Hello Reader,
I recently posted a few animations I made to Instagram, and I would like to tell you about the process of making those animations and my relationship to animation as a medium.
Here’s some Kekoa-lore: when I was younger, I wanted to be an animator/cartoonist. I was inspired by storytime animators I watched on Youtube and the rubber hose style of animation I saw emulated in the indie games Bendy and The Ink Machine and Cuphead.
I drew characters designed to resemble old cartoons. I even made a few short animations. I don’t have any of the art I made during this time, when I was around 7-12 years old, I think.
But after a while, I stopped engaging with art as much and became frustrated that I wasn’t as skilled an animator as I wanted to be. Thus I put down the pen.
However, as you know, I eventually got back into art and developed a desire to explore as many mediums as possible. I tried once to get into animation, but I found it confusing, and, like before, I put away the tablet. It was only recently I finally gave animation a fair shot.
I looked up some tutorials on Youtube on how to animate and learned about some of the basics of animation like speed, timing, squash & stretch, etc. etc. And I started on the simplest animation that I was recommended, a ball bouncing up and down. Unfortunately, I don’t have a premium enough account on WordPress to embed the animation I made into this post, so here’s the link to a google slide containing the video.
I thought that animation didn’t turn out too bad, so I went to the next simplest animation I was suggested, a pendulum swinging (link to animation). That turned out decently well too, so I decided to try out a concept of my own.
I thought the animation which I would eventually come to call Heart would be fairly simple to make (link to animation). It was just supposed to be a bunch of symbols I associate myself with morphing in and out of each other. Though, thinking back on it, I see how I probably should have considered doing some more smaller animations first. Even with my lack of experience, I feel like this animation turned out pretty well. For more info about some of the symbols I used in the animation, you can read my blogposts on personas (link here).
I had fun making these, and I think I’m going to try to explore this medium more in the future. Though I’m going to try not to make too many animations in a row to avoid hurting my sensitive eyes with the blue light emitted by the tablet.
Anyways, thanks for reading this blog post.
From,
Kekoa Paki
Kekoa Paki Arts 
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