Cat Animation 101 - part 2

Here we are.  In my last post I briefly introduced some quick ways to get familiar with animation. But if you are new to it, in the time of a jam you can’t stop and study everything. So…

have a wide choice of reference material

I had to be quick! So the first thing I did was gathering any kind of visual reference I could find on cats. I have a cat, but it’s just impossible to make her pose for a picture, let alone for a videogame sprite!

steal secrets!

What you can do is looking for animated gifs,videos you can stop to copy poses or just photos of poses you’d like to reproduce.

artists do it

What many people miss about art in general (and I missed this too!) is that artist don’t have everything perfectly clear in their minds since the beginning. If they have to draw a cat and never stopped to watch a cat closely, they (and me) probably only can tell you that a cat has 2 triangular ears and a tail, but they need to look at real cats photos, draw, make mistakes and redraw in order to get to know their subject and what makes it what it is. So just try.

I was sure I would have made a mess, and my first cat was terrible, you can see it here.But then drawing and erasing I got the hang of it (kinda).

create Frankenstein’s creatures

Give yourself a chance a draw something you never drew and if you are not sure about some part of it, copy and paste it from a reference in a layer under the one you are painting on. You can create a Frankenstein creature made up of pieces, it is shorter than you think :) and you should not consider it cheating: tracing over an outline will build muscle memory and it could be that next time you won’t even need a guide.