Feeling Animated

Remember Lauren? She’s the anime artist and coloring book author who works with instructor Zack as part of Game-U’s New Jersey Accelerate program. In recent classes, Lauren’s been adding the finishing touches to her portrait of two summer-ready girls. Now, she’s ready to add animation to her list of developing skills. See how she brought her latest artwork to life!

Before digging into animation, Lauren added missing details to her characters’ figures and created a background layer for their environment. Using Krita, the digital art program, she combined the character and background layers to produce the final picture. Now comes the animation! Lauren wanted to know how to give her characters, and especially their faces, realistic motion, so Zack explained how animation works and what they needed to do in Krita to make it happen. He showed her how animations use timelines to play frames – single images that capture movement progression, just like flipbook drawings – in a series. Lauren, in Krita, can adjust how many frames play per second to control the speed of the motion she creates. She and Zack worked together to organize the frames and frame play rates into a coherent series for each animation. To keep things simple, Lauren only animated one girl’s eyes and the other girl’s mouth. The girl on the left is blinking while her friend on the right chats. The beautiful summer weather in Lauren’s drawing is clearly making them both feel animated!

Great work, Lauren! We’re excited to see you take your art to the next level. Enjoy your next project, and be sure to share it with us – you’re helping make the world a more beautiful (and more lively) place!