Cat Animation 101 - part 3

You won’t get it at the first try and that’s ok

The clock was ticking. The first morning of jam had passed and I had nothing done, only wobbly sketches of cats. Then I discovered the beauty of guide layers :) I sketched over my first sketches trying to make them better and they did get better! I do this in blue pencil because the next step is to trace the final outline. Don’t try to get the final drawing immediately!

This was my error during the last jam. I thought it would have been quicker to draw directly my character outline, but then I spent ages erasing and redrawing making a mess and loosing precious time.

This time instead I started by sketching the basic position on legs and tails (again, keep your reference at end, even in a layer behind with 50% opacity if it make you feel more confident). After these quick blue cats I created a new layer over each one and started to draw the real thing. It was a lot easier!

A word about tools:

I recommend to use a pen obviously, but you don’t need a very expensive tablet. This is a common misconception. People think that they can’t draw well with a tablet because theirs isn’t good enough. The thing is: drawing like this has nothing to do with drawing on paper. you HAVE to practice a little and get the hang of it. And once you excercised you can get good results even with a cheap tablet.

Same for brushes: there is no special brush of smoothing option that can work magic (well you could use a little smoothing to get slickers lines).

I like to use a pencil effect brush for sketches (something with a bit of transparency), but then for the final sketch I use the simpler harder brush you can find, without any dynamics or transparency. This is because when you animate, you want your lines to stay the same thickness all the time or else the result will be wobbly.