Lol I studied animation as a hobby for about 5 years, and although my own skills weren't the best (I didn't practice nearly enough, but I was starting to get it), I did a lot of research on animating. It may sound silly, but I actually looked to the old fluidanims crew as a benchmark and place to learn. If you know of fluidanims (a lot of them migrated to Hyun's Dojo when fluidanims got absorbed by stickpage and one of the community members wanted to keep things going), awesome. If you don't, they did all those absolutely incredible stick person battle animations back in the 2000s known as the RHG series.

Although it wasn't fullbody animation, and often didn't even use a 3D space, the rules of emphasis, force, rhythm, focal points, motion, etc. all still apply. It was a fun experience, and some days I still miss animating.

But geez... A month minimum for some relatively basic looking animations? Digital art is so much more immediately gratifying.


@JesterSeraph @mar_cynwer I tried to make it a bit more human like. Well she is an android so maybe being a bit inhuman wouldn't be a bad thing but that wasn't my intention. sigh.... This thing is so tiring for both mind and soul that it is hard for me to keep going. I'm not sure how many frames should I create and how to make it less jumpy and more fluid.

What is your current frame rate? It looks rather low. Standard FPS when animating action is usually around 24 to 30 frames per second, and is a good area to aim at for all animation until you get stylized enough to begin experimenting with lower and higher frame rates.

one thing I'll note heavily is the amount of motion per frame transition. How much has the animation changed per frame? Like how we use high levels of contrast and size to depict the importance of a single space in a painting, animation uses time as a way of emphasizing force and effort, thus also importance. The more spent in a single place doing a single action, the more emphasis it has. If you want to see an example, look at the difference in how powerful a single punch thrown feels between these two studies someone else did in their art blog. The difference was the build up before the punch itself.

Another really good example is, if you've ever played it, the Falcon Punch animation from any of the Super Smash Brothers games. If you were to actually count the number of frames in the wind up and compared it to the number of frames in the punch itself, you'd be shocked. If you then look at how much Captain Falcon's model moves during that entire period, you'll notice he does rather slow movements to pull back his fist, and then the punch itself is a very quick few frames in which his model moves much farther distances, comparatively.

this contrast in speed (distance of change between frames) and duration (# of frames to the wind up vs # of frames in the punch) allow us as viewers to interpret the force behind the action. Even without all the fancy sound effects, you can practically feel the impact, hear the swoosh or crunch, and jump with excitement Add in a little camera manipulation to move with the action, and it's all the more powerful.

So going back to rhythm, if you want to display a rhythm then you have to put time emphasis on certain key points of the motion. If you stand up and walk in a straight line, you'll notice your speed varies. You don't quite walk at the same speed during the entire duration of the walk, it slows down and speeds up between each step as you put your foot down, push down, and pull your other leg forward. The variation in speed reduces the faster you walk/run, but it's always still there. That variation is the rhythm.

In your animation, the legs and arms move the exact same distance every frame, with no pause, thus they have no rhythm. It's completely normalized. Even the feet are always moving horizontally at approximately the same rate, without any sort of pause when the feet first press down. If you're looking for places to add frames, it would be at the moment of stepping.

If you want an easier time practicing, try instead something very exaggerated such as a stagger. If a person is staggering, they have a VERY clear rhythm of one step, pause, second step, pause, that you can emphasize quite nicely. Then you slowly work from there towards normal walking where the rhythm is a bit less obvious, and then onto running.

Also, try animating the character walking across the screen rather than as a stationary loop. Try animating them going from a standing position into a couple steps, then a slow walk, a walk, a brisk walk, a light jog, a jog, a light run, a run, a full sprint, then trying to slow down into a stop. Afterwards, if you want to make the whole thing easier to upload, move the drawings of each frame to overlap each other like they would in a running cycle. The distances their limbs travel and where a character's foot stops should be much easier to create initially though when actually animating the character moving across the screen.

Good luck, and feel free to ask me any questions you might have.


Did some more work on it. Tried to put more emphasis on the stepping. At the moment it has 25-26 frames. How many should be there?
@JesterSeraph Sadly the school assignment doesn't allow me to do a forward moving walk, it has to move gradually with a loop, and we have so many lessons, lots of homework that sadly I won't be able to do more movements other than what the teacher asks. Not until the end of the semester anyway...
The other thing: I don't know nearly enough to be able to ask questions. I can see when something is wrong, but I cannot figure out what it is exactly. D:

@derkodos Well I use Photoshop, but I read that its bad to do animation in it, its not mainly made for it. But that's the program I know most, and use regularly, so that's why.
On the topic of roughness: I get asked by my classmates a lot, and the only thing I can tell them is, I am not afraid of making mistakes, as Bob Ross used to say: Those are that "happy accidents" and it is very true. That just gives the piece soul and heart. If you chisel it to death, nobody will ever recognize you... well that's what I think anyways...

