More Folksy Cutesy Design Hacks.

I've committed to this thing, so now I'm forced to churn out whatever dang chintzy fluff it demands. Here's some designs on a horticultural theme.

Tractor Vector and Skipping Girl

I've animated the little girl skipping and have started on the farmer character.

Below is tractor as a vector in Anime Studio. I'll probably have the engine bounce around a bit as it moves.

Animated Marching Walk Cycles

I have a few more of these to do. This gif plays a lot slower than real-time unfortunately.

I got the arms wrong on the pig and the man, they are swinging counter to what happens in a real walk cycle, I don't think it's worth fixing, I just don't have the time. I  have designed the look for the farmer and the little girl.

Color planning

I watch a great video today, a 1 Hour painting Demo with Kyle T Webster . That's the man who designs all the Photoshop brushes I use. I realized how many bad habits I have when working on images in the digital medium. One of them is just choosing colors willy nilly from the rainbow spectrum on offer in the color chooser. So I'm going to start mixing my palette from red, yellow and blue primaries like he does.

  He had some advice about colors that won't print well, and how they can be identified in the color chooser, stuff I wish I'd known years ago.

Progress update

Here's how this ended up looking in the final animation, each character had to have some amount of rigging applied, not much but it still took some time doing.

I changed the lady on the end because she wasn't funny looking enough. I was able to duplicate the blotchy ink line look of the original drawing pretty good in Anime Studio. There's also the option of importing rasterized art into AS and doing it that way, but for some reason I prefer to work with vectors.

UPDATE;
Here's a detail of showing the sort of blotting paper effect I get with a combination of the brushes in Anime Studio and some extra post processing in After Effects.

I duplicate the layer in After Effects so that it is sitting above the original, apply a fast blur effect and use the darken transfer mode, this gives the soft blending look on top of the original. It definitely doesn't look like vector art at first glance.

Character designs/colors

Here I have a bunch of designs for characters and went about working on the color palette for this particular shot.

 

Rigged Vectors Test

As promised, here's a video showing the final rigged cat character for this shot. I also put in my first ever head turn, just in case I need it.