When I make digital artwork, I usually make a few preliminary sketches of new subjects in pencil before drawing on my tablet. This year, I have been drawn to crows, so I decided to do a drawing study of them. Prior to the sketch shown here, I did two drawings from photos I found online of crows to familiarize myself with them. Then, I improvised the pencil drawing here with some of the features that stood out to me when making the first set of drawings with reference photos. Drawing birds is something that is somewhat new to me, so here you can see in real time my sketching process to acquaint myself with features of birds before I create a colorful graphic depiction of them in digital art. Next time I do a sketch like this, I will try to go slower with more deliberate lines.
This week, I tried out animating a walk cycle. For this animation I drew a head and trunk of the body on a single layer. Then, I drew the arms and legs on separate layers. I created 8 variations of the body position using Richard William's chapter on Walks in the book The Animator's Survival Kit as a reference guide for where the feet and arms should be oriented at each major step. I assembled the images I created into frames on a timeline. I layered it with my website tag, added the grey background, and exported it as a GIF.