I’m bored and procrastinating on an animation, so instead of actually doing it, I decided to rant about animation! Here are tons of my tips and tricks for animating. Feel free to use any of them to improve your own works fellow animators! This post will be divided into four sections; Motivation and burnout, Art/drawing tips, Transitions, and Programs. Please keep in mind I am in no way an expert or claiming to be one, however I do art for a living, and I’ve been animating for nearly six years now, so I feel like I probably know a thing or two.
Motivation and Burnout:
-Take constant breaks however often you need. This can be every 30 minutes, every time you finish a scene, hell, even every time you finish a frame. Stretch, watch a short YouTube video, get something to eat, ex. I personally don’t have a break schedule, just whenever I’m bored, tired, or have finished an amount I feel satisfied with for the day. Find what works best for you!
-Listen to something as background noise. This can be songs you really like, a podcast, a musical soundtrack, youtube videos, streams, audio books, or whatever else your heart desires. You can listen to white noise or rain sounds or something like that, but I personally prefer something that engages my brain. (You can also use this to encourage breaks. If you’re at a bit of a podcast that you just can’t focus on whilst drawing, take a five minute break to focus on it alone! Your favorite song to bop out to comes on? Stand up and dance around in your workspace, sing along, just have fun!
-Have a food or drink next to you! I always like having something to munch or slurp on when drawing or animating. Make sure these snacks are smaller though, I’d recommend dedicating actual meal time to break time.
-This is a bad habit of mine and I’m sure many other artists, but if you’re demotivated, don’t try and trudge through unless there’s some form of deadline. If you’re simply animating for YouTube or something, just take a break! There’s no shame in doing so, and you’ll find that you actually work much faster when you are motivated, so the break helps with efficiency rather than hinders it.
-Set goals for yourself! Make them reasonable and not too out of reach. Say something like, “I’d like to draw 20 frames today.”, “I’d like to finish this storyboard by the end of the week.”, “I’d like to finish this scene today.”, “I’d like the animation to be done within a month and a half.” Make some bigger ones as well as smaller ones to give yourself short bursts of motivation, but also to keep that motivation going in the long run.
Art/Drawing Tips:
-Choose a simple style. This one kind of goes with motivation, but choosing a super complex art style often leads to the product just never being finished, especially if you’re a beginner.
-Practice drawing. Bring a sketchbook with you everywhere and just draw. The better you get at drawing, the better you get at animation
-Study other artists work. You can even trace! (Don’t post/claim it as your own EVER), but tracing for personal study is absolutely fine. It helps you figure out the shapes the artist used to make their character look how it does.
-Never be ashamed to use references, they help a ton.
-Color matters and can make an animation really pop. Choose a simple palate, what I normally do is assign one color per character, have a color for background objects, and maybe some others if I really want a certain scene or object to stand out against the rest.
-Shape language is a really cool tool. Learn it.
-Don’t worry about developing a style. Just draw. The style will come along the way.
Transitions:
-(First off, please note that in this section, I say the word ‘character’ a lot. However, these methods apply on objects too! Just wanted to clear that up, you can use them on more than just people.)
-Yes, frame by frame looks pretty, and you can use it in that sick action sequence, but also, try making things easier for yourself when you can. The following points will be describing some of my favorite easy transitions.
-Bounce back effects, the one I use the most. Basically, think of a ball bouncing. This ball will smoosh down against the ground, then spring back up, looking elongated as it does so. Or think of a car jerking forwards, before coming back a bit and to a complete stop. These are both bounce back effects. If your character is just changing poses, I’d recommend doing the ball method. smoosh your drawing down, then spring it back up. If your character is moving across the screen, move them just a bit further than their final destination, then bring them back. This makes animation look smoother and saves a ton of time.
-Smear or smudge frames! These are usually used when a character or object is going really fast. Smear the drawing and add a bit of motion blur in the direction a character is going.
-Partial movement frames! Not sure what the technical definition of this is, but this is when a character isn’t fully moving, just a small bit of them is, say they’re waving, or their hair is blowing in the breeze. Copy paste the rest without this bit, and only worry about redrawing that part!
-Tweening, okay.. I know what you’re going to say, because the animation community these days is so against tweening. I’ll admit, it doesn’t look the greatest when using excessively, but in small amounts? It can look good. Don’t overuse it, but don’t completely avoid it either. (Tweening is when different body parts are drawn on different layers so that movement can be done without redrawing. However, this only really works for simple movements, so use it sparingly.)
-Even when you are drawing frame by frame, these methods can be important. More so smear and smudge and bounce back, but tweening in some cases as well. You can incorporate these tricks into your frame by frame animation to make it look better as well. They aren’t just used to trick the minds eye into thinking there are in-betweens when there’s not.
Programs:
-Study your program. This’ll make things go much faster and allow for shortcuts. Animation is all about shortcuts.
-Start out with something cheap or free. You don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a drawing tablet and expensive programs when you first start. Draw on your ipad or phone if you have one, use flipaclip, imovie, ibis paint, kinemaster, or other free programs. Animation takes a ton of time and if you find in a month that you hate it and want to quit, you don’t want to have waisted hundreds or thousands of dollars.
-That being said, the creative cloud is pretty sweet. If you’re invested and have the money, I’d recommend it.
-Procreate is also amazing. I love it and actually use it to this day, even with having the creative cloud. You can’t do any complex editing but you can make some neat stuff on there.
-Decide what kind of animation you want to do. Do you want it more frame by frame? Get a program like procreate, flipaclip, or adobe animate. More drawn and edited? Try using a drawing and editing program combo. One of my friends uses ibispaint and imovie on her phone. I used to use ibispaint and kinemaster. I now use photoshop and premiere pro.
-Watch tons of YouTube tutorials. Google stuff. Chances are, you may find an easier way to do that thing that’s taken you five hours in the past.
And that’s it! Thank you for reading all the way through, I hope these helped! Feel free to ask questions, I’ll try to answer any I may get. Cya! Happy animating
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