Following from that old thing, here is the sort of material people have been asking me for lately. You may be better off not reading the text!

mitz opportunity
Somewhere in 2015 I had to make a 80×80 pixel icon to accompany my comic strip’s link on some outdated web-comic list that nobody has looked at in years. To justify the icon’s existence and permit it to be used on almost any other website, I subsequently increased the icon to 100×100 pixels. Later I added a useless animation to it for approximately no reason. And later I made the ears wiggle in an insufferable manner. Who does that mitz think it is?
I drew the initial 6 frames in paint shop pro version 6 circa 1999, as separate images. It worked for this but felt inefficient.

boxed botUnfortunately it inspired wimpod, whose creature also turned into one of these.
I tried to make edits in photoshop after I had already assembled it, and that is a terrible program to edit gifs in because there is no way to look at the next frame and also activate the next frame for editing without moving the mouse and clicking on two different things every time. Rubbish!
I hear that the newest photoshop has a less stupid animation mode. However, it is also subscription only, which means you pay for it until you die and never really own your copy of the software, and adope can arbitrarily cut you off from it whenever and for whatever reason it feels like. It probably won’t but it could.


aki-breaky bugsome months later this came along, for AtlasImperial of another suspicious character, a moth-oid named Aki. This required independent moving parts so I tried using my recently installed Clip Studio, which has a powerful animation mode. Unfortunately, it has absolutely no animation specific keyboard shortcuts and will only paste as new layers, but cannot merge layers at ALL in animation mode because [no reason], and it is very stupid and inconvenient for maintaining crucial consistency; for example, though the feet move, there will often be a foot part that is supposed to be the same between multiple frames, but if I change it in one place, I cannot copy the changed part and update other frames with it, which means I must meticulously redraw the edit several times, which requires manually mouse clicking the previous frame to check and then manually mouse clicking back to where I was and then moving the cursor to the part I was drawing at since there is no single button command for switching the active frame. Also! Clip Stupido cannot save transparent gifs, even though it handles transparency and in fact refuses to NOT erase into transparent on single layer images that are supposed to have a solid background color. I assure you what I just said makes makes sense and is very annoying. I had to implement the transparency in photoshop, to all 48 frames, which was a total nightmare. And then I had to do that a few more times when I changed something else. There are 48 frames even though the most complex part, the moving foot, only has 8 frames, since other things move out of synch with it. 48 was the lowest number at which it matched up with the other movements.

I’ve Fallen and Icon Get Up
Nonethless I did these, for Trevor-Fox and also Tachisalopex. They are plainly quite busy so I will try not to say too much.

pip my ride

for Pippy Batstocking. I got the impression that this is just as much attention to the feet as was called for. I thought: I have this clip stupido figured out, I will do the next thing people ask for in that also. I made sure all the moving parts linked up. It was not as bad but it was still a bad idea!

infern verminFor roshiyu: a rat wizard person plays around with a little blue fireball FOREVER.
As soon as I learned the details of the task I realized I needed better software to be able to pull it off, and found aseprite shortly thereafter. I gave up on making this work as transparent. Aseprite handles it better, but eh website, furra finity, cuts of user avatars at the intuitive size of 55 kilobytes, and this would blatantly go over, since gifs are stupid. Thankfully I discovered that I like colors better anyway.

murid murderer
For mightyrat, also in aseprite. Showing a friendly creature named Twitch the Plague Rat, jumping and then toe-exhibiting, all while clutching a mysterious, presumably lethal beverage in such a way that suggests it may be tossed at somebody whose company is not desirable.

the fox in our stars
A fox person with magical powers meditates in a space-sort of location.
I have a lot to say about this one, and so I shan’t.

