Japanese Dragon - Blog Posts

I made a pixel animation!

So today I made a pixel animation of a fox transforming into an Asian dragon!

The software I used was Adobe Photoshop and it took around 2 hours to make, during making this gif I learned that Photoshop was more than a photo editing software and how to make gifs bigger. I also used a Wacom tablet to draw the frames! I found it difficult at first as I never knew how to animate on photoshop as I’m more comfortable with a different program, but I got used to it quickly!

My inspiration behind it was Japanese mythology, especially the kitsune and it’s transformation powers! I have always been fascinated by Japan and its wonderful culture, so this was a perfect opportunity to let me show that through the wonderful medium of animation!

I have been animating for a while now and I’m always open to try new forms of it so being able to add another form of it under my belt was special. To me this is another step to becoming an animator for a big company or even starting my own!

I really enjoyed sketching out how this animation was going to look, sketching has always been my favorite part of animation and drawing in general because it’s the stage where mistakes don’t really matter and you can just go crazy with the start of your work! I also learned how to use the HSV adjustment tool to get the perfect shade of orange when the color wheel wasn’t good enough as well as how to make the lines come out smoother by tinkering with the brush settings.

However I found the coloring to be a real chore as every time I used the fill tool, pixels would flood outside of the lines and make the final product look really messy and sloppy, so I spent a fair amount of time cleaning that up just so the final product would look cleaner and smoother.

If I had a chance to revisit and redo this animation, I would probably make it longer and smoother, so someday I might remake this animation and it might not even be in a pixel format!