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i had an old tumblr acc but it has embarrassing old art that im too sentimental to delete he/him, 22yo

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and out of the darkness - you you you you you

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Hello! Your animations are very wonderful, and seem quite similar to the fluidity of a James Baxter animation!

Anyway, my question is both where and how you’ve become so fluent! I am extremely interested in animation, but have little idea where to start or even do any of the sick lineart and make it look clean

In short I’m kinda overwhelmed! 😭

Any good pointers?

Thanks a bunch!

(Ps- thanks for uploading your process video on the phm animation, it gives me a lot of really good additional insight!)

tyy🥺 you are all so kind here.. really motivates me to work and get better!!

i just graduated sheridan college! i cannot understate its help to me personally, but i believe its not necessary to be college educated to be a good artist.

what college gives you that is hard to find outside it is access to a big art community (with whom you will interact every day for four years and then most likely work with for the rest of your career) and access to life drawing

my suggestions:

• join an art/animation discord server and ask ppl for critique!

• do some fundamentals exercises (life drawing, bouncing balls, shapes in perspective etc.) BUT draw what you like. your ocs, or fanart, or just your favorite subject.

like, not just a boring pendulum swinging in a white void, but your favorite character holding a yoyo or a pocket watch or smth.

always shoehorn things you love into boring homework. life will be more bearable this way

• with every big project, try to use it to learn something new. a new style, or technique, or software. its hard to sit down and watch three hours of dry software tutorials. its easier to do that if all that time youre thinking how exactly youre gonna use these functions for your project.

• use lots of references! i film my own references for animation. it helps me with perspective, anatomy, timing, and performance!

it doesn't matter if youre a good actor (i really really am not), because you still subconsciously make little flourishes when you move, and they make all the difference.

i didnt film a reference for grace rocky hug. and even if i did, i would not show it anyway :P

• i know this sounds very generic, but like,, have fun? i always put music or an audiobook in the background (sorry milt kahl), and drink tasty drinks.

when youre doing roughs you definitely should concentrate fully, but when youre spending the entire day doing line between line cleanup (or spending the second day completely redoing what youve done the day before, haha totally not me right now😀), you might want to make life a little easier.

i guess thats about it! i hope this was helpful. i wish you luck on your journey and i hope you enjoy it! 🤝

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So, I love animation a bunch, and seeing a creator that is both insanely skilled, and willing to answer asks is really exciting! I have so many questions, and I was really hoping youd be willing to answer some bc, THIS level is my dream, and pretty much what I want to do with my life

Saw the program's in other ask, toonboom harmony vs TV paint, what do you like about either? I'm trying to decide if I should get one, bc I've been really trying to get into animation alot, but have run onto layer/ editing issues

you also said you paint in procreate, what exactly do you mean by that?

(I mainly draw and animate in procreate, but the layer limit is terrible, and I've tried procreate dream but I could never really figure it out much.)

Also, how many frames was that PHM animation?! its si smooth and dynamic and just incredible all around! what fps was it?

(Those are my main questions, but I was also wondering if either program has ways to separately animate the background and foreground, within the same frame, or smooth pans and zooms on still drawings. or if there is an easier way to that, bc I have had to basically stop motion all pans and it looks choppy and ugly lol )

Thank you for any answers you give, any bit/tip would be awsome, and very much appreciated!!!

hii tysm!!! thank you for your trust, im barely a professional 😭

answers in order:

1) i have much more experience with toonboom so i know my way around it much better than tv paint. its main cons are brushes that look too digital for my taste, and, if you do find a decent (bitmap) brush, the bucket fill is abysmal. i also heard from my peers that it crashes a lot, though it has never crashed on me. honestly, its got all i need. you can even composite in it and get similar results to Ae.

but recently ive been working in tv paint because idk, it feels better to draw in it? like the way the brush responds to the stylus feels less computer-y. its much more convincing when it comes to emulating the analogue look i like to strive for. but it comes at a cost of a much slower workflow because you cant adjust the lines without visibly ruining the quality. though its bucket fill coloring is like, almost perfect. you can even edit the lineart and the fill will update automatically!

honestly its a matter of taste and your needs. tv paint is made for traditional bitmap frame by frame animation, and toonboom is mainly used for vector rigged animation, so most of its toolset is for that.

also if you ever want to animate professionally, different projects will require different software.

TL;DR: i suggest you pirate get both lol (or at least get the free trials of both to see which you like best.)

P.S. clip studio paint is pretty good too btw! i worked in it for a production once, no complaints. its pretty similar to procreate actually, so learning curve-wise, it would be the easiest to start with.

2) i just meant i draw fully rendered static artwork in procreate lol. i just cannot learn photoshop i tried so many times😭

3) the hug animation is 22 drawings over 69 frames! the framerate is 24fps, but there are a lot of threes and fours.

