Okay, so I polished off both the Preston Blair and the Richard Williams books, and they were great! But they leave me with one question: How do you animate?? I mean, they're great for theory, but tend to gloss over a lot of technical stuff.
Specifically, I'm setting up some folders so I can flip through them in a simple image viewer system. I'll be getting Adobe Aftereffects pretty soon, and going full 24 fps. I want a system of importing individual drawings into photoshop as efficiently as possible. Going the full animation cells route seems a little excessive, since I'm scanning the pictures in and there's no camera involved.
I'm getting decent results with typing paper and my Rotring Rapidograph technical pens. But I'm wondering whether I should be getting some blue pencils for construction lines instead of doing all that erasing, and whether a tech pencil with an HB lead might not be contrasty enough to scan in.
Also, is it standard procedure to draw out all your key frames and lines of action on one sheet, then trace this to multiple sheets with a light box to get seperate drawings for each frame?
The theory's the important stuff; technical issues are constantly changing and can best be addressed in the here and now.
Are you cleaning up on the same page you're doing the ruff on? If so, think about doing the cleanup on a new piece of paper. You can do a lot of cleaning up digitally by playing with contrast and such in Pshop. The Actions palette is excellent for setting up a way to automate the cleanup. Your settings will depend on what your drawings look like; fiddle with it a bit and see what you get.
Can be. I've frequently drawn guide paths on a separate sheet and kept that under the drawing stack as I animate. It all depends on the shot and its complexity.
If you're getting that impression from the Williams and Blair books, be aware that those "stacked" drawings are frequently like that to show the progression of the action. For a simple walk cycle, for instance, you'd generally do each drawing on a separate sheet to begin with.
Yeah, I've been doing my roughs, then inking them and erasing them. Comic book habits-- though I also sometimes trace onto a clean sheet, if I'm doing something with lots of construction lines.
Williams says you build most sequences from the key frames out, doing the inbetweens last. A walk, for instance, can start from the frames where the feet first touch the ground, then built up from that.
Without a guide sheet, I wouldn't know whether my characters's steps were evenly spaced, or even if their proportions were consistant! I guess I'll use them until I figure out what I'm doing.