Pivot Cartoon

[Tancredo Dori]

While Unity allows the user to cut out the sheet automatically/based on parameters, my goal is to completely skip the step of having even to deal with the editor. All I need for that is the ability to read the pivot point from a file.

Thank you for reading this lengthy post! I hope I was able to make my goals clear and explain why I and others could benefit from those features. While my particular problems stem from the use of Unity (perhabs a clever solution just eludes me), I could see these points be valid in other game-making scenarios as well. Aseprite has become my go-to source for making animations and integrating them into games. I love how it packages all the relevant data in a .json file and I feel like this could be extended even more in the future.

My kids love pivot but unfortunately the boys seem to like creating fights with blood and guts so that put me off. However, I like what you have done here and may revisit the site and encourage them to have another look at it. Where do you actually put it in flickr to get it to keep animating? Meant to tell you that if your day in a sentence proposal is successful, let me know and if timezones suit and you would like me to appear briefly outlining the wonderful networking it has given me, let me know and we might skype videoconference if you are interested in a guest appearance.

This is a nice little animation. I have had my students to The Gimp to create animated fish in a aquarium. It takes patience, but it is fun. We saved them as GIFs. There are only so many Nings a person can join, but I found and joined the Animation for Education Ning the other day. It might be of interest to you too.
Ann

If you have read Justice Warriors, I would humbly ask if you could post a short review or rating on Amazon or Goodreads. These things really matters in the days or algorithms and recommendations, especially for creator-owned work where we are trying to make something new. Something that could, say, go on for many more volumes of dazzling dystopian mayhem and satire.

I hope your new year is off to good start. Mine has been pleasant and calm as winter finally picks up in Canada. We are experiencing late-onset snow this year, but it\u2019s piling up now as storms smack most of North America this week. My 2024 is beginning with the usual lifestyle recalibrations: hitting the gym more, cutting back on drinking, trying to get into better habits and routines as I design my work days around a lot of concentrated comic book writing. I\u2019m working on\u2026 four books at the moment. More on those in a minute.

The lede this month is that I\u2019ve drawn my first political cartoon since May of 2021. It is on the Israel/Gaza war and you can read it at this link. I figured I\u2019d dip my toes back in to the medium with a light topic. I edit the comics section at In These Times magazine every month and I\u2019ll throw in my own hat from time to time as ideas come to me.

I have a lot of longer projects in the works right now, but the first thing out from me this year will be a short comic with Daniel Irizarri for Project: Cryptid, an anthology of cryptid comics from Ahoy. Our story \u201CCabr\u00F3n\u201D deals with chupacabras and an entrepreneur obsessed with optimizing his body to live forever. He may be based on a real life cabr\u00F3n injecting himself with his son\u2019s blood.

As I mentioned above, I am writing multiple comic books right now. Some I will draw, some I will not, some are creator-owned, some are licensed characters\u2014a first for me. There are three scripts on deck that I move between with a fourth project to follow once the deck clears a bit. For that last project I have been doing a lot of preliminary drawing and character design the last few months.

None of these comics are set to be announced just yet, but I hope you\u2019ll like the new directions. All my current projects fit together in a certain way and you won\u2019t make it through this year without me sounding the trumpets for multiple book launches and hundreds of pages of comics to be published in the next year. When I mentioned on Facebook last week that I had my first political cartoon in a while coming out, someone responded, \u201CWe need post-apocalyptic mutants now more than ever!\u201D

However before we begin, just as having knowledge of drawing real heads helps your head drawing, having real knowledge of how real eyes work, will help your cartoon eye drawing. Especially the more naturalistic your cartoon characters are.

However, one of the trickiest things to do with them is make them seem like they're looking in specific directions. You can often get around this by turning the whole head to look in the desired direction.

Dot eyes can represent pretty much every part of the eyes: the whole eye, the irises or the just the pupils. When you want to make dot eyes look in a specific direction, it comes in handy to make them temporarily represent the iris or pupils.

It also helps with dot eyes if you're aware of the solidity of the shape of the head. It's best if you place the eyes in such a way that they emphasize the structure, direction and perspective of the head:

This is not necessarily the case if you separate the bubble eyes from each other. It's possible with separated bubble eyes to not have them seem like bubbles at all, but rather spherical disks inside the head. Which is fine, if that's what want.

Also remember that eyelids should have an origin point from which they pivot. The eyelids, ideally should wrap around and reinforce the roundness of the bubble eyes. UNLESS, you're trying to create a flat graphic look to your cartoons on purpose.

You should also try to avoid splitting the eye in half with your eyelids origins points. It's best to error favoring a lower origin for the lids. Why? Well, besides being good design, it's much more natural since our own eyes are not evenly split in half by our own eyelids and also favor a lower pivot point:

Below you'll find a turnaround of how a version of these set of eye may look like from different angles. This example is NOT the dogmatic, definitive way these eyes MUST be drawn. They're simply a version you can use that you can then modify to suit your whims.

Okay, here's where thing start getting a bit more naturalistic. Freddy Moore has had a big influence in the animation industry. His way of drawing eyes are almost industry standard IF you're going for a Disney or Looney Tunes type look to your cartoons.

Freddy Moore's eye style has become more naturalistic than it started out being. It's based far more on reality than the previous eye types. This means that knowing how to draw a realistic eye is more helpful when drawing this type of eye.

By the way, the examples shown here are by no means the definitive version of these eyes. They're just one sample of what can be done based on the framework I will talk about below. There's infinite design possibilities within the basic framework of this eye construction.

A. This type of eye simulates a real one much more. It's best to envision the whole eyeball when drawing it. This eyeball will be in the character's cartoon eye socket. In this case, the eye is so exaggerated that the ball would be enormous, so to save space I just made it an egg shape.

B. Just like with a real eye, the lids will have an origin. A pivot point for the eyelids to open and close from. It's good to imagine this pivot point on the other side of the ball. Notice it doesn't split the eye in half but favors the bottom of the eye. NOTE: I'm putting a line down to show where the pivot point is for this step but I don't draw the pivot point at this stage. I usually figure out a pivot point of the eye, after I've roughed out the eye lids.

C. When drawing the upper lid, make sure draw it wrapping around the eye ball. Sometimes, depending on the design, the top of the upper eye's lid are drawn thicker than the rest. This is meant to imply the thickness of the eyelid.

E. When the eyeball is erased all that's left is the exposed ball of the eye and the long shaped lids. I exaggerated the pivot area so you can see where they connect but more often than not, they are not so clearly marked. This area often looks like one continuous line.

G. Now that you have a finished eye, you can create any expression you want. You can even "break" the eye and make it do odd things in order to get the expression you want. This only works because the base shape of the eye you're messing around with has a solid structures to start with.

G. Here's a wide eyed look. I'm making sure to keep the upper lid lines thick, although I do it a bit with the lower lids too. I also added the wrinkle of skin above the eye as the eyelids compress to add to naturalism.

As you can see, familiarity with how a real eye works helps a lot when drawing his type of eye. This is the reason why Figure Drawing and learning to draw naturalistic is the industry standard foundation for getting into the animation industry. Naturalism pushes your cartooning to a whole new level.

The variations of eyes that can be produced from this basic structure is tremendous. Depending on the design and the style of characters, this type of eye can be very complicated or very simple. But in the end, their basic structure is the same.

Below you'll find a turnaround of how a version of these set of eye may look like from different angles. This example is NOT the dogmatic, definitive way these eyes MUST be drawn. They're simply a version you can use that you can then modify to suit your whims:

Bruce Timm male eyes are pretty much a modified version of the Freddy Moore eyes, only smaller on the head. There is one apparent difference that I noticed when looking at his male eyes, compared to Freddy Moore's, the pivot points of the lids tend to be higher in most of his eye designs. There is more eye showing below the pivot than above:

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