Today I decided to focus on the movement for the gif of the daughter - Donna. As I mentioned before, Donna is a women's rights activist and she is a strong feminist. I wanted that passion of her to be seen in her movement gif. I was thinking about what sort of movement could I have her do and I decided that it would be a movement as if she was on a protest. She would be stomping her legs and holding a sign. For the sign I decided to use the same design I put in her room as a poster, so there would be a connection between that.
I started by drawing little thumbnails of what movement I want the character to have. As I mentioned before, thumb-nailing is an important skill because when the thumbnails are done correctly, they are a good indicator of what I am doing and how to approach the posture. When I was clear on what exactly I am drawing, I started the creating process.
I started by copying the character from the main design for them and making a few minor changes. Generally the character was already positioned how I wanted them to be, therefore the changes did not have to be huge. I changed one of the feet and I have also changed the head.
For changing the head, I have used the select tool and tilted it to the front, exactly like I have planned. I also needed to add a sign and put a hand up holding the sign. When the character looked like I planned, I have created a starting point for my GIF and then I needed to turn on the Animation Assist option to make my job a little bit easier.
After I turned on the animation option I started drawing the frames. It is very straight forward, because I just pretty much followed what I was doing in the previous GIFs. I started by doing the movement in the character's right leg.
The main movement I was working on was lifting the foot and the putting it back down. I wanted to exaggerate this movement a little bit, therefore I have lifted the feet as high as they normally wouldn't go when just stamping feet.
I have also worked on the movement of the wrist and the sign. I wanted the movement to be strictly of the wrist so I only used the select tool for that and was rotating the sign.
I was moving the sign every 2 or 3 degrees per frame so the movement would look smoothly. It would look very unnatural if I was moving it 10 or 15 degrees. It would be strictly too much and also the wrist never does rotations like that.
The movement I have chosen for the daughter was actually quite a good choice because when the foot goes up, it also needed to go down the same way, so it was enough for me to just copy the frames I have already created and reverse them, so put them in an order from last to first.
To duplicate a frame I needed to click on a given frame and then I would see a menu like this one:
On this menu I can see there are different options, such as hold duration, duplicate, delete and foreground. I have not explored the foreground option yet. I have been using both delete and duplicate. With hold duration I have not had a chance yet to use this particular option. I think it is a good idea to use when I want to hold one frame but I do not want to duplicate a frame because that takes away one frame from my 26 given frames.
After a lot of time adjusting every frame so it all looks how I have planned it, I was able to export my GIF, this time I actually drew within the limit of 26 frames, so I did not have to struggle with finding a merging tool that could ruin the visuals or add some sort of watermark to my works. This made me very happy.
Here is the finished GIF:
I mis read the title of your last post, so ignore my comment ( I thought it was the final gif you were doing!). The daughter, again looks smoother and more convincing - your skills are definitely improving, well done!
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