Watercolour animation experiment

Sundays are for having fun and yesterday was no exception. I made this fun little Amy Winehouse-inspired animation using both analog and digital tools.

I started out with watercolours painting the face and hair and the eyes and lips separately on a single piece of paper. This wasn’t planned out at all so it was all very loose and a bit random on a piece of scrap paper.

I scanned the drawing and opened it in Adobe Photoshop adjusting levels and cleaned up the background a bit.

Then I cut out the face and pasted it onto a new canvas sized 1080 x 1080 px (works great with Instagram) and started cutting out the eyes and pasting them into separate layers on a transparent background. I played around with the different combinations of eyes and lips and saved the different images in a folder.

To make the frame animation I chose file –> scripts –> load files into stack and selected the files I wanted to use for my frame animation in the folder. It opens a new file with all the images loaded into separate layers. I then opened the Timeline and clicked on Make frame animation. The layers were imported into the timeline where I could tweet the speed and rearrange the images. Lastly I exported the animation as a GIF file (choose export –> Save for web (legacy) and to use on Instagram I chose Render video.

Et Voila!

This was just a little experiment. I’m definitely going to work some more with the combination of analog and digital media so stay tuned.