Studio Brief 1: 'I See Faces' - Cat GIF Artwork Development

Media

From my character roughs, I knew I wanted my cat to look fluffy and cute (obviously) and I wanted the colour to be bright and to stand out which is why i started to play with ginger/orange colours.

Idea of cats rolling movement

After experimenting with some media, I came to the conclusion that the "fluffiness" is created the most successfully when using coloured pencil. Pen and paint pen were too much of a block colour to create the texture I was looking for. Initially I was worried that using pencil wouldn't make the colour pop enough, but after experimenting, the colour i managed to achieve was really bright. This can obviously be edited more in photoshop once scanned in anyway.

BLUE TAC!

To help with the positioning of the cat "ball" rolling in each frame, I thought it would be a great idea to make a model of the cat physically out of blue tac which was all I had to hand at the time. Taking photos of each position as I rolled the cat ball around in my fingers, helped me to understand the amount of frames I would need in the GIF and what position to draw the cat in each one.

With the help of my blue tac cat and my trusty light box , I was able to draw the artwprk for the GIF. I thought it would be easiest if I drew and coloured every single frame of the GIF. so that when I came to creating the animation in photoshop, each frame was already created with the correct amount of movement.

 

 

Using the Lightbox was so so helpful when generating the artwork and making sure that the next frame being drawn was in the correct place for the next movement.

Final coloured artwork:

Here are a few of the finished pieces of artwork for the individual frames. I plan on creating the eyes digitally on photoshop so as to make the movement of this element a little easier (instead of trying to draw 27 different sets of eyes identically).

Successes
At this point I really think drawing each frame out like this will be beneficial. This extra planning and consideration means I have accounted for every small tiny movement, which I am hoping will help to generate a smooth continuous movement when put all together.
I am really happy with my choice in media also, as I think this texture will help aid the effect of movement and keep the character looking fluffy. Each frame also looks pretty similar to each other which should stop glitches/untidy bits in the final GIF.

Failures
I am worried I have too many frames. I am already over the limit of 24 as I have drawn up 27 in total, therefore once these are all scanned and in Photoshop, I hope to be able to spot a few frames I can take out/don't really need for the final GIF.