Animation test part II

So I'm back taking another whack at the home animation pipeline.  With my last animation there were two major problems. One, it just took WAY TOO LONG to make and secondly, clean up was just an issue for me. I had been using the pencil tool because I feel like it hides mistakes more but it looks. so. ugly. 

So I wanted to take the time to figure out how to clean up animation better. As I've come to discover... clean up artists are really the unsung heroes of the art world. Clean up is not easy! Give those guys/girls some respect. 

First I went through my recent doodles and picked out someone with a design that looked pretty simple. 

Exhibit A: 

Quickly roughed out something simple...

which became the following:

I simplified the design a bit because I wanted to stay focused on my learning clean up goal.

 I wanted him to feel like a chubby bumble bee and referenced Disney's Spike the bee and My little Pony for flight reference. I found that the wings are animated on 2's in a sporadic sort of way with a bit of motion blur every now and then. I tried coloring in the blur at first but it looked too distracting to me so I left it empty and I think that looks alright. 

I actually did clean up twice. Once with the paint brush tool. But it looked bad. It was too hard to control the line wight and the inconsistency looked bad.  Then I tried the mechanical pencil tool and it looked way better! The line weight was consistent, thin and looks way better. 

I'm going to have to see if going forward, doing clean up twice just has to be part of the process or not. I ran into problems where in rough animation I didn't have every detail drawn on every panel and when I went to clean up I wouldn't know where to draw a line. Doing clean up twice or just fudging it once? Find out next time... 

This animation only took me around four days to complete.  Which is insane compared to my last side project which took and insane 87days on and off to complete.  My last project had it's own unique hurdles like, relearning how to use TVPaint program and it was longer and more complex but still. Now that I remember how to use TVP and now that I understand how to used the mechanical pencil tool to do clean up. I think things are really going to speed up.  I mean. As much as animating can be. Like from a snails pace to a tortoise. 

Nice.