Anime Dreams

Flash animations, Photoshop tricks, cartooning, and graphics fun

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Almost all of the cartoonists, manga-ka and comic strip artists started off by drawing characters from other sources. Developing your own style and unique characters takes time, and lots of it. If you do a Google search and track down the very first Peanuts comic strip you will be surprised at how simple and almost primative Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang appears.

Title: Swimming Pool
Tools Used: Swishmax
Length: Continous
Audio: None
Download Size: 20k
Format: Flash SWF
Notes: This is based on a recent Garfield comic strip. I wanted to try something that included several scenes, some motion effects, and a replay button. The biggest surprise/learning was that the whole animation fits into a 20k Flash file.

So, where do you start? You’re sitting there faced with an absolutely blank piece of paper. You want to draw, to create, but the more you stare at that completely blank white paper the more empty your mind becomes. This would be fantastic if you wanted to become a Zen Buddist monk, but right now it’s just frustrating the hell out of you.

Naturally enough, your mind is doing exactly what you are telling it to do – focus on that empty space. And the more you try to convince it to create something out of nothing, the more frustrated you will become. It’s the way our brains are wired.

The technique that I use to break out of the “writer’s block” (cartoonist’s block) trap is simply to pick up a paper with some photos, or turn to the comic section, or pull one of the comics down from my bookshelf. Flipping through the pages, and looking at what other artists have created, gives me a place to start, a catalyst, a trigger. Something to break my brain out of the blank piece of paper trap. It gets my creative juices started.

For example, I wanted to work on my Flash animation skills and to figure out how to implement some design techniques that I had read about in a book on creating Flash movies. But my mind was a complete blank. Fortunately there was a funny Garfield strip in the paper that day. I started to wonder how that particular comic would look if it was an animated cartoon. . . . A few hours later I had a fully functional animation, and more important – I had a great time learning the things I needed to pick up about creating Flash cartoon animations.

Posted by Lem on September 5, 2005 | Permalink

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