I'm so excited about being ready to start animating with this project!

I wanted to use one of my own drawings for this, and wanted to use something that was fairly rigid but still would have the possibility for being expressive - I should have just used one of the lovely characters provided but I love over-complicating things for myself. In the end I went with a character that my friend Heather made up - she's a huge stone and metal construct named Pebbles, who is always there to help, whether you want the help or not. I love the character (she uses her in our Dungeons & Dragons games) so it was really fun drawing my own cute take on her!

The cover photo at the moment is my original drawing. Here she is divided onto separate layers and ready to animate!

 

 

I've had to split her onto quite a lot of layers in order to get this to work - for example, the copper section in the middle of her body and at the top of her legs bends while the grey stone and metal doesn't, I didn't want the shoulder caps and the bit of her cape overlapping her chest piece to warp, and the tops of her legs should overlap her hips as she moves, so I really had to think ahead as I was planning her. Also as her eyes are solid I had to plan out the features of her face individually if her head was going to move. Fingers crossed I considered it all in a way that's actually going to work in practice rather than just in theory!

Now to After Effects!