Any posts pertaining to tutorials, not merely my Lynda/Linkedin-Learning ones.
I’ve finally gotten around to creating a poster of my Foundations of Animation image! You can purchase it at REDBUBBLE, in vertical and horizontal formats. My bonkers map of ‘Fantastical Ireland’ is also available there. This map was based on a physical original that took 4 weeks to create (in a cold Portland alley), 4…
Occasionally I find a site that’s so well written that I read the entire catalog of posts. David Apatoff’s ‘Illustration Art’ is one of that very select club! Strongly recommended, it’s a great resource into the under-appreciated field of commercial art.
Much of this content was covered in one of my movies in the weekly ‘Tips & Tricks’ course I create for Linkedin-Learning (formerly Lynda.com). Back in the late 80s / early 90s when I was working at the Don Bluth studio in Dublin, one of the animators told me something curious. When you get into…
My youtube video and essay ‘the 21 foundations of animation’ has been expanded into a 2-hour course on LinkedIn Learning (Sign up via the link and I get a commission). I’ve tried a few times over the years to organise my courses/classes into the old ’12 principles’ structure by Disney’s Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston….
This movie took the best part of two months (the animation and art content was created for my Lynda/Linkedin Learning courses over the previous four or five years. I know there a lot of popular enthusiast videos on youtube explaining Disney’s ’12 Principles of Animation’, so the creation of yet another movie with a different…
If you want to follow my full courses and don’t already have a subscription to linkedin learning, the link below will give you a free 30 day trial, more than enough time to watch the course (I get a small commission if you sign up here:) LinkedIn Learning: Start your 30 day free trial I’ve…
I was inspired to do this course after working on a project that was animated in Flash/AnimateCC. Unfortunately, the board artists drew the boards on paper, instead of natively in Flash/AnimateCC. This was a major factor in the failure of the production. If the board artists had known the procedures demonstrated in this course, things…
Hair and clothing can be tricky to get right; it’s easy to make them move, not so easy to make them move believably, or in a way that doesn’t distract from the primary action. This course is designed to show you some techniques to help you with this secondary animation. LYNDA: Hair & Clothing LINKEDIN:…
Beginning animators and students often wonder how the more experienced artists can create so much footage. What’s the secret? Well, two of the main techniques that might help you break through BOTH the quality and quantity barriers is the use of thumbnails and breakdowns. Thumbnails are, as the name suggests, a preliminary sketch of the scene,…
This is a very short and to-the-point course, only 27 minutes long! Creating 2D Animation in Harmony I created this course to be very tightly focused on the skills required to animate a classic hand drawn animation in Harmony. For those who are more interested in the traditional style, and who have some drawing skills,…
I had great fun creating this course: it’s a collection of monsters and aliens! The course shows different actions for each, some walks, some runs, sneaks, slithers and turns. LYNDA: Animate Monsters & Aliens LINKEDIN: Animate Monsters & Aliens Here are some sample images. First up the entire family of horrors (click all images for…
My course on flying creatures is short and useful. It shows how bird anatomy relates to human, and takes you through the different flights of small, medium and large birds, as well as insects (flies, butterflies), and ends with a fantasy creature, the every popular dragon. I’m particularly happy with the way the dragon turned…
A student recently asked me about the famous Preston Blair animation books. They contain some excellent material, but frankly, the walk and run sections can be very difficult for a student or less experience animator to understand. As great as the reference animation is, Preston offered no help in timing, or in the sequence in…
A couple of students requested a Flash/Animate course that didn’t just show how to animate a character, but the process for creating and animating a complete scene – everything from background, foreground, character, effects, etc. So I created this course for those who want to see the process. Usually when I get TWO or more…
It’s been too long since I updated this blog, so I’m making up for some lost time. Back in 2016 I created two really useful animation courses for Lynda/Linkedin Learning, dealing with walk cycles. #1: Walk Cycles Basics The first course deals with the essentials: contact, down, passing and up poses, foot placement, arcs, timing,…
My latest course for Lynda.com has gone online: ‘Migrating from Flash to Toon Boom Harmony’ It teaches a Flash animator how their favourite Flash tools and processes correspond to the Harmony equivalent. The first twelve years of my animation career (1988 – 2000) were in the traditional hand drawn field, in feature, tv, and games….