In this week’s lecture, we looked at 2D animation and a simple walk-and-jump cycle.

Creating the sprites

For the workshop, we were given a prompt to create character sprites including:

• A player character – with walk, jump, and idle animations

I started by opening a photoshop document, the size of the document was 384 x 384 and creating a 12 x 12 grid where each cell was a 32 x 32 size (what the client asked for) this made it easier to create the animation sprites together in one document.

The main inspiration that was given to us was the Mr. men characters, both the shape and the colour which I feel is something I could do but also take other inspirations and include that.

I started with the player character, I liked the design of Kirby and didn’t really want to make something too complicated, this gave me an idea for a little mushroom. Some of the things I had to take into consideration were that the character had to be bipedal (meaning they walk on two legs), its jump should double as an attack and the colours should be suitable for a younger audience.

This is what I created first for the character, I liked how simple it was but it needed a bit of pop of colour, the biggest part of the character is the top so I felt that I could aim the audience’s eyes at this part with a reddish colour and the rest of it with a lighter colour. I based it on the more known red top mushrooms.

I like how this turned out as it felt like it is what the prompt wanted and looks like it took inspiration from the references I had.

The inspiration

The two images above are what I kept in mind when creating the character, I liked the round shape and simple colouring of Kirby showing Kirby is a good character and it is also aimed at younger audiences.

For Mr Men, I liked the variety of shapes which is what inspired me to make it a mushroom since there were a lot of rounder characters but also different varieties of characters that still look like good characters.

What was challenging?

I found this task quite straightforward but I did struggle with creating the walk animation for the character, specifically the feet. I did use a guide to help me but since I was working in a 32×32 grid I found it a bit challenging to draw it in a pixel style.

References

The mr. Men Show characters by TheAwesomeWorld on DeviantArt (2010) by TheAwesomeWorld on DeviantArt. TheAwesomeWorld. Available at: https://www.deviantart.com/theawesomeworld/art/The-Mr-Men-Show-Characters-176522094 (Accessed: December 14, 2022).

Forde, S. (2019) Dramatic falling action pose reference, by AdorkaStock on DeviantArt. Available at: https://www.deviantart.com/adorkastock/art/Dramatic-Falling-Action-Pose-Reference-818628026 (Accessed: September 29, 2022).