Been a bit quiet here the past couple days, mainly due to the fact that last Friday I lost my drawing tablet pen. Against all odds my teacher actually found it, so feeling pretty relieved at the moment.. Excluding the fact that I've wasted my money on purchasing a replacement, but I guess it never hurts to have a spare.
Anyway! I've done a quick sketch tonight to get back into the swing of things. Will try to post some images of my 3D environment render in the next day or two.

I had most of my turnaround frames drawn out earlier, though decided to redo them as I thought some of the anatomy and positions needed fixing/refining. The only thing that needs fixing now is just the positioning of the feet in some of the frames.

After some consideration I've decided to finally bite the bullet and go with the UVW process for texturing my spaceship. It's going to take a lot of time to get all these bits and pieces stitched together so I'm really hoping it's going to be worth it in the end! I've already spent a few hours with this process and it doesn't even feel like I've gotten half way through. I guess it might be true that this process can take as long as it takes actually making the spaceship itself haha.

I also might have some exciting news (for myself at least) in the next day or two, but for now sleep beckons me!

Squeezing in a daily sketch before I head off to bed! The focus for this one was trying to render the skin tones and all it's nuances.

I've quickly sketched out the rest of my character's jump cycle, I'm liking it for the most part, where I think I've gotten a good flow for their cloak. The only thing I'll probably fix up is the second last frame, where I think I need to stretch out their pose a bit more. Looking at it, I think it is slightly interfering with the flow of the animation. That, or I might need to add another frame in between the last 2 frames..

Just scanned through my frames for my walk cycle just to see if everything was going well and I'm pretty happy with the results, especially since this is my first attempt with hand-drawn animation!

Got to say, something bizarre about seeing your own pencil drawing moving.

Now I'm even more determine to finish and polish my other sheets and get everything ready for next week!

The Elongated Inbetween

 Another quick practise until I settle down tonight to work on assignments. Here is an animation concept that had always interested me, the 'elongated inbetween'.

I first really became aware of this when a while ago people were posting animation stills from well known movies, such as Aladdin. Although at first it was made humorous, it got me thinking about how and why this method was being used.
The elongated inbetween is very useful for a numerous amount of reasons, though what I find is that it helps to create a lot of fluidity for an animation, and also helps to exaggerate a movement which helps for better story-telling.

Although very simple and rough, I've done a quick study of how elongated inbetweens work. Where, once the timing of the frames have been sorted, you can't actually tell how the image is distorted inbetween the main key frames. i.e.

Overall definitely a necessity to hold on to with my future dabbles with animation!