I received an inquiry about doing an animation only a few seconds long for someone online who intended to start streaming as a VTuber. He said he wanted me to draw his character doing this animation from Pokémon. I agreed to the job. I felt honored in a way to be reanimating such an iconic cut of animation.
I was given this character reference sheet with the request. Loomie asked me to draw the animation in a style that reflected my previous artwork rather than adhering to the style of the reference or the Pokémon anime. I think my art looks good too.
My first order of business was to establish what Loomie was going to look like animated. I drew a bust of the character and then a full body sketch to familiarize myself with the clothes, accessories, hair and how he wears them.
Then comes rough key-poses. I looked at the original shot from Pokémon and identified what I would consider to be the key frames and sketched them out for myself as well as set camera keyframes for the camera movement. By this point I realized I would also have to consider how frame the movement on the screen because the original was don in 4:3 aspect ratio, and I'm now working in 16:9.
I did a sketch and breakdown of the skull and another sketch of the head from a random angle to ensure I had the correct idea about how the human head works before I started committing to the key-poses I'd drawn.
Then I drew a more cleaned up and colored image of the character's head, essentially for the same purpose as the first sketch, but this time it would be more accurate as I'd been working with the design for hours at this point. This is also where I settled on the colors I would use later.
I inbetweened the key-poses and drew the hair, clothes, goggles, face, and Pokéball.
Then cleaned up each frame.
And finally, the finished animation with color! Watch it at the top of the page.
The finished product consisted of many many layers, and a shocking number of frames. This whole project took way longer than I initially thought it would. This character had so many details that felt like a tunnel with no light at the end. The hair for example took multiple work sessions/days to get on the canvas. I want to find a more efficient and good-looking way to animate this type of hair before I do something like that again.