I couldn’t resist sketching 1950s Groucho as I died laughing at these outtakes from “You Bet Your Life” on YouTube.

Well golly, this is still in a sloppy state, in so many ways, but I really need to move on to my next bit of practice (or maybe the 11-second contest if the April sound file appeals to me). I think I was fairly happy with the movement early on, but for me the hard part was keeping Mary looking consistent from frame to frame. I didn’t design her for animation, and if I really wanted to use her, I should have drawn a model sheet in advance, and really nailed down how she’s supposed to look from different angles.

Here’s an example of a model sheet, of that fish-lady from the Little Mermaid:

Obviously, as I get better at drawing, and better at planning, I’ll be better at animating relatively complicated characters like Mary Rae, but whatever I do next will definitely be more along the lines of Elmer Fudd, as I mentioned before.

I don’t usually think about my age, but when I do, I picture myself as…a cheerful prospector?

Seriously, someone asked me today how old I’d be at my next birthday, and when “35” came out, it sounded really, really weird to me.

(Commence Aunts telling me how young I am.)

I did a lot of work on my spider-squashing animation this morning. Don’t worry, that’ll be finished soon, but as usual I’m doing a lot of learning and revising along the way. One thing I’m doing to facilitate that is animating in vague scribbles, rather than spending too much time laboring over each drawing. That way I won’t hesitate to revise drawings or throw them away completely.

Once I have the motion exactly how I want it, I can start to worry about filling in the details.

Ren and Stimpy animator John Kricfalusi has lots of great advice for budding animators, and makes a great argument for using simple early-1940s characters as the basis for animation practice. By then, animators had nailed down the best practices for animating, but were still tentative about moving beyond typical pear-shaped characters. So they’re perfect vehicles for a beginning animator to conceptualize how cartoons move and carry their weight, without getting thrown off by any zany stylization that later evolved.

So, after trying to animate a girl with a ponytail, I think my next twick will be the mercifully bald Elmer Fudd.

Had a little better luck with hands today; rereading the hands section in The Mad Art of Caricature reminded me of some simple methods for considering the structure of hands (such as: the two sides of your palm look like upside-down chicken drumsticks!).

Still, I feel like I’m back to square one; it’s almost like I need to come up with an exercise rotation to improve and retain these essential skills.