Learning to Animate: The Animator's Survival Kit

I got this book called The Animator's Survival Kit for Christmas this past year. I have been meaning to read it but have not had the chance since it accidentally got put into storage. Anyways, I thought that I would start reading it after I found it and was totally blown away by the first few pages! I have heard from other people and read on blogs that it was an absolute necessity but never really took it to heart. I think I will now. I feel as if I will learn more from this than the 4 years I had in college! I'm going to continue to read it but as a VERY quick exercise I decided to try my hand at a quick animation to see how it would work out. I made it into a GIF but couldn't post it so here was what the process looked like.

Update: I did another animation. This one was not nearly as jumpy as the first and that's why I'm uploading this one and not the other one.

Leah's Sketchbook

I showed my 7 year old neice, Leah, my sketchbook drawings. She loved them so much that she wanted to make some of her own. I taught her some techniques for shading and this is what she drew!

Weekly Sketchbook 1

This is some of my sketchbook that I just recently found during Val and I's excursion into our shed. Although I like people to see some of my sketches this is mainly to catalog my sketchbook as I am terrified of losing and losing all of my pictures. It has happened MANY MANY times before.

Have You Taken A Door Off Its Hinges Today?

Today was an unusually boring day. That is until Val, Leah, and I decided to get some of Val and I's stuff out of our outside storage shed. We went out to open it and, what do ya know, it wouldn't open.... of course :P. So we began a very rigid search for a solution. We tried some graphite lubricant that we had. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Next we tried some WD-40. Again, it was a big fat failure. Since none of the basics worked we decided to try some drastic measures. We looked up ways to fix the problem and saw that you could just remove the door knob. Duh! It seemed so obvious! Unfortunately, the screws were on the inside of the door. Great.... So we decided to go for the only thing that would work, taking the hinges off the door. So this is what we did! In order to properly document our process and leave notes for future knowledge seekers of door removal, Leah made a list. Here it is:

Oh! and don't forget the "hi five". It's probably the MOST important step!


I also found some of my old sketch books and thought it would be fun to post some pictures! I'll start that tomorrow. Val also found some of her old journals and plans on emailing our old hostesses in France that we lived with! How exciting is that!

Another Robot

I started another robot. This one's supposed to be more like a fighter than my last one which was a scout bot. He's only a little bit done but I thought it would be fun to post all of my progress. So here's the first!


You can see that the legs are barely started and the joints need to be built but you can get a slight idea of what's going on.

Short Animation: Part 2

Just an update of the video. I fixed some things and changed some others. I think it looks a LOT better now.

A Short Animation

I worked on a short animation for about an hour today. The rendering took FOREVER so I didn't want to fix anything with it today. It's not perfect but I think it came out pretty well. :D