#30 The story of my brainfart

I always feel like talking about a story you're going to create is like talking about a dream you had with someone: You try telling them what makes it so awesome and interesting, but in the end, the other person doesn't really care. And I think that's partly because there's nothing to gain from listening to those stories. There's no larger theme to everything. That's why theme is so essential, it gives your story a reason to exist. And it's what I'm going to start off with.

This post is arriving a week late. Sorry about that, but I couldn't figure out a way to talk about what I was doing. I was basically trying to come up with a cool story, but I couldn't find a solid theme to wrap everything around in. I made up a list of themes in TextEdit that I could work off of, and they were all about the relationship between lies/truths and reality/dreams. (Although these are things I want to focus on, they're not the main subject of the story. They're more like underlying themes.) Then during the weekend, I realized how stupid I was being.

 The list of themes I made. I blurred it, because it's dumb

 and I'm self-conscious of it.

After thinking about everything, I came to the conclusion that my gific was (and is) going to be about coming to terms with death. Yeah. It took my a week to realize this. The worst part is, I looked back at the last post I made with the summary of the story and saw I named it "Come to Peace." Like, it's stuff like this that makes me feel really stupid. Let's just forget about the whole thing.

Also, to not make you think I did nothing last week except try to come up with the theme, here's a blurred image of a really long story outline I created. 'Course, I was never going to make such a long story. I just wanted to explore this world and see where I needed to add in more detail.

Next week, or rather this week, I'll make the actual outline and maybe design some of the characters and settings.

#29 The new and possibly last Gific

My next Gific is going to be about this:

Come to Peace

In the future, the world's countries have combined to form one worldwide government. There are a group of scientists that find out a type of invisible energy is heading into our solar system and it will end up destroying all life on earth.  The story is about the decisions the president of the world has to make, mainly the question of whether he should tell the world what's happening or if he should keep it to himself and let the people die without knowing what happened. As the ball of energy gets closer, he starts hallucinating more and more, and I'll use that part of the story to change art styles every so often.

That's all I'll reveal now, because I don't want to ruin it. And frankly, I don't know what could happen next. No worries though, it'll still be awesome.

That's all for this week. I spent too much of my time looking at other artists' work online. I might make a post that I update regularly with all of my favorite online artists/animators.

Hasta luego.

#28 Bonfire

The last looping gif I'm making is going to be of a bonfire at a beach. I'm just figuring out how to work with pixel art, as this video explains, so I'll be using it for this next gif. Here's a short example of where I am right now with it:

I've found a whole bunch of pixel artists out there to inspire me to do this. Here are some of the places you can find them at:

• Michael Hussinger
• Waneella
• Noah Bradley
• Octavi Navarro
• Jalonso  

It's inspiring seeing what these people can do with this style. Pixel art sometimes looks like it was done by a little kid, but there's actually a lot of technique involved.  Here, take a looksie at this. This whole style is one where the artist actually has to edit the art pixel by pixel. So yeah, the people behind all of those Super Nintendo games deserve a lot more praise than one would think they're worth.
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Annnd jumping to the the end...

My favorite part of this is the name at the bottom left. It looks so cool.

I also learned how to use dithering for this, which is what you can see in the lit part of the ground by the fire. It's a way to blend two colors together.

#27 The process for the Tinder-Browsing gif and other boring stuff

There's not much to say about the last gif I made that I haven't already gone over before, but there's still some stuff I want to talk about:

I used really dark colors when I blocked in all of the colors, so when I added the lighting animation, it would highlight the face and create a strong contrast between that and the background. That's why my preview post looked all bad, because I hadn't added the glow coming from the phone.

To make that phone screen animation (mainly the pictures sliding out of the screen. The 'like' button animation is pretty simple to make, I think anyone could figure it out.), I duplicated the picture several times, and then I moved it a bit each time. There was no mask holding the picture in that screen, so it was just flying out of the screen like this:

I had to go over all of the frames and erase the parts that weren't inside the screen.

For the animated lighting, I duplicated the layer that had just the guy, and used that checkered button I talked about in this post to make sure only the guy was affected when I added the light. I used some sweet textured brush with low opacity to make the lighting.

That's about it, I think.
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UPDATES AND NEW GIFIC PLAN.

Small little gifs are exhausting me. I feel like I'm starting to outgrow them, wanting to move more into making stuff like my Delta comic. I want to make a comic that allows me the freedom to change styles in the middle of it. The purpose of this blog is for me to keep learning from other places, so that's why, but it's also fun finding new artists and see what their workflow is like. I'll probably make one more, small, loopy thing, but then that'll be it.

Again, my time ran out for this week. I'll be more productive next time.

Probably. Not.