Last night, I wanted to see if a concept I had for making an object appear in mid-air in stop motion animation (to look like it's falling, flying, or floating) would work.

I'm imagining it's a pretty standard way of doing it, but I wanted to see if I could do it.

After the break, I've included a step by step "How-To" guide for how I got the ball to look like it was in the air. Click "Read More" to... read more.

Here's the video:

 I've been playing with the stop motion editor again...

Having made one claymation video, months ago, I was initially just messing about to re-familiarise myself with the controls of it. The photograpy took around half an hour. Then I ended up getting quite involved in adding titles and redoing the sound and so on.

​More on how I did it, after the vid:

The other day, I wanted to try something a little different. I wanted to incorporate a little of Medusa Dollmaker's style into mine and also wanted to try colouring from greyscale first with layers of colour over the top, a method I've read about but never tried. And since this occurred to me on the day before the Presidential Inauguration, I thought I'd draw President Donald Trump.
I've got to be honest, I regretted this last decision as it meant I then spent an inordinate amount of time looking at him, but to paraphrase Magnus Magnusson, "I'd started so I'd finish..."

Nearing the end of the pencils stage, I decided to add laurels but realised I'd not left enough room on the left of the page for a laurel, so added it after I'd scanned the drawing to Photoshop and bumped up the darkness of the drawing.
Then I inked it, concentrating mainly on the outlines. 

When it came to adding colour, I first attempted to simply add washes of colour over the pencils and fiddled with the blending modes. There is a method of colouring where this is the primary means of colouring, but when I tried it, it looked awful so I think I need to have another go at that and see if I can work it out. If anyone has any tips for this method, please do leave me a comment.

So then I used my more usual method of colouring and shading, freehanding directly onto those washes with my Wacom tablet to build up light and shade, using the pencil sketch as a guide.

Then I added in a texture on the metal ring, brought up the darkness on the wall's pencils to allow the texture of the paper to add to the wall, added the stars, a vignette, and a parchment texture over the whole illustration, and a couple of final tweaks such as blending the text in more.

So there he is: Your new President of the United States, Donald Trump.

​What a guy...