The amount of frames is wholely dependant on how long you want the walking cycle to be. There aren't any rules on how many frames they have to be, because everyone walks at different speeds, in different ways. This is why I brought up the question of frame rate.

In animation (film in general, but I'll be discussing animation), you have a frame rate, which is the number of frames which play per second. Standards are 24, 30, and 60. The more frames you have per second, the more fluid you can animate motion.

So how many frames your walking cycle is depends on the two key factors of how long you want your walk cycle to be in seconds, and what your frame rate is set to. If you want to see how long your walk cycle is, start walking at a very steady speed, then at some point when one of your feet touches the ground, start a timer. Count every step that follows that initial one (Don't count the step you start the timer on), and when you reach the 10th step immediately stop your timer. Divide the time you got by 5, and that's your average walk cycle time. Then divide that tike by your frame rate, and that's the number of frames you would need to animate your particular walk cycle at whichever frame rate you chose.

Also, Photoshop isn't a very good application for animation at all. It has a couple features for making gifs, but overall it isn't exactly a tool for animation. If you like Adobe, consider trying Adobe Flash (or whatever they're calling Flash nowadays). You'll find it more similar to illustrator than to photoshop though, since it's vector-based, but it is a tool for animation that's been around for a while now and is a common choice for beginners due to its simplicity. Otherwise, I recommend googling "2D animation software" and using a free trial of something to see if you like it.

If you're still looking for critiques on your current walk cycle, consider having the android take slightly shorter steps, and don't have her body bend down quite so much with each step. Everything is just a little too exaggerated. You're certainly getting closer to a standard human walk! I'm sure if you told someone "this is my first attempt at animation," you would make a number of people jealous of your skill.

13 days later

Hey you have a lot of pretty nice work here!
I'd say don't be afraid to try to clean up and really push/refine your paintings. They have a pretty nice quality to them but really look unfinished, here are a couple of links to other artist that you might be able to learn from their work. Aaron Griffin Art has a bunch of great process/behind the scenes/tutorial paintings that are great to see how one might go from a super rough painting to a more refined one and Brandion Liao's older work has a rough quality to it that I think you might like. I hope this helps and look forward to more of your artwork!! ^__^

@zanben Yes Aaron is a huge inspiration of mine, love his works to bits. (also know Brandion)
It is very hard for me to go further than this, blending is something I am struggling with constantly. Either it turns out blurred or unfinished, and I choose to stop at half finished, before everything goes into the "overworked" category just to be safe... ^^" I guess its a bad habbit that I should work on...

19 days later

1 month later

1 month later

Something about this makes me fall in love with this Character ^^ I love her features and she seems so...i don't know... pure ? xD if that makes sense ..

9 days later

Thank you very much! I tried to make her interesting, and not necessarily beautiful in a conventional way with her funny nose and a rather strong jawline for a girl

8 days later

what was your process and thought behind getting these vibrant rainbow-ish lights? Really like the composition and lighting :smile:

I really wanted to make an underlit, menacing tone. The character is stern, and unapologetic, so I tried to showchase just that. Originaly I made the whole picture in black and white to get the values to work, and apllied color in around the middle of the workthrough. But it still felt monochromatic with all the blue tones, and not very interesting to look at. So I decided to mess around whit some colorisation on the face, as this was my focalpoint. I wanted to frame it to make it stand out more, so I put on a glass helmet, this way the face wouldn't get covered. I looked at a lot of helmets, and glass object and found that sometimes the light or the camera (I'm not sure which) changes the colours or obscures them on the endges. This gave me the idea to mess around with the channels. Then to pull the attention away from the outter circle, I decrased the saturation, and brightness a bit on the top, and made it glow more where it met with shoulder piece. That little yellowish part was just a happy accident when my photoshop glitched out, and I kept it because it looked interresting to me.
Hope this answers the question :smile: Thank you for the comment!

Thanks yeah you answered it! This kind of stuff is always interesting to me. Keep going :smile: