like to maybe try it on some of my own characters at some point and see how animating different parts of the illustrations changes the focus of the image.

This has a lot more animation in than Mock's pieces, but I think it works since the focus is on the character rather than the background. The foot outside/on top of the frame was unintentional; I left the edge of the ship white while I was working on the rest of it, but I like the almost 3D effect it gives, and it would be fun to play around with a bit more.

This has made me a little bit friendly towards 2D animation again, although I still don't enjoy it as much as designing but if it can be used more as a tool to explore and/or show off my designs and illustrations then I am willing to play with it again.