Creating the final gif - son

 For the next GIF, I decided to work on a child movement for my main character. I wanted the movement to be fun, a movement that an adult would not just do out of blue. And that made me think of creating a GIF of the character jumping and putting its arm up, as if they were waving. I personally thought this was a good idea to show how fun the character is. 

I started by drawing little thumbnails of how the character was going to look on a paper. Instead of sketching the entire character, I have just sketched out the body parts like beanbags. 

This sketch showed the way I want to go about with this GIF. Thumb-nailing is a little bit like storyboarding but it only shows the movement of the character. It is an important skill for me, if I want to get into character animation. 

First what I needed to do was to sketch out the characters but facing the front. I needed him to look directly to the front and I only had a drawing of him tilted a little bit. I needed to change the way his nose would look like and his entire head shape. I have experimented with different options until I came to my final idea which is this one:

I think this sketch is highly successful and it does look like the same character but from a different perspective. After sketching it and cleaning up the sketch, I have added color to the design and toned the skin in the face as I did with this character's main design. Toning makes me think about the physics of the design and of the head in 3D. It really makes me understand light and shades.

This is the character in color and I must tell, I really like it and I like the design I have created. On this screenshot I have already started drawing the next frames with the Animation Assist option turned on. The first movement I needed this character to do was go down so he could jump. People and other creatures do not just jump from their straight legs, they need to bend their knees first if they want to go up. 

Here is a screenshot of a bunch of frames on each other. It shows how the character is bending his knees and how that affect the whole body. When he is bending his knees, automatically the whole body is going down. If I kept the rest of the body static, it would look very unnatural, because the legs would just become incredibly long for no reason. When I thought it was the right moment in the movement, I started changing the arm to go up and do a movement. 

To get a reference of how the hand and the arm would be moving I have looked at my own arm doing the movement multiple times. I needed to see how the hand would turn and how do the elbow bend exactly. It was learning from nature and I do that a lot when animating or drawing characters because nature is a big resource to learn from. I really needed that arm to work well so it doesn't look out of place or just simply odd. 

Once again I was working on layers, so they would be the frames of the GIF. As I mentioned before the maximum amount of layers on Procreate is 26, therefore, when I reached 26 I needed to continue the project on a separate document and then merge it together online. 

Everything was working smoothly up until when I had to merge the two projects together. The tool I used for my experiment didn't work again and the tool I used for the dad's GIF also did not work! It made me very frustrated and I did not know how to approach the problem. I tried different options of softwares and apps but none of them were actually working which got me annoyed. After a long time of brainstorming I finally came up with an idea. 

I decided to export both files as MP4 files from Procreate, then merge those two as videos not GIFs and lastly convert the MP4 file to the GIF file. This was a long process and it forced me to think outside of the box. This is the sort of problem-solving ability, I have mentioned in my research on The Little Prince. I needed to think creatively to come up with the idea on how to merge two GIFs. 

This is the final GIF I have created: 

I am really happy with this GIF. I think it looks fun and is smooth, and that is what I wanted to create.