John wastes paper

KICKING THE TIRES AGAIN, DEPT:  Recently, I've spent some quality time checking out the 2D animation application TV Paint because it seems to be the application of choice for a lot of former Disney animators, such as Aaron Blaise and Nik Ranieri. I respect both of these gentlemen and so I downloaded the trial version and spent a few days playing with it. No wait– first I spent a few days viewing on-line tutorials trying to grok it's strange and dense interface, and then I spent another couple of days recreating the tutorials by myself. It was all pretty great and I was impressed with TV Paint. And probably some day, when I have more discretionary cash, I'll buy it and be very happy.  But after having spent time playing with this obviously more sophisticated program, I realized that 90% of what I want to do now with drawn animation I can do in Autodesk's Sketchbook 7 Pro with its flipbook feature. And I'm pretty happy about that. So, to sort of

MORE FLIPBOOK FUN DEPT: Boy has it been blustery here these last few days – and C-O-L-D! So, I just had to add a little animated scarf to this doodle with Sketchbook Pro's flipbook feature :-) SIDE NOTE DEPT:  On the subject of animating flowing items, Eric Goldberg's excellent book "Character Animation Crash Course" is full of great examples of secondary animation and overlap. This one below, that I've copied badly, shows that even a simple movement can have a surprising amount of sophistication. This head turn is a great opportunity to add drag and follow through on the character's large nose and goatee.  Voilà!