Here's a bit of a glimpse into the past.
Before I started doing comics, I had a long stretch (five years or so) of self-guided animation study. What little skill I may have at character design comes from this, as well as my attempts at acting in the characters' expressions and postures.
I filled several sketchbooks, made a lot of flip books, and wound up with a couple of very short Quicktime movies that never actually managed to tell a story.
This boxing boy comes from the very end of that phase, just before I decided I wanted to be a painter again and spent a year doing abstracts. I was taking boxing lessons, and wanted to capture some of the movements. Here are a few poses from the model sheet I made for the little guy (at left, and at the bottom of this page).
And here is a pencil test, the only bit of animation I actually did for this character, though I had higher hopes at the time, and was encouraged by how fluid the motion was at 6 frames per second. I saw a new and more efficient working model laid out before me.
Then I got busy on other things, and decided I should really be painting. I mean, that's what serious artists do, right?
