I duped myself into trying another animation. Based on seeing some success on another project (which I've actually restarted because it would take too long) I decided that I would try and animation for the March drawing since these are designed to be longer projects anyway. First idea was way too frustrating so ended up going with this project. I actually had this one on my back burner for a couple years now and decided it was worth a shot if I approached it carefully. Basically complex changes tend to give programs like photoshop issues. So I had to approach a transformation with a bunch of very simple changes.


Everything but the tails is done by utilizing a bunch of mostly straight lines. They needed to be mostly straight so that when I scaled them up or down, the line thickness wouldn't change all that much. Because doing that for the tails would be way too time consuming for those I just redrew it every 1/6th of a second and just had that image scale up or down. All told there are 223 layers in this document. There is still some jankiness with some of the lines, mostly the result of to dealing with what should be on top of what. There is no fill. If there was that'd probably have to be done on a per frame basis, so would add another 145 frames. What i had been doing was strategically placing white blotches that would overwrite certain areas. but it's difficult to manage these correctly all the time without adding in too many more layers. That and I ran out of time. As this was march's drawing and march ended. Overall this took me probably around 30-40 hours all told, I wasn't keeping track. But this was done entirely in photoshop and nothing else.

Edit: I don't know why it doesn't seem to be animating correctly, at least it doesn't for me, but it does animate correctly on DeviantArt and on Patreon so if the animation isn't working for you, go view it over there