Creating the final gif - mom

 In this blog post I will explain my process of creating the GIF for the mom's character. I was wondering what kind of movement I have not done yet and I thought about clapping hands. The mom is a very happy and cheerful character, so I thought that clapping hands is a good idea. I was thinking of a movement of hands clapping twice and then getting back to their starting point. 

I started by sketching the character in a position I wanted them to be so looking directly to the front. This created I confusion for me because once again I really needed to play with the perspective since the nose was quite long but it is not possible to notice when the character is facing the front. 

I decided to make a small change and pretend as if the character is in this GIF before going into her art studio. In the art studio the character gets very messy, so here the mom is wearing her artistic attire but is not covered in stains yet. I wanted to create a difference between the main illustration and the GIF. I have also opened the Animation Assist option in Procreate so I was able to draw frames. For the drawing process I have used the brush called 'Plume Studio' because it is one of the only brushes that does not create the odd white lines when I use the bucket fill tool. The image above is my starting point therefore my plan was to put the hands up, make the character clap twice and then get the hands down again. 

This is how I approached the movement of the hands up. I used the lasso select tool and rotated the objects that I was selecting, so for example in this case I was rotating the arms. To make the movement believable I needed to really take a reference from my own body and arms. I was standing in front of the mirror for a long time to get an actual idea of how my hands move when I clap. I see observing human body as a great reference for movement of a character. If it is based on a real human body it is more natural and realistic which I think is a very good thing. 

The rotating process became really messy when the hands got very close together. I had to use the brush to really polish it, because since I was using the lasso selection tool, even though I tried to be precise in the selection process, I would still select a little bit of the background with the body part I was using. This is very well illustrated in the screenshot above. I have also looked very carefully for tangent point, because I keep in mind to avoid them. I am aware though that if a tangent point appears only in one frame, it is on the screen for less than a second so it would not be as disturbing as it would be on a still image. 

This screenshot above is also portraying how messy animating on a busy background is. This made me realize that the type of a gif that I did for the daughter or the son is a bit easier because there is nothing behind the elements of the body that the character is moving. I think it is an interesting thing to think about when choosing a movement. Now I know doing this sort of movement is very time consuming even though it does seem like a very easy motion. 

 

I have obviously exceeded the limit of 26 frames, therefore I needed to open a new document and continue on that document. After doing so many of those GIFs I already know the drill of doing it very well, so it is less time consuming to get everything right on the second document. 

I exported both files in mp4 files and merged them together as videos and then I have converted the one mp4 file to a GIF file. I have followed the exactly the same procedure I have been following with the couple of the other GIFs. This method is a good one because there is no tool to let me down, because there are many softwares that merge mp4 files together and also many tools that convert mp4 to GIF. 

Here is my finished product and I am very happy with it: