SHINee Animation Project: Painting Onew

I hope you are ready for a very long blog post, because I have a lot of pictures for this one.

So I've been enjoying making gifs lately, and I had the joyous idea that maybe I could take a gif I'd made, separate out each frame, paint them, and then animate the paintings. It could be a really cool experiment, right? So I got to work tracing 14 frames of a gif I'd made earlier of SHINee's Onew, using my laptop screen as a lightbox.

For the animation, I knew that having a precise image would be important so that it would run smoothly when finally animated. Tracing the image directly would hopefully help my achieve that.

When it came to painting the frames, that was when I could be looser in style. I wanted to get a nice painterly, watercolour look, so I let colours bleed and overlap a bit, and I let some of the paint pool for added texture.

My paint palette got very messy.

I also liked the incorporation of mistakes. I think when animating stuff it can be really nice to have mistakes or artefacts or, of course, animation smears, because all of these add some personality and realness to the animation. There is one blank frame in the original gif, so that was fun to replicate in paint.

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Here's how the final animation turned out:

I feel really pleased with it. It doesn't quite capture the expressions of the original gif as much as I'd like, but I achieved a style I like, and I think the colours and textures work well.

For comparison, here's the original gif I made (from this performance video):

I took a few frames off for the painted version (because I got tired of drawing them).

Here's all 14 frames individually:

And finally, here's a video I made about the process: