Sophia Foster-Dimino

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July 2014

Jul 30, 2014 456 notes
#Illustration
Jul 24, 2014 3,724 notes
#animation

June 2014

Hey Sophia, nice job, I really enjoy your work. How are you creating your animations if you don't mind me asking?

A bunch of people have asked me this over the months, so instead of just linking to tutorials I’d like to go a little more in-depth.

My process for making animations has changed a lot in the time I’ve been doing them. I used to work almost exclusively in Flash (for animations like lighthouse lady, fish man, busy girl, train folks, and rock roller) with a little bit of Photoshop basically just for post-processing (tweaking colors with adjustment layers). I should note that when I’m animating geometric shapes I almost always make them in Illustrator, and then import them into Flash.

When I upgraded to Photoshop CS6 and then CC, I found that the animation functionality had gotten much better, so I tried it out (see beach girl and crying person). Alex Grigg’s photoshop animation tutorial, as I’ve mentioned, was invaluable here.

For some other recent animations I’ve done a hybrid approach – making geometric shapes in Illustrator and animating them in Flash, then bringing them into Photoshop to apply texture to the shapes and also do any hand-drawn animation. See “help computer” and this NYT piece.

Unfortunately, Flash CC has actually removed a lot of the features I depended on for animation (the motion editor, and inverse kinematics) so I am finally taking the plunge into learning After Effects, which I’ve been putting off for forever even though it’s industry standard. I expect it will change my approach a lot.

Before I get into the weeds with a specific example I wanna shout out Ric Carrasquillo, who has mentored me with a lot of animation stuff and is a phenomenal artist and all-around nice guy!

So the most recent animation I’ve put on tumblr is this running girl. Let me tell you how this came to be.

I have a folder on my computer called “style tests” that is filled with random scribbles, sketches, abstract color palettes, brush experiments, patterns, etc. When I feel like starting a random personal project, I peek in here and see if there’s anything that holds water. If it manages to keep my interest after wasting away in this folder for months, then it’s probably worth finishing.

Apparently I started “runner” about a year ago, in April 2013. it was initially just an idea for a static illustration in a sort of printmakey style with a limited palette. I’m sure I was thinking of this scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams because it haunts me.

Anyway, it stayed like this for basically a year, then in May of 2014 I decided to do something with it. I had been thinking of the scene again and thought it would be fun to animate a run cycle.

I did rough pass animation in Flash because I find it faster and more intuitive when you’re working out timing.  The final animation is two 16-frame run cycles at 12 fps, so on the 2’s at 24 fps, basically. My first pass here is on the 2’s at 12 fps, so on the 4’s at 24 fps. I asked my coworker Matt Cruickshank for tips and he pointed out that it’s physically impossible to run with your arms and legs moving foward on the same side, which gives you fascinating insight into how little I know about this stuff

Second pass with all the frames filled out – this was sufficient for me to move to final linework.

I exported the animation from Flash as a .png sequence, then imported that into Photoshop as a video layer so that I could trace over it in a new video layer. This part was the most time-consuming and tedious, so I queued up Das Boot and had at it. Here’s a progress shot. Someone on twitter mentioned that her right arm (our left) was doing some funky stuff and he was right! I fixed it as best I could in the final. It still looks weird tho :C

When I was done with the 16-frame cycle, I duplicated it and changed her facial expression in the second round so that it wouldn’t feel too repetitive. Next: color.

Then I set up some Photoshop actions to fill in the flats. Some glitches occurred. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When animating in Photoshop, you can create a cycling texture animation as a smart object and then clip it to a layer, video layer, or group of frame layers. This is what I did with her shirt. I made a Photoshop action to create a bunch of random blobby noise, ran it on 16 separate color layers, and clipped the resulting footage to the flat shirt shapes.

I do variations of this all the time, with static illustrations too, just to add some speckle to a solid color.

Then I spent a long time coloring all the lines………

For the background elements, I went back to Flash, using some Illustrator-made vector shapes. The hill in the background is a giant rotating circle with alternating smooth and pointy ripples.

The bush in the foreground is a spiky rectangle doing a tile tween. Both of these got punted to Photoshop as .png sequences in video layers, where I colored and textured them.

At some point in this entire process I decided to lose the spooky hand + shadow in the background (seemed too cheesy, I wanted something more ambiguous) and I also removed the kicked-up dirt, under Ric’s advice that it was driving home a point that the character animation had sufficiently made.

The sky has some texture that was not procedurally generated, but scanned in (years ago) from some powdered graphite + alcohol experiments (I’m not being glib, you literally mix the graphite powder with alcohol). The texture files were huge and this led to some problems. Every single frame of that cycling texture was a very zoomed-in portion of a duplicated enormous 600dpi smart object, and it was bogging down the .psd. I rasterized the smart objects thinking that would solve the problem, but the thing is – Photoshop often lets pixels outside the canvas hang around in case you need them. I eventually solved the issue by cutting and pasting every single layer, so that I was sure it was only saving on-canvas pixels.

When everything was ready to go, I exported all the frames as flat .pngs and ran some actions on them to tweak the colors with curves layers and gradient maps, then piled them back into a .psd (File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack…)

Then I exported it as a .gif (because this was a limited palette piece from the start, this part was pretty painless) and posted it to tumblr, but not before redrawing it in unicode

⟨Ϡ⍘Ϡ⦦⦦

(the most essential part of my artistic process)

In all this animation took about two weeks, but I was only working for half an hour to an hour every day, in-between more pressing projects – as a way to relax and have fun.

Feel free to download the animation .psd and poke around. Please note that it will only work with CS6 and up.

I hope this was simple enough to follow. Again, I really recommend Alex Grigg’s Photoshop tutorial, it taught me basically everything I know. This Richard Williams book is also a big deal. I hope more people give animation a shot and make weird gifs – it’s fun and informative.

Jun 20, 2014 804 notes
#process #animation
Jun 18, 2014 1,690 notes
#sketches #instagram

May 2014

May 23, 2014 710 notes
#animation #gif
May 18, 2014 273 notes
#animation #gif #illustration
May 13, 2014 1,496 notes
#zines #sex fantasy
May 8, 2014 187 notes
#comics #illustration #zines
May 5, 2014 572 notes
#comics #music

April 2014

Apr 23, 2014 168 notes
#sketches #instagram
Apr 1, 2014 1,238 notes
#illustration #videogames

March 2014

Mar 28, 2014 4,317 notes
#animation #gif #human-computer interaction
Mar 15, 2014 533 notes
#comics
Mar 3, 2014 156 notes
#Illustration #polyamory #animation #gif

February 2014

Feb 19, 2014 4,410 notes
#animation

January 2014

Jan 21, 2014 82 notes
#sketches #instagram

December 2013

Dec 22, 2013 115 notes
#illustration
Dec 16, 2013 4,121 notes
#comics
Dec 3, 2013 269 notes
#illustration #dogs

November 2013

Nov 25, 2013 163 notes
#Illustration #food
Nov 18, 2013 271 notes
#Illustration #comics
Nov 12, 2013 144 notes
#sketches
Nov 11, 2013 78 notes
#Illustration #music

October 2013

Oct 22, 2013 84 notes
#Illustration
Oct 10, 2013 323 notes
#illustration #music

September 2013

Sep 18, 2013 728 notes
#illustration
Sep 17, 2013 163 notes
#illustration
Sep 17, 2013 319 notes
#zines #sex fantasy
Sep 3, 2013 336 notes
#zines #sex fantasy

August 2013

Aug 26, 2013 88 notes
#comics #illustration #zines
Aug 19, 2013 108 notes
#comics

Here are some disorganized thoughts about the game Gone Home, by The Fullbright Company, which was released recently.

Please don’t read this if you haven’t played the game. It’s a great game, it’s not expensive, and you can beat it in about three hours. And you should.

Spoilers follow.

Keep reading

Aug 17, 2013 45 notes
#videogames

July 2013

Jul 29, 2013 4,308 notes
#jointogetherpdx #Illustration #watercolor
Jul 8, 2013 163 notes
#sketches
Jul 6, 2013 222 notes
#illustration #ice cream

June 2013

Jun 23, 2013 177 notes
#comics #antiques
Jun 7, 2013 119 notes
#illustration #printmaking #silkscreen

May 2013

May 9, 2013 151 notes
#illustration #watercolor
May 7, 2013 460 notes
#illustration

April 2013

Apr 29, 2013 478 notes
#illustration #prints #risograph
Apr 1, 2013 1,094 notes
#sketches

March 2013

Mar 18, 2013 12,097 notes
#animation #gif
Mar 13, 2013 113 notes
#Illustration
Mar 7, 2013 346 notes
#sketches

February 2013

Feb 28, 2013 114 notes
#film #Illustration
Feb 16, 2013 287 notes
#comics
Feb 14, 2013 164 notes
#comics
Feb 11, 2013 180 notes
#Illustration #film

January 2013

Jan 20, 2013 60 notes
#sketches #q and a

December 2012

Dec 10, 2012 252 notes
#illustration
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