Monthly Waifu -Jeanne Alter (Summer)- WIP (Patreon)

I normally don't post WIP unless the artwork was also 90%~100% finished and ready to be posted so if I gave you false ideas, I apologize in advance!

I don't think I was going to post this when I got up this morning and remembered the discussions I had with the new animator I'll be working with for this mini-project. Some of you might find it boring and pointless but if the current events happening around the world right now taught me anything, good communication and transparency is a welcome practice everywhere even on an NSFW artist's Patreon posts.

SO, I've been thinking of keeping the identity of the animator who will be doing a collab with me until the animation is completed but it's probably best I tell you now than later since there's more context to cover. The animator I'm working with, this time,  is Holden ( https://twitter.com/HoldenBremley )  Animator/Director at Studio LotuS  https://www.lotusanimation.net/ 

I've known and befriended Holden since late February this year (27th iirc). He was introduced to me by Fakkuza on my discord. Holden is the real deal, I think as far as skills go, working with Holden will be like the equivalent of walking around with a shiny legendary weapon on an MMO. 

Kind of like... imagine you're the only person in the galaxy with the Twin Warglaives of Holden. 

There's absolutely no doubt about Holden's experience and skills as an animator. I've confirmed this over the past 3 months I've known Holden. 

So you're probably asking yourself, why haven't I worked with Holden so far if his skills are as powerful as you say.

If you've played a lot of RPG and MMO games you might have run into a similar problem yourself. Let's say you obtained one of the most game-breaking legendary weapon in the game with a drop chance of 0.00001% First of all, congrats! (Now go buy yourself a lotto ticket)

But then you notice that you need to possess 99 STR, 69 DEX and 40 VIT to equip this legendary weapon. On top of that, you also find out that you need to be Revered with the Dark Brotherhood of Lewd Doujins faction AND you need to acquire complete 300/300 Mastery with Close Range Weapons.

Working with Holden is a bit like that, at least for me. It's almost the same as not meeting the Stat requirements for wielding the legendary Twin Warglaives of Holden because I'm a Mage with 99 INT 69 RES and 40 VIT.

As you know, most if not all of my illustrations are extreme quality render artworks. One of the things that came up with my 3-hour discussion with Holden yesterday was that fluid animation doesn't actually require a super high quality rendered illustration. On the contrary it works better if I were to lower the quality of my artworks and focus more on producing more variations/pose/expressions.

Using the same RPG example as above. It's a bit like drinking a re-stat potion to reset my stats to 0 and putting the points back into the stats I need in order to properly wield the Twin Warglaives of Holden. 

While it may sound simple enough, in practice, I feel it's quite difficult and far outside my comfort zone as it's on the complete opposite end of the spectrum of what I create normally.


The most glaring problem I see in animation collabs is the fact that unlike what I've been doing so far, I would need to draw more poses which means I would also need to do a lot more lineart than I'm accustomed to. If I ever gave you guys the impression I'm fast and efficient at lineart I'm sorry to shatter the illusion, it's actually one of the key things I struggle with and end up spending a lot of time on. As an illustrator I'm flawed, far from ideal perfection I seek to one day reach and I admit that this is one of the areas I need to invest real time into improving.

I also learned from our discussion that super high render art, while appreciated by fans, isn't necessarily when people want in good animation work. It has to feel more natural and fluid. To achieve that, I just need to drop my quality a notch and meet at a good compromise, the golden ratio of quality/quantity the magnum opus. Once I've found this style with my art style and turn it into the Holy Grail, I should then practice on making more dynamic poses/expressions using that style. Holden explained it nicely so I could understand what I've been subconsciously overlooking in the past.  

There is a lot more that went into this discussion with a lot of examples shown by Holden but I won't get into that. This became a long ranty post so I apologize if it was a bit too long. I'll try to finish it soon.

I'm grossly oversimplifying it here for the sake of sharing what I've learned and the news it brings. The good news is that I now have a clearer picture of what I'm lacking and what I need to do with this collab. The bad news is that it's a bit of uncharted territory for me so there will be a lot of things I need to re-learn and adapt to and time is not in my favor as I'm already lacking that severely. It's going to be a slow and rocky phase of learning for me, as such I wanted to take this chance to apologize that the animation may come out slower than anticipated. For anyone wondering, it's my first time ever making a storyboard so this is all new stuff for me. 

I'm half contemplating whether to even share this since it's far from polished and as rough as they come. Maybe I'll delete it? I don't know, but this is what I've sketched so far. I'm trying out something new and horribly outside my comfort zone.