David Bowie animation

I’m a huge David Bowie fan and back in January wanted to do something special to mark the anniversary of David Bowie’s passing. I was shocked and so incredible sad when he died and it still feels raw and when I heard the news I spent three evenings crying, listening to his music and I wrote a long blog post about what he and his music had meant to me.

Several times since then I’ve wanted to draw or paint his picture but somehow it just didn’t feel right but this time it did.

I started out with 12 frames from the Heroes cover photo shoot with Masayoshi Sukita (Heroes also happens to be my all time favourite Bowie song btw).

I traced all the frames in Procreate using the 6b pencil in black and saved it as a jpg. I then opened the jpg in Afterlight and cut out and saved every frame as separate jpgs in 882×882 px.

The animation itself was done using iMotion   where I imported the photos twice so I had 24 frames in total. I set the speed to 4 frames per second and exported it as both video (for Instagram) and Gif (for other uses like Twitter).

If I were to do a more professional version I would probably import the psd file from Procreate to Photoshop and use that for the animation as well. But this was just for fun so I used the apps on my phone and iPad instead.