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.