[nsfw] Animation + Steps

This YCH was purchased by BallsDonk and Raijen, but I thought I'd share with y'all the steps that I took to get to the finished piece! Animation is a lot of fun but still challenging for me. There's a ton of trial and error and a lot of frustrated walking away and coming back to figure out how to solve the problem, but every project feels like I'm learning something new to incorporate into my next!

This was the original YCH. You can see that certain elements are essentially unchanged to the final. It's super important to get the basics of the movements and the keyframes established because those are very hard to change down the line. Here's the characters drawn into the pose after the ych was purchased!

Some basic anatomy changes for the characters but nothing too drastic. Next, to smooth out the movement.

In-betweens added but now the movement doesn't have the appropriate weight and lag, letting me know that there's some frames missing. This is the hardest part for me, figuring out where the frame needs to go to make the timing work again and the most trial and error takes place here. I can tell that the balls need to linger longer at the bottom of the movement, so I try adding a frame in there! I also add another frame at the top of the movement to give it a bit more of a 'pause'

ah, much better! Now to ink it! This part takes the longest. It's important to make sure that the lines don't vary or wiggle too much as it becomes distracting in the finished piece, but it's hard drawing the same line over and over without it wiggling a little, so I use a lot of ctrl-t (transform tool) to push lines back into place.

Even at this stage I'm thinking about how there's lines I will probably need to alter after colors are added. 

Now it's all starting to come together! All that's needed now is to pop in a background and some shading to tie the whole piece together.

Some color tweaks and a little camera shake and we're done!