How To Animate Without Drawing Quite As Much As You Think You Have To
Added 2025-06-03 17:20:54 +0000 UTCJust a tiny little snippet of animation from the upcoming Ready 2 Start Toon!
We're barreling towards the finish line with this one. Later this month or early next month is still the plan.
This is from an extended moment of dialogue where I kind of needed to break it up between a few poses. I'm going heavy on the corner cutting, however, as to ensure we meet that deadline. I still have a couple more scenes left to get to!
The easiest way to cut down on animation time is to aim to draw as few things as possible, and see how much movement can be conveyed by way of shape transforming. Here, I've drawn 3 different body poses, and 4 different arm positions, that I'm just squashing and stretching strategically, rotating the hands, pulling on the arms, to give the illusion of smooth-ish transitions between the frames, without actually drawing any inbetweens. I think the motion tracks decently.
If you ever wanna try animation and find the time consumption daunting, try shortcuts like these every now and then! I say this a lot, but being a good animator isn't necessarily about drawing as many frames as possible, but rather, seeing how far you can stretch as little information as possible.
