In November, I created a gif of a mermaid, featured in the Doodles exhibit! This was a project that I did in about a week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Mermaids are a fantasy movie staple; the new Little Mermaid movie came out in 2023 featuring Halle Bailey, and in 2022, the Black Panther II movie featured several mermaid characters as well. If I were a fantasy character, I would want to be a mermaid. For now, I shall practice animating them to capture their majesty. The way I created my mermaid gif was by drawing my mermaid character in Photoshop. I duplicated the layer in which I had drawn my mermaid character, and then I edited the arms and position of the tail on new separate layers. I saved combinations of the layers with the different arm and tail postures as PNG files. These files served as character frames that I imported into Adobe Animate. I positioned my character frames of the mermaid floating up and down through the water, coordinating the beginning and ends of the motion path with how her arms and fish tail would be postured. After positioning the beginning and endpoints of where she would float, I used the classic tween feature to automatically generate frames along her path of motion. Then I exported it as a GIF file so that it loops while displayed on my website. I have a habit of giving myself very ambitious projects when I am practicing subjects that I really enjoy, and this was a fun project to me that I kept simple and paced myself well as I explored animation with my favorite fantasy creature.
I took my fascination with drawing hands one dimension further and created a sculpture of two hands in alabaster stone. Before I decided on a subject for the sculpture, I had a photo of my two hands that I used for a digital drawing hanging on my refrigerator, mostly because I get a good feeling from looking at it. I looked at every day for a few weeks, and then when the time came to decide on a form for the stone I was carving, the image of the two hands was fresh in my mind, and that's what I picked. I wanted to tilt the hands so that the part of the palm closest to the wrist was a high point, to emphasize the hands were in an offering position, almost pushing any object they may hold toward the viewer standing in front of them. In contrast, I pictured a receiving or asking position would have had the part of the palm closest to the wrist in a lower position, in which the cup of the hands would have more space to receive a treasure in its grasp without dropping it. In the final product, the tilt of the palm and how it balances with the fingers is subtle, and the posture of the hands feels like holding something cherished.