Making of: Secondary Action

An exercise in secondary action and weight. I also wanted to test a digital cel animation workflow with added shadows.

I started out with simple balls where the main body guides the rest:

I animated on two's in the beginning, but the timing didn't quite match the weight of the character, so I switched to ones; leaving me with more work, but a better result in the end I think.

While making the rough animation there wasn't any thought out character yet. I thought of flipped buckets and vegetables, but ultimately settled on a rabit like doll carrying something under its skin:

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The secondary action principle also applied to the ears, arms and buttoned eye. I wanted the ears to have a stiffness at the base, so I tried to limit the amount of waviness there. The arms serve as a counter weight to the belly and I left them dangling under its head.

The inking was done in Krita. Same goes for the rough animation. I used pure red lines for the shadows which enabled me to fill those with the designated shadow color in the last stage.

As for the coloring I wanted to utilize Opentoonz, but failed because I was still struggling with its bucket tool. It seems to be too strict when finding edges. Have to do some more research on that. I stayed and colored in Krita instead.

Getting rid of the red shadow lines proved to be difficult as well. The lines were anti-aliased, which confused the paint bucket tool by not fully filling them up, leaving red spots all over the edges of the color planes. The only tool that helped was the 'Similar Color Selection Tool', which selected only the red color so I could paint over it.

Learned a lot again with this one! The hardest thing was keeping volume. In hindsight there are some notable volume shifts in the belly and the head towards the end. I'm going to keep an eye out for that.