Our final project of the semester was working on key animation. It was pretty fun, and it was a great look behind the curtain about how animation is done in the digital age. I learned to work within technical limitations and evolving ideas on the fly.

My original plan was to have a snowman being built piece at a time as it rolled across the frame, but iMovie only allows for one dynamic piece at a time. I settled for working to make a believable rotation cycle for a snowball. From photoshopping each rotation stage and placing each by hand, I have a real appreciation for all the work that animation professionals put in to make movies and shows.

I will probably keep working on this project on my own with some different software in order to bring my original idea to life.

Digital Art 2520 was a really fun class and I’ll take a lot of the skills I learned with me and continue to develop as a digital artist.

Moving on into Adobe Illustrator, we took a crack at making vintage-style postcards. Given the license to use any location real or fiction I decided to work with imagery from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The painting-like aesthetics and varied environments gave plenty of options for sourcing the photos that were overlaid on each letter. After all the pictures were set, the final touches were done in photoshop, including increasing saturation and overlaying a vintage paper screen tone to make the postcard look like it has aged.

I was surprised to find out that editing text was a multi step process. After setting the type, one needs to turn it into an object to manipulate. Overall the process had a less steep learning curve than Photoshop, but no longer having access to a layer viewer was an adjustment.

Overall I am very, very happy with the finished product and I have really enjoyed working with Illustrator.