Christmas Moika | Step-by-Step (Patreon)

This is a post for my behind the scenes explanation of how I made my Moika Christmas loop. I love doing these posts and I hope you enjoy them too!
So here I go:

Project Settings:

• Size: 1920x1080 px
• FPS: 11 fps (started as 12, but reduced 1 frame to make it a bit slower)
• Time took: Around 4 days of work

tep 1: IDEA AND REFERENCE

On my previous Bea Step-by-Step post I talked a lot about the use of reference, please refer to it for my best insight on how I use it and what software I use.
As for this one my reference was going to be based on Christmas.
To find references I use these websites:

• Google Images
• Pinterest
• Sex.com (their gif section has always very inspiring stuff)
• 500.px (it's a photography website, super high quality material)

As you can tell I based my animation highly on the big picture of the lady in the ground. Sometimes I would do a mix between references for my animations, and sometimes the idea it's just too perfect that I don't have to think much about it. This was the second case.
I must say I had other previous plans for this animation. I wanted to do a Christmas Dance animation first, but I had to do something more simple because my time this month to work on animations is very limited. So I had to K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid! ... some of you will get that reference)
So I stuck with a simple but cute pose for Moika, maybe next Christmas I'll do something more complex.

Step 2: SOME SKETCHING AND MAIN POSE

I played around with some ideas and finally decided on her main pose. Since there isn't much movement involved in this animation, I wanted to nail a good main pose with her. When there is no much animation to be done, I threat my animations more like illustrations of pinups.

Step 2: THREE POSES

For this animation, I started working with three poses.

As you can see I also used circle shapes to understand her rotation a bit better. Using these kinds o guidelines is super useful when you need to understand the volume and tridimensionality of a figure.
 Step 3: FIRST INBETWEENS

After the main poses were ready, I did a few inbetweens for them. These are important inbetweens because I am not only displaying the speed of the animation, but I am also showing a bit of dragging on her movement. If you take a closer look, her head and feet swing has a bit of dragging/overlapping applied to them. 

 Step 4: CLEAN UP (FIRST STAGE)

 I started the cleanup process a bit earlier on this animation. I knew I would have to apply more inbetweens later to make the whole animation smoother. But to save time I decided to start working clean already. The final inbetweens would be made as clean drawings/frames instead of rough/sketchy ones. I can do that with animations like these ones because these inbetween drawings tend to be very close to each other.
 

Step 4: COSTUME + PONYTAIL

Once the clean up for the main body was done, I decided to draw her Santa costume as well. My references from Step 1 were very helpful in here. Also, some Patreons commented that candy cane stockings would fit her greatly, they were right!
I also animated her Ponytail in this stage. Remember, I always have the main body action animated before doing anything that's like hair, tails, loose clothes, etc.
 

Step 5: MORE INBETWEENS!

Most of the difficult stuff was done. So I decided to inbetween all the poses and make the whole thing run smoother.
I also painted in greyscale most of her body because I wanted to get a feeling of the final product (And also because I start to get impatient)
Here it's a look at my timeline change when I go from animating in 2's, to inbetweening everything into 1's.

 

Step 6: FRINGES animation + Color

At this stage I decided to animate her fringes. I am still trying to understand how they work, because I haven't animated Moika that much. But I am starting to apply some rules to them:

• The biggest fringe does not move very much, and tries to keep it's shape at all times.
• The shorter fringe moves a lot, and can change its shape a lot depending on the speed.

I might change these rules in the future, but for this animation, I feel it works well.
I also applied some color... because I am getting more impatient for the final look.
 

Step 7: Final Hair + Gift bow + Blink

 The title is self-explanatory. I animated the rest of the hair. I also included a gift bow on her hair. And changed her panties to green. It was more Christmassy
The blink was animated in this part too. But just a blink wasn't enough... it needed:

Step 8: VARIATIONS

Yes, I always try to add variations to her expression. Maybe a blink first, then a change in her mouth expression... anything that makes her look less robotic or like an endless "loop". I feel that it's a small touch that makes the viewer appreciate the piece for a bit longer than just two seconds.
Oh, and before I finish:
THE BACKGROUND

This beautiful background was done by my good friend  @Mizu_wolf . He is the guy that I hire for most of my animations that include backgrounds. He managed to make this in about 3 hours. It was incredible!

So that's it, that how I made this short and cute Christmas animation of Moika.
I hope that you enjoyed this post! Thank you for reading it.