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This was a pure joy to work on.

For the behind-the-scenes story of how I made this animated mini-short, click “keep reading” below.

I started this 6 weeks ago, just before Nintendo shut down its 3DS and WiiU servers. The server shutdown meant no more multi-player online play for 3DS games, like Mario Kart 7, but also no more uploading to the Butterfly Animation online gallery directly from the app.

As an homage to the Inchworm and Butterfly Animation apps for the DSi and 3DS that I’ve been animating on since 2011, I originally was just going to animate just a single shot featuring something butterfly related.

But the story evolved as I began asking myself a series of "what if" questions that I had fun answering, like, “what if it was a little girl playing dress up as a butterfly?” And then “what if she was first cosplaying as a caterpillar then the butterfly?” “If this is a story of growth, what if she stumbles? What is her attitude when she stumbles?” “What if the design of the girl was something like Isao Takahata or Yoichi Kotabe would draw?”

Making this was the embodiment of everything I hope to achieve with my personal animation: to let creativity flow and just have fun animating and creating.

Since this mini-short was animated on my Nintendo 3DS, there was a memory limit of only 100 drawings, which was a bit of a challenge for longer or complex actions, but was a fun puzzle to solve. Sometimes limitations force you to come up with even more creative solutions. (I was able the squeeze in more drawings than the memory allowed, and filled it to the max!) :)

The song I used is from Rebecca Sugar’s album, "Spiral Bound", and perfectly fit the theme of the short. Initially, while I was drawing the character, I found myself humming a tune from Steven Universe that dealt with beginnings, endings, and not being ready. It’s amazing how the brain can subconsciously pick the playlist!

In the end, that song, sung by Steven’s father in the show, didn’t quite fit, but then I remembered another song by Rebecca Sugar which was more on theme with my story, called “My Own Way to the End”. The whole album is wonderful! You can check it out here:

ffm.to

Rebecca Sugar - Spiral Bound

Choose your preferred music service

Painting the backgrounds for this was the most challenging thing for me, but also the most eye opening! After painting, I would look around at the trees in the neighborhood differently. So many colors when you really look closely.

There’s so many talented people at my work and it was great that I could ask them for advice. One person I asked was the talented Tia Kratter, who happened to teach a mini-painting class for the animators while I was working on this short. I asked her for advice on one of the background paintings and she asked great questions which challenged me to try different things, but I still felt like I was having fun and playing without fear of failure. I mean, it was still hard though! Hahaha!

If you’ve read up to this point, thank you for reading this. :) I hope you enjoy this mini-short as much as I enjoyed making it!

I cry the whole time :')

:’)

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

✨Merry crisis everyone✨

Yeah I’m two days late but don’t worry about it

group stimming session

Q: how do you draw torsos and legs? Some people say the hands are more difficult but for me it's those things, what tips would you give for those?

I also struggle with legs, way more than I ever struggled with hands. But, every problem has a solution. In this case: skeletons and naked people.

You can trace directly off of real life bodies, but a better practice is to draw your best copy of what you see, making your measuring and line confidence stronger💪

Yeah muscle anatomy is cool, but that’s a factor AFTER learning basic skeleton structuring. Having a 3D model of a skeleton that you can manipulate helps with figuring out how the skeleton moves with muscles, but you can typically see someone’s skeleton straight through their body depending on their weight and position. Below, you can see my simplified version of what I think his skeleton is doing. You need to understand how to build a strong base to create a proper body over it.

With enough studying of how the skeleton manipulates through the muscles, you can add your own skeleton to your drawing. Knowing each layer of biological anatomy, not just simple limb by limb drawing anatomy, brings much more weight and mass to your characters.

Lots of simple studies to figure out how the bone fits into the muscle so that you don’t have any limbs anatomically clipping over eachother and breaking form

For muscles, first off, just draw lots of naked people, second, use this lemon slice shape to show the weight of flesh, along with the tension of movement along the straight line of the shape. Watch all of this dudes video but specifically this one to understand more

Rapper Macklemore posts on Instagram a song in support of Palestine called “HIND’S HALL” that will be on streaming platforms soon and all proceeds will go to UNRWA