Demi-Ladies and Talking Hats

 

Sustra & Dogoro with Nemo & Rae. Although coming from radically different backgrounds, these dimension-hopping, multi-talented adventurers and their textile companions find they may have much in common.

Sketch Dump, Ladies and Others

 

 

  

 

 

Another big ol' dump of sketches, made on various programs.

New Litlins Unlocked!

 

Finally came up with some more simplified character designs for Poppy to interact with. Margot, the Golden Ant, and Phiz, the Skink. Not sure when I'll get back to actually animating, though. I think if I do follow through on this, I will perhaps go with the Litlin idea (small critter-sized characters in a world left behind by the larger species).

Made Ya Look!

Rae being a little scamp, and Nemo reacting appropriately! :V I was initially going to color this, but it's already late and doing this too long kills my body's joints, so maybe I'll come back to it later and update this post when I do.

Created with Clip Studio Paint. Fresco was fun for a toe-dip into the medium, but it's time to graduate to an animation engine actually built for making full scenes, and not just quick little looping effects. Unfortunately, to animate more than 24 frames in total for CSP requires spending even more money on either a monthly subscription, or a substantive amount for the PC version. The other alternative people have recommended is Krita, which is free, but the UI just is not optimized for use on mobile tablets, which is what I've switched to full time now. I still have the XP-Pen, and it still works great, but it's just not the same, and truth be told, I left Krita behind because I've found other programs to be more compelling. It's still a good program with plenty of neat brushes, so it wouldn't be the worst thing to go back to it, but does feel like I'd be going backwards to a less optimal situation.

There are other options, but all of them are programs I'm unfamiliar with, some of which seem substantially more complicated. It's also been pointed out to me that I've been hopping between programs too much lately, which is something I was already thinking, but I guess needed to have it said outright. I haven't been sticking with programs long enough to really adapt to them, just mostly end up wasting time playing around with the brushes for a bit without committing.

 I guess I got a little caught up in all the options that tablets have opened up for me. For a time, I had fully switched over to CSP as my main, and fortunately, it was also available for iPad and Android tablets. However, CSP got a little annoying with its updates, and has now decided to DRM lock itself so that you need to log in for conformation of ownership at least once a day, which means that if I'm not able to access wi-fi while I'm out and about, CSP forces me into doodle mode, where I can't save my work unless I just screenshot it, or just try to keep the canvas open and hope the program doesn't reset itself again when I put it in sleep mode.

Ergo, I got to looking around for one-time purchase or free alternatives, and before I knew it, I'm now juggling like six or seven different programs. On the one hand, I guess that is what ultimately lead to me trying out animation as I decided on whim to start playing around with the simpler animation features of Procreate, and then Fresco. On the other hand, if I am going to learn the ropes, I do need to just pick something a stick with it, so I'm not constantly working while on my back foot of never getting used to any given program's specific quibbles.

Poppy Update

 

Decided Poppy looked a little too much like Mickey Mouse, so I decided to update her model a bit to resemble more of a jerboa. Still not totally sure what her deal is, and I've been trying, and not really succeeding, to design similar doodle-critter-characters to have her interact with. I have a vague idea she could be a "Litlin", one of several species of diminuitive demihumans who live in a world where "giants" (normal people) once ruled the Earth, but had mysteriously vanished years ago, leaving Litlins to navigate a suddenly vast and empty world. Or maybe she's a human-sized knight errant. Or maybe just a farmer caught up in shenanigans. Who knows? Likely, if I don't come up with something specific for her soon, she'll join the massive pile of other characters I came up with for something, then never followed through.

Update: More Poppys

Poppy

 

Attempting to design some simplistic toons for more animating. So here's a new adventurer demihuman girl. No idea what's up with her yet. We shall see as her escapades unfold!

(first version)

(slight FPS edit)

And here's a little animation of her! Putting up two versions, as I can't decide which speed works best for the final moment of the clip. Meant to do something longer, but I got distracted by other things. Definitely need a lot of work on model consistency, but some of that is me rushin' to get some proof of concept done today. Not sold on her color pallet yet, or general design, but maybe I can tweak it more.

I find myself already hitting hard technical limitations on Fresco; pathing is way less useful than I thought it might be for little background elements, and moreover, there's a hard FPS cap; I wanted to have the clouds slowly and consistently move across the sky, but they kept going too fast and I couldn't line up the loop consistently. Looping the ground was also a tremendous pain to line up properly and still couldn't help but get glitched.

Fresco and Procreate are good for cute little looping gifs, but I think I'm going to have to upgrade to Krita or Blender sooner rather than later. Assuming my interest actually stick around longer than another week.

Skull Slash

 

Animation is a medium I've only had the barest and briefest of interests in before, but suddenly, I've found myself wanting to play around with it lately. This was made using Adobe Fresco. Initially, I was starting to use Procreate, but Fresco has some more features that make for a better workflow in creating simple animations (such as a easier UI layout for animating on different layers). While I don't think it would be good for full-throated animation production, simple little bits like this its pretty solid for. Still has some irritating flubs to it, but I'm also only toe-dipping here.

Fresco is a fully loaded illustration program that I believe is basically just all the illustration features of Photoshop forked off into its own program. Astonishingly for Adobe, it's also (almost) entirely free. You can pay a subscription for a couple extra brushes and materials and bigger cloud storage, but I can easily do without those. Even the animation system is, as far as I can tell, fully featured without needing to pay for it. Considering this is Adobe, I'm sure at some point they'll start pay walling it, but so far, so good!

I don't know that I'll go hard into this medium outside of some simple tinkering. Something as crude as this test sample doesn't take too long to make, but any serious animation effort would take monstrously more time and effort, not to mention kill the shit out of my arm, versus even just doing a comic. Still, in lieu of actually coming up with comics to make, its good to try out new things.

By the way, just who is this mighty skull character? We saw in before in my squiggle-vision post. Given how you want to keep things simple for animation, especially starting out, maybe this goofy guy will be a nice animation mascot to try things out with.