Puppet Updates 3 - Line Work
Line It Up
Here’s a quick, but exciting update for the puppet update I’ve been talking about. At this point this is more of a “design” update, but I’m already 3 blogs in and it’s too late to change the name. Anywho, one of the more difficult things about this years update is that I find myself asking “What would I like to do, that I can’t do now, and I won’t want to take time to do later”. Then when I find an answer to that, I immediately add it to the backlog for this update.
A good example of this would be that I couldn’t really change the line style of the puppets. One of the secrets to making a design fresh is to change the line art. Sometimes you can make it “line less”, or give it a colored line. Another way is to change the textures of the lines. This is important because it’s a fun and relatively easy way to bring new life to old designs and to diversify the look of my content (I will talk about this in another blog sometime in the future). Eventually I would like to make traditional, standalone shorts and I would like my Toonboom puppets to be the basis of how those shorts are designed and produced but I don’t want them to use my usual style.
KSP V1 used for experimentation. Here you can see the default line art style is a solid line.
Up until now, I was able to kind of make a line less style (due to how the new puppets are designed, it’s not as easy to make line less art as it was for my previous series “Frame of Mind”), and a colored line style. The last option of changing the line texture was not possible to do, at least easily.
I had some spare time and messed around in Toonboom and the idea of seeing if it were possible to change the line art for all of the drawing layers came to mind. I did a bit of experimenting and eventually stumbled on a method for doing this exact thing!
After the initial line adjustments. I had forgotten the eyes are the same layer, but it made me think what would happen if I selected all of the drawing layers
So I goofed around a bit and discovered it’s possible to change the line art of all the drawings in an entire *layer* AND to do so for ALL LAYERS AT ONCE, as opposed to manually sifting through each drawing and changing the line art.
The experiment proved to be a success! It took Toonboom a couple of minutes to apply the effect, and I thought it would crash, but NOT TODAY SATAN!
That’s huge.
This opens up the possibility to have specialized puppets with unique styles in my library and eventually more diverse and distinctive styles for my shorts.
Outro
The overall progress on the puppets have been slower than I’m used to, but I do feel as if I am now able to address issues that have bothered me for years. Slowly, but surely I’m creating the tools I need to best deliver my shorts to my audience.
Ultimately, hope that this allows me to make more visually interesting and diverse shorts in the future. It’s worth a shot!
-Until next time-