A friend's dog died recently and we exchanged some old photos, one of which had him, his dog and my dog - Nomi in Provincetown. I had a better copy of the photo and sent it to my friend but immediately missed my dog who died in 2008 and I think of every day still. He was off to the side in the photo and partially obscured by my friend's arm and leg but his expressions as so wonderful I wanted to draw it. I didn't do enough drawings and photos of him ( never enough) partly because he was around before the digital photo era and taking photos was much more complicated and expensive.
Drawn in Procreate over 10 days when I had time to focus on his little happy face.
My puppy is less of a puppy soon, he is almost 2 years old. He was standing on top or and staring at me and I decided to use that pose as a drawing. This is a definite consequence of the ability to draw anywhere, anytime with the iPad Pro. I was able to do my sketch, then take a couple photos to reference for details and finish it in a couple hours. Working digitally has increased my productivity in general but the IPad has done a lot to put how much I can do to new limits. This is the 5th drawing of the little pest I've done in 2 years so he will be the most artistically represented dog I've ever had.
Affinity Photo was the app I used, I like to mix it up and it keeps me familiar with the variety of software I use.
My second attempt at 2D animation. I found some very helpful tutorials that moved me along with Open Toonz and I also looked into Adobe animate which I was fairly familiar with after doing tons of work in Flash back in the day... they are the same program, really.
I wanted to go deeper and did, but I think I should try vector drawing over raster drawing next time. I did some animation in Apple's Motion app this time and also added the shows and smoke effect there. I played with adding motion blur to the characters but it looked too weird. The rally toy looked awesome but not the rest. I also tried a few tricks for the falling toy. I did a quick sketch animation by hand, then reproduced it in a 3D with some physics applied to see how it might look and need up using a combo of the 2.
I kept getting disturbed while doing this one and had to redraw it 3 times at one point to get back into the feel of it again. The drawing tools in Open toonZ don't really help thought if I use it next time I'll try some of the new brushes they just added in a new update that also squashed some bugs I had last time out.
These are just tests to see what I can do and what I have to learn and even if it's something I can get a good handle on. One thing I've noticed looking over the work of others on YouTube and TV is that the tools seem to be driving the styles of animation these days. What I mean that the current crop of animation software is focused less on drawing everything by hand and more geared towards making 2D puppets that sort of look like simple video game animations to me. For sure it's cheaper, faster and less of a headache to make things this way but It is a little disappointing as well.
