I was asked by Lost Marble, the makers of Moho animation software, to create a webinar about animating bitmaps using two of my favourite softwares – Moho, for the animation (obviously) and Clip Studio Paint, for the illustration.
The intention was to show that, with this technique, any illustration style can be easily animated in Moho, not just flat colour vector artwork.
My usual method for coming up with an idea is to doodle aimlessly on non-threatening scraps of paper until something occurs to me.
On this occasion the ‘something’ that occurred was this troll …
who, it turned out, found guarding treasure boring.
I scanned my thumbnails into Clip Studio and created a layered illustration of the troll. I then imported him into Moho and rigged and animated him waiting for someone to steal his treasure.
For the webinar I broke down the steps I took to create the animation (editing out all the mistakes and failed experiments). Then I practiced describing them and, when the time came, spent 45 minutes talking to myself while people watched online.
If you are curious you can see the replay here:
