Learning How to Animate

I’ve always been in awe of animation. My favorite films are animated because I love studying art styles of different animation studios and seeing how people put such incredible things together. And this week, I got to try my hand at animation.

I’m in a group project that decided that we should animate a character that would follow the user through an app experience. I volunteered to create that character and learn how to animate it.

My goal was to create Artemis, the Greek goddess. I wanted to match the style of ancient Greek art, so I decided to trace it. I started with one art piece that I used for Artemis’ head:

I continued on, using a different image to trace the body. I realized that I needed to trace each body part separately so that I could move them individually in Adobe Animate, so that took quite a bit of work to pull off.

I didn’t know, exactly, what I wanted Artemis to do, so I made a clunky short movement that could work so that we could see how it might look in the app.

Here was what I ended up with:

She needs some TLC, but I’m proud of what I did with my first week in Adobe Animate.

I had so much fun making this project, that I decided to try a new thing. I wanted to make a basic animation of my own hand opening and closing. I started by taking stop-motion photos of the movement, and I pulled each photo into Adobe Illustrator to trace them. I traced 9 images total.

I pulled them into Animate, and I made sure that I duplicated and reversed the frames so that it would be able to loop.

Here’s my final product!

I know I have a lot to learn and that my Illustrator skills need some work, but I’m stoked to get better at these skills and make cool animations while doing so!