Animation Project: Hand Drawn Animation Further Ideas

I decided to devise a mini project to combine the techniques I’d learned so far in this project. As I’d like to develop the ideas explored in my earlier work with hand drawn animation I chose to explore that area to produce a longer piece.

As I had looked at canine locomotion before I decided to vary this slightly by exploring fox designs. Foxes are anatomically very similar to wolves, however they are a bit less stocky and more flexible. They are sharper in their features and have a more “sulking” gait.

I did some quick doodles to figure out the body shape I would like. Through different iterations I realised a lean slender look was what I wanted, even if this wasn’t at all anatomically correct.

I also scribble out some strecthing and squashing poses to work out the form a bit more. I also played with the idea of bi point colouring which is typical of many animals, however it can be hard to keep consistent during simple animations.

Next I experimented with facial feature designs, even though im not sure if I would use something this complicated in an actual animation as this project has quite a short timescale.

Something that I would like to become a theme of sorts for this project is the phrase and concept “bête noire” which is French for a personal bugbear or pet peeve. Something which is a pet peeve of mine is my very messy penmanship and scribbling style as you can quite clearly see above! To show this through the character design I decided to make the figure more messy and scribbly. I tried doing some poses with this style to try and figure out if this would work as a longer animation.I’d have to be quite careful with my posing as some of the forms become very indistinguishable when they overlap in this scribbly style.

Overall I think the character could work but I would have to be really careful with placement of limbs and other things to make sure the movement is conveyed properly. Next I will do some animation tests and do some quick sketches of what a walk and a run cycle would look like.