Getting Started

Been ages since I’ve written a blog post! The last blog I had was for my Illustration and Animation course at ARU last year, so hopefully I remember how to do it. So far I don’t have much to document about my workings, as it is only the first week. We’ve been doing a little about bouncing ball stuff, which is pretty fun, but something I covered in my previous course.

The facilities at UAL are very nice, I have always avoided syntiqs previously in favour of my screenless wacom tablet like a caveman, but I can definitely see the benefit of drawing directly onto a screen, even if it is not that great for my posture while working. I have also come around a lot to TVPaint, and although I still prefer how Animate works, TVPaint definitely has its advantages. The interface is less streamlined and it has a lot of issues such as no obvious way to select and move things with a lasso tool, no simple way to duplicate frames etc. But the brush is far better than Animate’s, although I do feel that TVPaint can often look crunchy upon export with a lot of very visibly pixelated edges to lines, whereas Animate’s vector based shapes look a lot cleaner.

I think it will be fun to use TVPaint for roughing out animations, bringing compressed image sequences into Animate and creating tasty line-less animations in that programme. But I might try doing something that looks unlike my previous works, maybe more like a living illustration than a living paper cut-out. Anyway, for now I am mostly having a nice time interacting with the class and making little loops.