Creepy Animated Self-Portrait

Creepy Animated Self-Portrait - student project

Woo! I've had my eye on this class for a while and I was finally able to dive in this weekend! I decided it would be a great chance to try my hand at traditional animation and do a stylized self-portrait! The final product is a little rough, but I kind of the love imperfect nature of this kind of animation and I had a blast learning the process!

First, I went around the web looking for inspiration. This was a one day project for me, so I kept things simple by browsing through Pinterest and Dribbble. You can see my inspiration board here: https://www.pinterest.com/autumnhutch/self-portrait-project/

Then, I started working in my sketchbook and deciding what I wanted my self-portrait to represent about me, how I could make it creepy, and how I could animate it in an interesting way.

I tried to pinpoint a couple of my features that could be emphasized (like my ever changing hair color) and then let those features kind of guide the animation ideas.

 

Creepy Animated Self-Portrait - image 1 - student project

Once I was happy with the sketch and the basic animation idea, I scanned everything in and began working in Photoshop. I used my inspiration board to build a palette that I liked and started getting everything inked and colored. I did some planning for the colors, but things usually change as I work and experiment with what looks right.

Creepy Animated Self-Portrait - image 2 - student project

I wanted the animation to remain pretty simple so that I could keep this as a one-day project. But I also didn't want things to be too boring, so I tried to add just enough movement and interest to make it fun and unique. 

Overall, this was a blast! And now I feel confident enough to take on some more complex frame by frame animations! Really excited to dig into this technique more :)  

Creepy Animated Self-Portrait - image 3 - student project