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Help for absolute newbie. My son!

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Help for absolute newbie. My son!

I just stumbled across this forum thanks to a Google search. It seems to be a rather new forum from what I can tell. So I'm not sure if how many people are around.

Here's my quest. My son, 13yo is showing a keen interest in animating. He's persistent, patient, and eager to learn. A couple years ago, he spent alot of time with the Pivot stick animator making goofy little stick animations. But they were rather complex, and had many frames. Since then, he has used Photo Shop to make frames to create a 20 sec or so Sonic Hedgehog animation.

I want to get him a serious entry level animation program that will make it easier for him to learn different aspect of animating and a decent usable drawing/graphics pad. We have Photo Shop 7.0 with a few plugins.

We have 2 computers. His is 5yo Dell 2.4G XP 256 Ram, Mine is Dell Dual Core something-or-other (Walmart buy) with Vista 2Megs ram. I will give him mine if it will help. His actually has a much better video card, we used to use it for gaming.

Now, where do we begin. I don't really want to spend alot of time downloading and trying different freeware/shareware/trial programs. I would prefer to buy from someone an older, but pretty good software. I will start googling, and reading forums. But I'd like some input.

Feel free to email me directly with advice. We have pretty slow sketchy internet and speed. So downloading LARGE files is a big pain
darinlwarren@yahoo.com

My son is of a similar age and ability to yours. We’re both using Serif Drawplus8 at the moment. DrawPlus4 is free if you want to try it. It is vector based and has onion skins. We got 8 really cheaply by registering and them making an offer we couldn’t refuse after a couple of months. This has loads of vector brushes and the outlines are scaled. XP2 is the next level with key frames, filling in unclosed areas and still miles cheaper than Flash that everyone seems to use.

I'll download it and check it out, thanks. Do you have an sample of what you done with it?

I made this with the free version.

I'm not an expert by any means, and have only started to push the limits of what 8 can do.

Here's the best advice I could give, and it's the same advice I got from an ex-Disney animator:

Draw. Draw some more. Draw until it hurts. And then, just when you couldn't possibly draw any more.... draw some more.

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