Getting started on some more animation practice; Mary Rae sees a bug on the table and smashes it. Today I sketched a few thumbnail poses, and also plotted the timing on a stripped-down exposure sheet on the right side of my page. Boring spreadsheets may seem antithetical to spontaneous-looking animation, but it really just serves the necessary purpose of timing your character’s actions; how you choose to excute those actions is what brings the character to life.

The timing for this animation actually comes from Eric Goldberg’s “Character Animation Crash Course.” I’ll make it my own by coming up with interesting breakdowns and overlapping action. So, look for that within the next couple days.

No time to draw something tonight, I’m playing some silly Facebook game.

Well, I guess the Kerkel posts this week were a wake of sorts; my strip’s been eliminated from the competition. On the upside, I’m now free to share the entire run here on the site.

It was an odd contest; the thing I found especially strange is that there is no real feedback or interaction on the Cartoonist Studio site, so I feel like I haven’t really learned much about what constitutes an appealing comic strip. The 11-second animation contest made a lot more sense, and I got some solid constructive criticism from the community. About the only positive thing I can say about this contest is that it motivated me to create a comic strip!

That said, after looking through these, please let me know which one you liked the least, and which one you liked the best. Now that I’ve got the storyline-introducing awkwardness out of the way, I’d really like to continue developing these characters.

Drawn on my new iPad of course. It’s a marvelous content creation device (I’m even dictating this!), but I must admit that using it for drawing doesn’t make as much sense as I thought it did when I bought my original iPad about a year and a half ago.

Much like doodling on an Etch-a-Sketch, there’s a certain pleasure in overcoming the iPad’s inherent limitations to produce a competent drawing. All iPads thus far have been designed to register relatively imprecise input from your fat fingers. The basic workaround is to draw as zoomed-in as possible, but sometimes it can be tough to draw without seeing the entire picture at once. Your mileage may vary, but unfortunately for me, this rules out the iPad as a sketchbook for quick ideas or gesture sketches.

Incidentally, many of my drawing apps actually seem to be extra laggy on my otherwise zippy new toy, which I hope are just growing pains resulting from the awesome new display resolution.

Art-wise, I think where the iPad really shines is painting; you can’t beat the massive color pallete, and if you paint in large areas of color/tone and work your way into the details, you don’t necessarily have to do a lot of zooming until the very end.

I’m holding out hope for some sort of accessory or software that will tear me away from my real paper sketchbook, but so far Apple doesn’t seem very interested in latching onto my market segment. But all of my artsy e-books look great!