Breaking the posting drought. These were doodled directly into Pencil.
Knight Doodles
Knight Doodles
7
Lightning
I was playing with the timing of this lightning strike in Blender’s VSE. Each strike is actually a slightly different timing approach. Which one do you like the best? That lightning design could use some work, though.
Working the Lines
This post is actually kind of momentous though it may not seem like much. First, the not so important part: I did some testing in Flash to see how I might be able to get decent line quality using Flash as a frame-by-frame animation tool. It’s okay, I guess, though the underlying drawing is kind of sucky. On the second head, I experimented with using blurs on some elements.
Flash Lines
But the cool part is the image below. For this one, I was testing the idea of inking and painting in Gimp over a camera shot of a penciled image (the same image in this post, also not a great underlying drawing but good enough for test purposes). I really like both how this turned out and the process. My next step is to try it on a short animated sequence to see if line quality holds up under those circumstances. If that works, then I think I’ve finally found my pipe line for hand-drawn animation. 
Doesn’t that just look like a traditional hand-painted cel?
Jumper Dude Revisited
This is a second pass at the little animation I posted here. I reworked the landing slightly and then played with Pencil’s coloring tools. The alpha protection mode is actually really useful for shading and highlights, but I’m still not crazy about the quality of the finished line on the character. I also did a really quick background in Gimp.
Pencils on a pencil in Pencil
Experimenting with various approaches to finishing a drawing in the open source program Pencil. Nothing really satisfies me. I have a plan to do some old-fashioned paper and pencil animation this weekend. I think I may try finishing some of those frames in Gimp or MyPaint for comparison. MyPaint just released version 1.1 and I can’t wait to try out the new features.
Pencil Experiments