It’s just around the corner: another week up on Onaway Island with the Brigade for their Leadership Training Conference (LTC)! 🌲✨
Being early risers ourselves, the hubby and I often help lead the “early bird” activities for the LTC campers and leadership. As a little incentive to join in the fun every morning, I created a few water bottle stickers for them to take home at the end of the week, which now serves as the artwork for this animation project!
This Blender project actually went remarkably smoothly, giving me some much-welcome momentum and enthusiasm to dig back into some other projects that had me a little more stumped. Most of the work for this project was done on the front end, making sure all the artwork was created in a way that would be simple to animate, while maintaining that fun hand-drawn, cartoony look. 🐦🖌️
There were, of course, some challenges. For this project, I decided to use instances instead of placing scenes in the video sequencer in order to allow a bit more interaction between the various scene elements like the birdies. While it may have simply been the version of Blender I was using, making updates to the instances was a challenge—they were not live or automatically updating. I had to basically replace the instance manually whenever I made any changes to the artwork! 😅
The flat, 2D-style artwork I was going for served as yet another, though fortunately simple challenge. I remembered I was actually working in a 3D space and could avoid the front/back sorting issues of the art by simply adding a bit of dimension to certain elements with extrusions on the curve shapes. 🧱📐
Every project really is a new learning opportunity, which is why I love sticking with open-source software like Blender (and it’s free!). I’m hooked on the problem-solving, and as I get more comfortable with the toolkit, the more “Follow the Fun” energy I can bring to the creativity.
Creating animations for my favorite organizations drives so much of my motivation, and hopefully, it can lead to some new collaborative opportunities!
💬 Let’s talk shop: What are you currently animating in Blender, or are you hoping to learn Grease Pencil? Let’s swap notes in the comments!
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