For fb group: Daily Sketch Workout
Doing this involved an exploration into animals that fly and using procreate to do an animation.
My first thought about flying dinosaurs is they had wings of skin. So I found some videos of bats flying:
A little research showed me that dinosaur wings were more like bird wings. I found bird videos to study:
The first one was a profile where I started to see the rotation of the wing tip, but I was unable to capture it. So I tried another video of a bird in flight:
This was a three quarter view and it allowed me to see the way that birds 'grab' the air, almost like a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke. I was starting to see the movement of the various parts of the wing, but I was sure I was missing the subtleties. So I looked for slow motion studies of birds. I found a wonderful resource, Birds in Flight by Wildlife World. I also discovered that I could reduce the speed of the YouTube video by a factor of four. This allowed me to glimpse the bird grabbing the air and 'slapping it with its wingtips. I would love to see how the feathers participate in this 'slap'. I imagine them acting like cascading little paddles.
To make my flying dinosaur, I took some artistic license and assumed that those pterosaurs had feathers and just glued a pterosaur head on the goose. I used Procreate to make the animation and discovered that I had to add the background to each drawing. The bad aspect of this is it's tedious. The good thing about it is that you have complete control of the frame. After putting the background with each frame, i realized that I had to tone down the background. To make this tedious exercise less onerous, I played by varying the opacity. This serendipitously ended up creating an actively misty background.
Very cool! Nice animation. The pterosaurs weren't actually relatives of the dinosaur family but flying reptiles. So they may not have had feathers after all.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I discovered that pterosaurs weren't dinosaurs, but I was too invested in looking at the mechanics of birds flying.
DeleteRegarding feathers, I found an article, well it's more like a thesis, on the idea that birds evolved from pterosaurs. It includes a paragraph speculating that pterosaurs were covered with the precursors of feathers. Granted the writing was published by Dr Pterosaurs, but hey it was good enough for me : )
https://pterosaurnet.blogspot.com
Love your new work- Saw a Drink Responsibly ad on TV that is similar.(a swirling Martini w/olive)
ReplyDeleteThanks.
DeleteRegarding a swirling martini, the challenge for me was learning how to splice the animation to make a believable loop. It made me realize that animation has captured my attention because it requires solving visual puzzles.
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