Looping Seaside Animation

Hi everyone!

I spent the last few days creating this animation for the About/Contact page on my website. I asked a pal of mine(David Walters) how to avoid collecting spam through my contact page and he suggested CAPTCHA, which is great, but it would have taken me at least a couple weeks to dope it out and get it running right. I never have that kind of time. So instead I decided that it would be really hard for bots to scan and scrape an email address from a moving image, and since I love to draw and animate I went to work.

Ryan's Boats from ryanloghry.

I used muted colors, and pencil texture (in the pier, and the gull on the piling) to help this piece blend with my illustration style. I should have some artsy-fartsy, fancy pants reason, but I don't. I just really like the look of washed out color, translucent, so you can see the pencil work through it.

I was kind of bummed that the tops of all the buildings on the pier got cropped, but in order to get them close enough to see them, they were too tall for the frame. So Here is a small version of that drawing.

I also sketched some gulls sitting on top of the buildings, but they would have been so small, they would have been confusing. I might go back and add a couple 3D ones in though, so I can move them a little. We'll see.

Here is my original pencil sketch, all I had at first was the idea about the boats. When I put that scene together it looked so sparse, I knew I needed to add some more elements. So I drew the pier, and then built the clouds and the seagulls in 3D. The gulls were fun to animate. I still might add something in the foreground on the right hand side, to give the scene more depth.

I hope you enjoyed this peak behind the scenes. I sure enjoyed creating it. --Ryan