Creating the final gif - Grandma

 In this post I am going to explain my work process of creating a GIF for the grandma. This time I decided not to incorporate the whole body because with the grandma I wanted to focus on her head. She is the head of the family and she is also the wise character. I have created little very rough sketches of what I imagined the gif to be, and these are the sketches: 

I thought about doing a little movement of a book going up and down and her eyes going from left to right as if she was reading the book. To create this GIF I needed to think about how the character would look from the front and how do I want the eyes to move. This was the main thing of the GIF. I decided to also try using the options that allows me to hold frames for a little longer. 

I started by drawing out the face from the front. It was not very easy because the only image I have created before was the character standing sideways. I looked at the main image as a reference for my creation, but it was really only a reference. 

What I thought was the biggest challenge of creating this face, was the nose, because the nose is quite long, but it is not visible when looking from the front. I needed to create an illusion that the nose is long and I am not sure if I have succeeded completely, but I am happy with what I have created. The face looks friendly and old, so it is a good representation. I decided to give my character a smile because she will be reading a book and that is her passion. I have also used the Rough Skin brush to tone the skin and the Tache smudging brush to blend the toning in. I used the eraser to erase any shades on the black outlines. 

I started adding frames by simply placing the book higher and higher. It was a time consuming work, but it was not too difficult. I decided to make the book green and blue to indicate that the book is about Earth. As visible in the picture above, I have used the select tool to move the book higher, so I needed to use the eraser to clean up the edges. 

I tired to use an option called 'hold duration'. This is the option I have not used before. It created a few new frames that would look exactly the same as the one I am holding the duration of and they would appear in grey on the timeline, so it is easier for me to see where I have the action held for a little while. I think this tool is very useful, because it saves the problem of copying and pasting the exact same frame and possibly getting confused in all them. 

When I reached the 26 frames, I needed to copy the last frame and paste it onto a new document. The action of opening the copy & paste bar is swiping three fingers down. The copy and paste bar looks like what is presented in the picture above. I just simply copied the frame and pasted it onto a new document and finished the GIF in a separate document. 

This time I decided not to worry about the GIF merging softwares because all they've done is let me down. I decided to start by exporting it as an MP4 file and then merging the videos together and then converting the merged MP4 to a GIF format. This is a lot quicker and simpler method than trying to merge GIFs. 

Here is the finished GIF for the grandma - Filosofia. 

I am very satisfied with the eye movement and generally with the smoothness of the GIF. I think it looks good.