4) yes you can do layers in all animation software! bro if youve only animated in procreate, any specialized software will be a weight off you back.

you can animate the camera in all three, and i know for a fact that in toonboom you can do a multiplane effect so that levels of your background can parallax. i think you can do it in tv paint too. also, in toonboom you can key the position of separate layers, add slow ins and outs and all that. very handy.

but yea biggest biggest anim tip: flip between your drawings!!! i swear its so important. like if my non dominant hand hurts, i cannot animate. use onion skin when you clean up and need precision, but when you rough things out - flip! youll feel the movement better this way.

i hope this helps and i wish you luck🫡 youll do great

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Can we see any of your other animation? Your work is super impressive and I want to study more of it under a microscope! Aaaaa the Grace and Rocky hug melts my heart ;w;

ty!! :D

here's a scene from my thesis (very exclusive) ((not released anywhere yet because festivals)) (((hopefully)))

i have stuff on my insta (@/_voidsetup), but i dont really feel like reposting old work, i think i can do better now😔

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Hey is it okay I use your art for my playlist's pfp? I'll have credit in the description ofc

ye ofc👌

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helloo ! i can’t help but absolutely love your work, your animations have become such a huge inspiration for me to try to improve my own 🙏 if it’s okay for me to ask, how long have you been animating for? :o and at what point did you realize that animation is what you wanted to pursue?

as always, thank you so much for your work, it’s so so beautiful 😭💕

tysm🙏🙏

i started drawing in 2019, and before starting college four years ago i didnt animate very much because i only had an ipad and its annoying to animate in procreate lol

but i knew from the start of my art journey that i wanted to be a 2d hand drawn animator, to me its the closest real world has got to sorcery

before that i was in stem lmao

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I technically have an animation degree but I missed most of my classes due to health issues lmao

HOW the hell do you keep track of everything in view while keeping weights/volume/objects interacting consistent Oh My God

i do the first pass on vibes only, its used to figure out acting, gesture, how long the animation is and just generally whats happening, but in the second pass im trying to think of it almost like a physics diagram (i think they are called free body diagrams? the ones where you mark all the forces acting on an object)

starting with the most important body part, the one thats doing the most action, and imagining how its pulling or pushing on a second object. if its something heavy, it will take some time to start moving. and, once its moving, if the force suddenly stops or changes direction, the heavy thing will take some time to stop or start moving in a different direction. so yea newtons laws are also animation principles ig

(im a stem dropout and i dislike maths as much as the next guy, but trying to run a physics simulation in my head is lowk pretty fun lol)

i go through the entire length of the animation just focusing on these two masses.

once im happy with the way these two move, i start adding less important, lighter things, also one at a time

oh also, if its a full body action, even if cropped, it helps to draw the entire body, in the roughs of my hug animation i drew grace's legs too, just to know how his weight would be shifting (hes kneeling on the ground). no need to inbetween the parts that you know will be offscreen

i hope this is helpful! i enjoy yapping about animation process hehe

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What program do you use for animating? Do you sketch on paper beforehand or sketch right in the program?

ive been using toonboom harmony for like four years, but recently decided to switch to tv paint because its a one time purchase. this is my first time using it👌

i paint in procreate and comp in after effects (altho i suspect ill have to switch to smth else when my college license expires 😔)

i can animate on paper tho, its impractical for actual production, at least on my scale, but very good for exercise

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I just want to while the animation for grace and rocky hug caught my eye first, the rt for Rocky's vision of grace and that stratt work what gives me 70s-80s vibes are also amazing!

tysm🙏🙏 i really enjoy illustration too but im much worse at it than animation loll

ill make more if i get any decent ideas

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what's your animation process? how on earth did you make something so beautiful...... i can never get my animations past the sketchy stage before i lose confidence or give up, what steps do you follow to get your animation from start to finish? :O

its kind of the opposite for me, my roughs look so ass😭 but i learned that its okay because each new pass is an opportunity to improve things and fix mistakes

its always best not to overthink things and just plow through the work, at least for me bc i know if i stop to plan, nothing will ever get finished

also if youre worried with about your cleanup being too stiff, the solution ive found for myself is to have a bigger gap between it and tiedown, so youre not just tracing over the same lines. its more tricky tho because you have to figure out a lot of things like perspective and volume while also drawing clean, but this way your linework will be more intentional

to make it easier to maintain consistency and good spacing, animate body parts (or even parts of body parts) separately, like go through the entire movement of the bottom side of the elbow, then return to frame one and do the top side, etc (you can kind of see it in the video)

also, if something is bothering you, like if a drawing seems kinda off, or you feel like the animation is jittery in some spot, my advice is to get in there and fix it! even if it seems like its gonna be too much unnecessary work. at least for me, i know if something is bothering me, it will bother me every time i watch the animation, so its better to fix it than to have an artwork i cant look at.

i hope this is helpful! im new to tumblr community and im liking the ask questions function :D ill post more of my old animations from instagram sometime, but if you wanna see them i go by _voidestup there too

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How long did it take you to make that amazing animation of Grace and Rocky? It's amazing!!

like three weeks.. i usually work faster than that but i was lazy and it was a new software (tv paint)

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Hi!!! Your rocky and grace hugging is literally the cutest thing ive ever seen, could i maybe use the gif for my discord banner?

ye ofc🙏🙏

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Hi i love your art so much. the grace rocky animation is literally everything i ever needed and your drawing of stratt is so hauntingly gorgeous im gonna be sick (positive connotation!!!)

tysm🙏🙏 im so happy you all like it :)

phm has taken over my life lol

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im actually quite proud of this one

i rly like the headcanon that rocky can see graces organs but not his pupils

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oh the light that never warms❄️