An Animated Warm Up
I've been watching a ton of Bob's Burgers and women's MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) lately, so I thought I would get back into animation mode using this quick character animation as a warm up, combining my two current obsessions.
I haven't done that much action-based animation. I'm much more comfortable animating 'cute' movements and gestures which convey emotion as that's what I'm best at, but I'm starting to move out of that comfort zone and practice my action, lip sync and other skills which I haven't done much of.
I'm a bit rusty at it on the whole, but I'm gearing up to create Ammil, my animated short. In my opinion it's really important to develop my skills and to make sure I'm on-form, so before I crack on with that, I'm using a few exercises including some more frame-by-frame stuff (like this is and my animated short will be), but also stop-motion and vector styles to push my skills forwards. Then I'll feel a bit less rusty and a bit better about getting stuck into Ammil, which will be much longer and much more refined and therefore time consuming than these exercises, but largely involves skills that are well within my comfort zone.
I used a video of Rose Namajunas sparring as a reference to get the movement right during roughing. I then used a little character that I've had in the works for a while to finalise the overall look and drew her in a rough Bob's Burgers-like style. I'm actually building a stop motion puppet of this character (who doesn't actually have a name yet) so I can have a play around with that, so watch this space.