Process

Up to this point I haven’t had a reason to put sound effects, but for this animation it was crucial.

This is my first ever attempt at a wyvern. To be brutally honest I don’t really like it. The eyes are a little too high, but especially trying to find that balance between the arm part and the wing part is hard and I didn’t nail it. But (writing this in June 2024) I’m going to adopt a new way of drawing wings based on what other people are doing (first put to use on my Designspace Dragon project) and it’ll definitely make my future attempts at wyverns much better.

All this to say that I think it’s helpful to be honest sometimes as to how I feel about my own work. It’s not good to sell yourself short (even though I certainly do all the time) but I want to show that you won’t always be satisfied with your own work even if others love it. In fact, usually you’re never satisfied with your own work. But that’s what keeps you moving forward.

You will always have a relationship to your own work that’s different from others’ relationships to it. Your viewers will only have ever known about the fully finished piece with no prior context behind it, seeing it for just a few seconds before judging how good it is. But you have seen every iteration and permutation of that art piece and have stared at it all for hours, days, even weeks. Of course it’s going to feel different to you. Remember this if you ever feel a lack of confidence in your own artistic abilities.

I also want to point out how I treat references. I never look at other people’s art when I draw. And I never draw when I’m looking at other people’s art. So I have to really think about the way a character is drawn and proportioned when I go to draw, and it also causes me to do a lot of experimentation and trying things (being guided by my instincts, and my past art). It takes far longer to do than if I had been looking at references while drawing (and my work certainly wouldn’t look as good as it could be), but I come away with a deeper understanding of how character art works. So it’s definitely worth it.

With it feeling like more of a sketch of an idea, this is yet another uncleaned and uncolored piece. Instead of editing it in Blender, I edited it in DaVinci Resolve for whatever reason. I tend to use Resolve for editing behind-the-scenes stuff. I suspect I also used it for this piece because of the sound, but I didn’t need to do anything too crazy beyond changing the pitches of the sound to emulate what Minecraft does.

Here’s the timelapse of the animation, followed by its rough timed version: