Emotional Support Tiger: An Animation
A peek into my art process.
Emotional Support Tiger: An Animation
Earlier this month, a man in Nevada was arrested after police seized seven emotional support tigers from his home.1 I heard this on an episode of That’s Spooky, a new podcast I’m trying out. It was playing when I showered. Inspiration has never struck so hard! Here are some warm up illustrations in my sketchbook.
Plans began with seven individual tigers, each offering emotional support in their unique way. Plans derailed when I spent too long talking myself in and out of every medium at my disposal. Eventually, there will be seven tigers, painted on nice paper. Big goal: I sell them on my website and exit financial doom. Dream for the stars, kid! In the meantime, let’s actually create an entire work of art.
Spolier alert: I did!
The Process Behind This Animation
I’ve been itching to create an animation for at least a few weeks/years. They are so playful and I would love to expand my skills. This one actually opens and closes its mouth!! I haven’t had a character transform in the capacity before.
Each slide is completely hand drawn- no duplicating any elements. This gives the artwork extra movement/personality. The entire project took two hours, with 1 hour and 46 minutes purely spent on animation/drawing all the pieces. In the images explaining my art, I use the terms frame, layers, groups and slides. I hope you understand what I am meaning to say. The groups are slides AKA frames. The layers are living inside each group, making up the individual slides/frames of the final animation.
I’m using Procreate App on my iPad for the entire process. Here’s a look at the layers, which become slides/frames. I kept the lettering, border, orange fill and black tiger line work on four separate layers.
Procreate offers “Animation Assist” with lovely onion skins. This allows me to see the previous drawing as I re-illustrate the art. You can see below the shadows of previous frames.
In case you are interested in watching the entire drawing process, here is a Timelapse video!
PS. you’ll hear from me again on Thursday 🤡 I wrote an essay about AI art, sketchbook practice, reclaiming my art, using the tools I have to continue creating/sharing/experimenting, and how my undiagnosed borderline personality mother’s power over me is dwindling to the last pieces of sludge. More images and edits are needed, but I feel terrible keeping this dope ass tiger to myself any longer.