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One of the things that's happened as a result of getting the iPad Pro: I've rediscovered my ambition to create animations of my characters.
I don't have any illusions that I'll be able to produce professional-looking half-hour episodes or even feature-length movies; but the iPad Pro/Apple Pencil combo, combined with Kdan Mobile's Animation Desk Cloud app, does make it easier to make pencil tests of short clips and scenes. (If you're one of my sponsors on Patreon, you've already seen a looping GIF I created on the iPad.)
I haven't gotten the results I want with inking and painting in Animation Desk that I want, though, so my thought at first was to create the rough animation on iPad and transfer that footage to Clip Studio Paint (a much more sophisticated app for animation) for ink and paint. Unfortunately, CSP's animation functions don't play well with animations created outside the program. The pencil tests created in ADC had to be converted to PSD files (one cel per layer), transferred to my desktop Mac, then opened in CSP where I had to save out each layer as a separate file. (Rather time-consuming when there's 47 cels...)
The good part is, though, I'm being forced to learn the capabilities and methods of CSP's animation component. So I feel confident that pretty soon I'll be throwing out new animated clips starring Tetsuko at least, and possibly Charlotte and Dyna, maybe even Starburst.
In fact, over the past year or so, I've been working on a video featuring Tetsuko. I'm imagining it as an excerpt from an episode of an imaginary Tetsuko animated series, showing her trapped by the villain in a death-trap which will tax every bit of strength she has in order to escape (if she does, heh heh heh...) I have a pencil test of one of the scenes from just after the trap is sprung on her, of which I'm rather proud how it's turning out so far. I'll be posting it here as soon as I finish this journal, and I may even post some of the (very rough) storyboards I scribbled up for the sequence.
I also have five cels from the scene inked; trying to get one cel done each day. (Maybe that's an approach I ought to try with my comics?)
I don't have any illusions that I'll be able to produce professional-looking half-hour episodes or even feature-length movies; but the iPad Pro/Apple Pencil combo, combined with Kdan Mobile's Animation Desk Cloud app, does make it easier to make pencil tests of short clips and scenes. (If you're one of my sponsors on Patreon, you've already seen a looping GIF I created on the iPad.)
I haven't gotten the results I want with inking and painting in Animation Desk that I want, though, so my thought at first was to create the rough animation on iPad and transfer that footage to Clip Studio Paint (a much more sophisticated app for animation) for ink and paint. Unfortunately, CSP's animation functions don't play well with animations created outside the program. The pencil tests created in ADC had to be converted to PSD files (one cel per layer), transferred to my desktop Mac, then opened in CSP where I had to save out each layer as a separate file. (Rather time-consuming when there's 47 cels...)
The good part is, though, I'm being forced to learn the capabilities and methods of CSP's animation component. So I feel confident that pretty soon I'll be throwing out new animated clips starring Tetsuko at least, and possibly Charlotte and Dyna, maybe even Starburst.
In fact, over the past year or so, I've been working on a video featuring Tetsuko. I'm imagining it as an excerpt from an episode of an imaginary Tetsuko animated series, showing her trapped by the villain in a death-trap which will tax every bit of strength she has in order to escape (if she does, heh heh heh...) I have a pencil test of one of the scenes from just after the trap is sprung on her, of which I'm rather proud how it's turning out so far. I'll be posting it here as soon as I finish this journal, and I may even post some of the (very rough) storyboards I scribbled up for the sequence.
I also have five cels from the scene inked; trying to get one cel done each day. (Maybe that's an approach I ought to try with my comics?)
Forgotten OC
I was searching through my old sketchbooks and notebooks last night, looking for drawings and notes I made about one of my earliest creations, the belly dancer Sayyina. (She might have actually been the first OC I created, since she was inspired by the belly dancers at Busch Gardens Tampa, where my wife Janet and I worked for a couple of year in the very early 1980s.) And I came across some drawings of a character that I'd completely forgotten that I'd even thought of! I don't remember doing the drawings, and I didn't write down many notes about the character. But I did create about six or seven pages of sketches, and even a couple of logo ideas. The series would have been entitled "Muscle" Shoals, PI. The title character, Patricia Shoals, is a private investigator whose nickname is "Muscle" because of her physique; bodybuilding is her hobby. I chose six pages of sketches - well, five pages of sketches and one good sketch from a sixth - to give you an idea of what was running
I've been away...
...but now I'm back! My wife and I took a road trip to visit a friend (fellow DA member Jimmy Dimples) in NC, two of my brothers in VA and a third brother in SC. I hadn't seen my brothers in ten years (ever since my father's funeral), so it was fun being able to visit them. What wasn't so fun was having to deal with an overheating car in Charlotte NC that took $700 in repairs to make drivable again. Thankfully, Jimmy was willing to drive down from Mt. Airy (two hours each way) to pick us up and bring us to our hotel, then drive us back down to Charlotte to pick up the car two days later. Other than that, it was a fun trip. But despite my best intentions, I wasn't able to work on as much art as I hoped, so I'm way behind in creating and posting artwork. So I've got some catching up to do! So if you've left messages for me, and you're pissed I haven't replied to them yet... this is why. (Plus my apologies for not answering before now.)
''Contest Jitters'' update
Don't get too excited: there aren't any new finished pages. Yet. What there are, though, are newly reworked versions of some existing pages. This is something I've wanted to do for awhile, because one of the reasons I haven't been enthusiastic about finishing "Contest Jitters" is that there were parts in which I couldn't stand to look at some of the work I did. So I've spent most of the time since the New Year finishing the reworking of the pages. I also wanted to re-paginate the story so that they all fit into standard comics size, for eventual publication as digital as well as (I hope) print publication. During that process, I also found opportunities for expanding a few scenes, and laying (I think) a better framework for the events to come. (And I worked in a cameo appearance by yerz trooly.) The repagination process also lengthened the story, from 16 to 23 pages. Some of the original long-scrolling pages had material that easily took up one and a half to two print pages. (It's
F*CK IAN!
I haven't been checking in here as often as I should (my apologies for that), so unless you're also a member of my Patreon page, you probably don't know about the big road trip my wife and were taking this past week. The plan was: up to NC to visit friend and fellow DA member @JimmyDimples, and my cousin Susan in Laurel Springs; over to Tennessee to visit another cousin (Julie); over to Richmond VA to see two of my three brothers; then down to Myrtle Beach SC to visit my third brother. (It's been years since I've seen my brothers, and literally decades since I've seen my cousins Susan and Julie.) The most ambitious trip my wife and I have ever planned (and most likely never will again). And it was going well, until the middle of our visit with Julie in Tennessee. That's when we found out about Ian. A tropical storm which suddenly formed in the Caribbean, and was forecast to come up the Gulf Coast of Florida, and possibly over Orlando as Hurricane Ian*. So we felt we needed to cut
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That's great to hear you've been bitten by the animation bug once again! Your earlier Tetsuko animations were great, so more of that sort of thing would definitely be something to look forward to indeed! 