Production: Drawing

Drawing

Once I was happy with my design, I had to start drawing quickly as it's always a lengthly process. I spent around three weeks for a couple of hours a day drawing this little AloeVera man. I find it really exciting because despite the fact you spend so much time drawing something repetitively, you ironically never really know what the finished piece is going to look like, until it's all scanned, animated.. you won't ever know until that final mouse click. I find something really rewarding in this technique and have found it so much more enjoyable than digital animation with say the Childline brief which was confusing and frustrating with error messages popping up for seemingly no reason.

So my process for drawing is simple, I have a cheap a4 light-box which works perfectly for tracing, I use layout paper and gradually build upon the design, moving the character/ tree a few mm/cm each time. I planned so the character moves quicker than the petals as I wanted to emphasise them being dainty and have more of a visual of them dancing in the wind, an extended metaphor for time attempting to stand still. I wanted the tree to constantly subtly change throughout so I altered the shadows every other frame.

To make things easier for myself when it came to the moving arm, I marked it out before drawing the rest of the image. I did this for the whole arm movement so when I got to each new slide, I could just plan around the arm movement; often when you're doing this so repetitively you tend to go into robot mode and have the habit of ruining slides just blindly tracing it exactly as it was the previous slide forgetting to add new motion.

It looks really beautiful the motion of the petals coming through from previous pages and is a neat way of highlighting how slow this process is!  

I needed to be wary as I wanted to loop the animation, to have the first and last frames as close as possible but naturally as things are drawn 22 times over they're bound to end up looking quite different (it's like Chinese whispers!)

So with the last few frames I had the previous image behind it on the light-box along with the original image, this was quite mind boggling at first but eventually I got used to it, all I have to do is draw inside both the lines, so the progression back to the original frame positioning is more fluid.

Before scanning in each frame, I made sure to number them just incase, I'll edit this out later.

Scanning them in I decided to pull them out the pad and scan them with a blank page underneath it, I usually just scan them with the other drawings just behind so you can see the progression of movement but I felt there was something symbolic in having a fresh start, a blank page.