Warning - I do tend to ramble and go off subject frequently, read at own risk...
The main reason I'm on the course I am, "Digital Media Design", is because I have a great love of both animation and digital art. I'm far from a pro in either department but I'm hoping to improve vastly in the next three years. Everything I know and do is self-taught. I always felt pretty constrained back at school when it came to art, being told to produce this like such, and do that like this. I remember back in year 11 I suggested the use of photoshop to an art teacher (this was about 4 years ago now?) and she told me that wasnt art, and then went about complaining that the way I had drawn something was wrong. (She wasnt exactly the biggest encouragement when it came to free thinking and originality). When I finished secondary school I was left not wanting to study art again for this reason, and when I went into college I studied an ICT topic. Whilst studying that, I really got into Flash and started to spend alot of time on it.
At first I was mostly influence by videgames and webcomics that friends had linked me too, and infact tried to set up my own webcomic, called JUD Junkies. It was a failure, since at the time I was still sort of coming to grips with actually digital editting. At first I attempted to draw and colour in photoshop, but I wasnt happy with the results. After a few trial-and-error attempts I found a method I quite liked. I started drawing out my characters by hand, scanning them in to photoshop, cleaning up any cracks of speckles left by the scanning process and thickening any blacklines I didnt think would survive through to flash. Then I would import the scans into a program called "Steamline", I never really toyed with this program, so in all honesty I dont know what its main purpose was, but I would use it to convert the pixel-based images I had scanned into vectors. This then allowed me to import into flash and edit images in here. Flash gives some of the most nicest lines ive come across, and they're so easy to alter and shape. As time went on I got better at using flash, as can be seen in most of my webcomics, then I bought a tablet and really got going. I stuck to using the same method for a while, only using the tablet now and then I decided to start drawing things fully digitally. I got mixed results at first, but finally found a style of producing work that I liked, usually drawing 2 or 3 layers of "rough" lineart, in several shades of gray, and then on a new layer, of the top, drawing a final, neat layer of the final lineart. Whilst this sped up the process a great deal, by the point I had already given up on my webcomic. I still prefer to work in flash due to the incredible results that you can get and the ease of use with a tablet, however, im also trying to get myself to work in photoshop and illustrator more.
As far as animation goes, its something I really enjoy, though so far I have only really dabled. I've produced quite a few simple, animated .gifs and few animated "cartoons", though nothing longer then 2 minutes really. In the future I hope to produce more interactive animations, maybe even some flash games.
So there you go, I warned you I rambled. This post was originally going to be about why I like animation so much, and some suggestions on some really good animations to watch...oh well, maybe next post.
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