Dragons 2 of them update

Lately I've been feeling down about my animation skills. Like, I want to embrace cartoonish animation more, I want characters to feel more malleable and dynamic, like I want to push the actions further and try making things have more feeling to it.

For example, in this animation, I wanted to start off by showing Jet snout-deep in some dragon hole and then he pulls his face out. I was thinking about how can I make this connect more deeply with my audience? What can I do to express this idea in a way that's more visceral and weighty? Then I thought it'd be fun to do a slow motion type scene, where there's some pretty extreme smear frames that are "felt, not seen"

I think it ended up working pretty well, especially with that part where we can see the energy of the face pull out rippling across the hole. I'm happy to say that was manually animated, took a bit to get right but I'm happy with the result!

Like I said in the last post, I want to go next-level with this one... and part of that has been doing a few other things to try learn more stuff. I did this trot cycle to try adding in some more subtle squash/stretch.

And also I was experimenting with something else for something else (I'll post about it later eventually) and made this mouse cursor wait icon but with some squash/stretch/smearing when it flips over. I'm not much of a 2d animator but I feel like I took away something useful from doing this tiny pixel art animation.

Also, I recently got the Animators Survival Kit and it inspired me to finally try a bouncing ball. Honestly, I thought it would be easy enough (like as if I'm some hot shot big brain animator) but it was actually a bit challenging.

I was way too aggressive on the squash/stretch- attempt 2 I'll try to be more subtle about it. But honestly, just from this quick exercise, I feel like I learned a lot.

So yeah, re-thinking the way this dragon mating animation should go, like it's the same main idea (two dragons going at it) but I'm redoing stuff. I've attach the original, outdated, very rough animatic I made for now though.