Onion skinning

I just animated my first walk cycle. It was only one second and i used onion skinning while drawing the different positions in the walk cycle. I quickly realized that I didn't know how to walk and therefore was having a difficult time animating. I ended up getting up and simulating walking at a very slow pace in order to really understand each movement that happens when you take one step. I think the animation gets better with each frame, but it definitely needs a lot more work. I ended up adding color to it as well because after testing out the three different ways to color my figure, I was curious on how the color would add to the energy of my character. I liked the way it looked, but my only criticism is that I think I need to make the figure travel a shorter distance because it is moving too fast.

Starting the walk cycle

Since we are going to start making a walk cycle I first made a figure that looks as though it is stopped in motion. I chose just to make that action walking, just to start out and get my bearings while using the pencil tool and also using the tablet and pen. I just was going to start by making a very sketchy looking form and then was planning on using that as a template for a more clean, human like form. While in this process, I actually decided that I liked the energy that this little sketch figure possessed. Now it came time to add color. Since I had this non traditional sketch form, I had to think of how I could add color to it. The first thing I did was use different colored pencils to represent each part of the body. Flesh colored for the face and arms, and different colors for the clothing. I really started to like how this was coming out. The next thing i did was to take the paint bucket and just  fill in whatever  it let me with the colors in their respected areas. This gave a really interesting look to the figure. The last way I colored was to use the paintbrush tool set to 'paint behind' and painted the figure with its respected color. By using the paint behind, however, it allowed the black sketch outlines to be on top of the color which I ended up really liking. I really enjoyed trying to come up with different processes to color the figure and the different feel it gave which each change.