The Anaether

Just a little preface to this post, in case it’s ever crossed your mind, I’m pretty aware that this website could be way better. I don’t know all that much about maintaining good image quality on my own websites. I don’t actually know web design that well at all, nor do I have an interest in learning to do it myself. I’d much rather pay someone else to iron out the kinks on web design for me, and I think I actually seriously want to do that. I’m not sure when, but I really want to so that this website is far more accessible and not so ugly. So in advance, sorry if the images are low quality or not even moving when they’re probably supposed to be.

Alright, this animation project took waaaay too long. I missed a step that probably could’ve saved me a lot of agony during the past 4, 5ish months. It’s called “planning.” Just now I just wrote down a list of items for another animation idea that I have — exactly what layers for what objects I needed, like outlines for face, hair, clothes, hands or whatever, multiplied that number by two to account for coloring and then multiplied that number by 5 for the average amount of time taken to go through each frame to do a pass (outline pass, color pass, shading pass and so on) and I have an idea that would apparently take me about 40 hours. So at slowest, probably it’d be a 1-month project. At the fastest, 2-3 weeks. 2 if I’m absolutely diligent and my brain isn’t super scattered.

The first segment of this animation was quite simple. Just hair and earrings blowing in the wind. Not much brain power required for me.

Then the 2nd part.

Stuff started to get real with this one. Yeah, most artists for at least a long time from the beginning of their journey as an artist, are deathly afraid of drawing hands. I’m at that point where hands are just like meh, whatever. Animating them is a different story. At a certain point I just felt like, “okay… okay… I’ve… I’ve had enough.” But I insisted that this project be finished. I told myself “just one more month for part 3… just… a few more weeks…”

Oh how wrong I was. I think the 3rd part ended up taking me 2 to 3 months or something.

It was 140 frames. A bunch of loops but still maybe like, 50ish unique frames in this part? Maybe more? I laid out the sketches for the key frames, then did Vas’s head, then Syf’s then their bodies, then Vas’s hair, Syf’s hair… then I got so tired of lines. So I started coloring. Since I didn’t make sure the outlines were all closed loops, I scribbled a lot for the colors instead of using the fill bucket tool. I absolutely need to use the stupid fill bucket tool. It’d be worth it for me to make sure the lines are closed loops. It’d save me so much time. Working hard just for the sake of it is dumb and pointless.

I thought the earrings wouldn’t take me long. The last two weeks leading up to yesterday, I worked my ass off thinking “I’m almost done. I’m almost done.” I always work way more and find myself the most motivated when I’m about to complete a piece. In the middle, I know it’s going to be a while before I see the light at the end of the tunnel. But last week, I was spending like 5 hours a day instead of my usual 2-3 hours a day. Then on Friday, I spent 8 hours. It’s a lot for me. I was still not finished. I was sooo tired of this project, but still insistent about it getting completed. I spent a bunch more hours over the weekend and then a few hours on Monday coloring in the earrings frame by frame. I lie to myself so much, always saying “oh it’s not gonna take a lot more time,” like a bad client who’s never done any work related to what they’re hiring their contractor to do. I really needed to be more honest with myself, and to be unafraid of being honest with my audience.

For weeks I promised myself: “Never again.”
Well, unless I have a lot more fans subscribing and being okay with me taking on a longer, bigger animation project. Perhaps if I had at least 1 animation assistant. I think it’d be better for everyone if I were way more honest about my timeline for release based on some more accurate estimates.

I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this in detail on my website here. I’m not sure if I’m really going to be focusing on rendering the comic pages to the main storyline of “The Anaether” anytime soon, because I’d really like for this project to be more financially sustainable for myself. I really want to deliver good work for you guys. The way I’d like to raise more financial support for this project is to continue creating more animations for Tiktok, since it seems to be the best way I know of to get more patrons. I’ll probably switch to illustrations if I feel like it, but I feel like front and center project types for me right now are animations. You can think of them as “teaser” or “trailer” animations that give a glimpse into the world of The Anaether. I have a lot of ideas, and I’ll do my best to be realistic about their delivery time.

Thank you all so much for your patience and all your continued support.