For this animation I was asked to make a drawn animated loop of about 24-48 frames of a chair spinning 360 degrees. I did this on my iPad in Procreate.
- Step 1: Set up a chair in the middle of the room. This was a little bit tricky as there is no room in my house where it is possible to have a chair in the middle far enough away to move around while maintaining the same distance and viewpoint because other furniture gets in the way. I could have added an object, but the simple chair was in itself enough of an interesting challenge.
- Step 2: Make a drawing of the chair (and object). Work fast, loose and try to fill most of the page. No more than 3 minutes per drawing. Then move your seating position a few degrees to the right and make another drawing from this new perspective. Then move and draw again until you have encircled the chair and made drawings from roughly all positions around it. Number your drawings as you go along on the corner of the page.
I did very quick sketches in Procreate on my iPad, some shaded and some not. Using onion skinning to maintain some semblance of alignment and scale despite the need to draw from slightly different distances and heights to avoid furniture/stand or sit etc. I actually quite like some of the variation – it seems like the chair is sometimes coming nearer, sometimes receding and the occasional shaded frames add interest. I could experiment a lot more with this – adding more or less variation, doing all shaded shapes or all sketches and getting mor or less constancy in size through cropping/transformation and redrawing with more accurate linear perspective.
- Step 3: Import your images into your editing software. Starting with 24 frames per second, I experimented frame rates: 6FPS, 12 FPS and 15 FPS, and with loop and pingpong variants.