Garden Witch Minicomic Complete Process Timelapse and Art Talk! (+Art AMA suggestion box)

Happy Sunday, Department people, here's a process and sketch post!

Please treat the comments as a suggestion box for process or general art AMA that I can try to fit into future posts. I'd love to know if you have any burning questions I can hit upon as I wax romantic about porn in future posts. ❤️
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It's rare for me to capture the entire process of working on something but the Garden Witch minicomic I did entirely in CSP so I was just able to just easily export the results.

In the attachments below are 8min and a 60sec version of the same timelapse just because the full-size one is 500Mbs. They'll also be in the dropbox downloads for this month July/August that I'll be sharing next!

I really didn't start out with much of a plan after sketching the drawings above, I just wanted to imagine a little prelude to the to the animation.

The one thing I feel is lacking in looping animations is that they can sometimes feel a little mechanical and not very emotionally weighted, and I feel like a lot of eroticism comes from the emotional setup of a comic.

I kept going with some different poses to explore the character, without a lot of plans. Also some wonky proportions hehe 😅 Sketches are sketches, but I liked the character that I started to see.

What I'm interested in exploring in animation is just how communicating eroticism changes when things are in motion, rather than in a comic, because your brain fills in the gaps with a comic, but everything is clearly described in animation.

I wanted to try the minicomic as an intermediate step to making narrative animation, to see if it could kind of color your perception of the animation with the context added in.

It's kind of the exact reverse of me drawing a Marcille & Falin bathtime spread laste year, where if you saw the episode, you're familiar with the the setup and I'm just drawing all the scenes that they cut. 😉

Because I didn't really know what i was doing when I started I just began with polishing some and fixing some issues.

Then I got into writing some dialog and spreading it out on the pages just to see what it would feel like and how little I could get away with. I kinda like jumping into the middle of a conversation, personally, it feels more casual and intimate to me.

This is the page I spent the most time shuffling panels around on, which you can see in the timelapse. I even mirrored some drawings to make them fit better.

I also started to see how some of the drawings could connect int a narrative if I tried so I started laying them out on the 2-page spread format and redrew the witch leaning forward so she could be peaking out from the little alcove with the bags of seeds or potting soil or whatever from the animation.

Then I just started patching holes with drawings and dialog, even maybe a hint at the next animation (Iggy🐸 is planning on using foxglove in the next composition because it's a pretty framing device. More on that later)

I think it's easier for me to approach comics in this way where I just think of the big compelling drawings first and then try to fill in the gaps that will help get me to the next big compelling drawing.

It helps me prioritize space and emphasis a little bit too when laying out pages.

Nothing ever completely goes to plan but as a fast experiment I like the lessons I learned as part of the process and I hope me sharing it with you is helpful! I feel like it's most beneficial to hear/see someone struggle with their work rather than just totally ace it, because experience shows most when you're problem solving, to my way of thinking.

❤️Winton