microsurgeonFor plaguerattus, a rat person that is rat-sized despite wearing clothing and having human characteristics, and consequently uses a ex-acto knife as a weapon, and also lives a life of such peril as to require a weapon, which apparently sees a great deal of usage. Or maybe this is from back when I had one and stored it in my bag without putting a cap on it, because I think they just didn’t MAKE caps for the things then, and I reached into the bag expecting to grab something else, and for months afterward had intense anxiety about reaching into ANY bag for ANY reason, even after an airline worker ordered me to dispose of it. Don’t tell anybody that my authentic staff-spinning reference material was Cheetara from Thundercats.


the good, the bad, and the bowtieA rather large pixel animation commission for Lizzy MajP Ampharos. A stupid yellow lizard thing which I must confess looked mildly less punchable than this before I got a hold of it. That thing is FAR prouder of itself than it has any right to be, even without the bowtie. And there could easily BE no bowtie since I forgot to draw it tied in place. Yet it lingers.
Why larger, I do not know. I was able to keep this under control a bit better than the non-animated large pixel drawings, but those were still twice the size of this one. I was not asked to include a background, and I should not have included one that inadvertently mimicked the shape and color of the ears. There are enough inexcusable ears on this page without me implying more of them.


rodentia brush yer hair?
for Akvo, in which a rat person endures a hairrowing ordeal. People do love their rat folk. I do not know why people want ME to draw their rat folk, but I like those better than bears or otters.
This suddenly looks under-animated to me; the pieces do not have an extra settling frame after the abrupt turns, but the amount of things TO animate here is higher than usual, and I tend to give more than I need to, so I must have felt haggard up if I did not.
The fur trim on the jacket and the pink hair especially were difficult to get looking right, and I had to paste them into Clip Stupido to work on, and then paste back into aseprite. Clippo’s animation mode is terrible but its drawing mode is great. Aseprite’s animation mode is great and its drawing is terrible. It does not use pressure sensitivity in tablet pens and is inexplicably slow and lagful even though I tend to work on pictures that are lower in color depth and one-fiftieth the resolution that I work on in other software. Is there a program that accommodates bitmap drawing AND animation well? Probably, and it most of a certainly does something else more important disgracefully for no reason, like it will have passwords instead of saving, or you can only use shades of beige or you have to guess a magical gnome’s name in order to access the full version.

deflotter
For Jazz Otter, of a rather exhausted air-filled creature. I doubt I could sleep so peacefully knowing that there were scissors in the world.
Twitter seemed to like this, which makes sense: nothing is happening, I did not draw it especially well nor especially enjoy doing do. I did like making the movements, though there were not many, and in fact I had to un-do some of the excessive movements that I added. But it is all good for something: several relatively influential people that I think are complete garbage but who my situation render inescapable, who would never ever directly acknowledge me in a coherent medium where they could tell that it was me who had made these things, have “like”d or retwutted some of them, so even though I still feel like a drimpy sub-human pudding being that will never reach a substantial audience with the work that is meaningful to me, I can at least feel like I “beat” some irritating forklogans in an incredibly petty and stupid way that is exactly what we both deserve.

Second-Hand Dork And finally this one last week-ish, for kingodin, of Jordan Deere, a one-eyed creature with the unfortunate addictive habit of brandishing bow ties. I get the impression Kingodin has seen some of my other icon animations.
I think it has more and better movement than most of the others, though it has no shading. Truthfully, getting the lines solid and smoothed out is most of the work. However, most of the recognition, apparently, is in the shading (as well as most of what I charge, like an idiot, like a usual). Or perhaps people object to cigar-smoking. Or perhaps they object to inaccurately-drawn cigar-smoking: I realized after I made this that real cigar smoke goes everywhere and takes its time leaving, quite the opposite. People should be GLAD I sent it off so fast. Although smoke can look elegant. Perhaps people wish the rest of it looked as elegant as the smoke!

So what have I learned through all this? That I can always learn nothing in a new way. My shoe is off, my foot is cold, I have a bird I like to hold. My hat is old, my teeth are gold, and now my story is all told.