Pen Tablet Problems

A lot can go wrong when you’re trying to get some work done with a graphic design tablet. I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet and it works wonderfully! Usually….yesterday I encountered an issue with it but I think today I found a solution. This post isn’t technically about art itself but more about some tools you use and how they can go wrong. Learn about your tools and you’re work flow will be more efficient.

Wacom offers many different types of tablets. Wacom Bamboo Fun is probably the least expensive at $99 but it’s worth every cent. =) I’ll go more into different tablets in a later post, but what I want to say about the Bamboo Fun, and many other tablets, is that’s it’s not touch sensitive.  I can’t tell you how many times I work on my laptop with my tablet next to me and my brother or sister come over and touch the tablet int he hopes to mess up whatever I’m doing! lol It’s pretty funny that they keep doing it even after I tell them it’s not touch sensitive. Today, I actually found out that it’s actually works with magnets that are in the pen and sensors. I don’t know much about the hardware of technology like this but I learned about the magnets after my pen suddenly stopped working with my tablet.

Yesterday, I got angry with my sister and in my anger, I slammed my pen down on my tablet in mid work. Good news is, my sister and I weren’t really fighting, just playing around, bad news? In the midst of playing, I actually manage to break apart the magnet that allows my pen to connect to my tablet. The eraser part worked perfectly but the nib part would not respond at all!

How horrible!?! To a graphic artist, this is pretty much the end of the world! (Well to a broke graphic artist anyway lol, the pens are about $30 a pop!) I was so upset that my pen wasn’t working and I felt guilty that I wasn’t able to get drawings done for a few people on Fiverr, I had to message them asking for more time. And I spent what felt like forever trying to find a cure for my poor little pen.

I was really hoping that it was a software malfunction, so I tried uninstalling and re-installing the tablet software, I checked for driver updates, and changing pen nibs but nothing worked! Many other people asked the same question I was but there wasn’t much of a solution. And then something happened. Like an angle came down to answer my heart’s desire of finding a solution. Someone commented on a question that was just like mine and referred readers to a blog. What was the solution you might ask? I had to open up my pen and fix the magnets!

That was a pretty scary thought? Opening up my pen? Blasphemy! What if I broke it? It’d never work again and I can’t get a new pen right now! I’ve opened up electronics before but this was my beloved pen! But I had to try.

It wasn’t that hard actually, and, more importantly, it worked!!! I was sooo happy! But my pen movements are still kinda jerky and I’m working on getting those kinks out. The reviews on that tutorial was phenomenal! A lot of people had this method work for them and so did I.

If you’re having trouble with your pen, check out this blog post and see if this will work for you. =)

Fixing a Wacom Pen

First Episode!

It’s finally done! The animation isn’t anything that great, I’m still learning and working on techniques but I really wanted to get the first episode done! So here it is! I hope you like it!

This week I”m going to publish another video. It’s not an animation though. I’ve been playing around with After Effects and I’ve got some really fun ideas! I shot the footage for my first video so now all I have to do is edit and add in some effects! I”m really excited and I can’t wait to upload it! hehe Until then, enjoy my first episode of my new animated vlog show and subscribe to my Youtube channel so you don’t miss out on anything! And don’t forget to check back soon!

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Toon Boom

So today I got really tired of Flash. I had the trail and every time I would try to open Flash, there was an error that I just didn’t know how to fix. It would say uninstall and re install the program. The good thing about this corrupted file was that the 30 day trial would start over. But the reinstalling process really got annoying and not only that, Flash would crash every 5 minuets! And if I didn’t save, I’d lose all my work or even if I did save, there was a high chance Flash would crash while I was trying to save and I’d lose my work anyway! Ugh! How irriating!

Now this isn’t a rant on how horrible Flash is because I think it’s actually a really good program but one that just doesn’t want to work properly on my computer. So I started looking around of other animation software. I came across one that I have heard about in the past called Toon Bom and I decided to look into it.

Toon Boom seems, to me, to be made more for cartoon work like shows and such and then Flash more for application animation type thing. Sorry if that’s pretty obvious to others but I knew about Flash and just thought “Well hey…I’m going to try to make a show using this program.” And that just didn’t work out for me. I”m going to try the trail for Toon Boom and even though I can’t buy this program, I think it’ll be fun to buy. Also, I heard there was a free program that was a lot like Toon Boom but just not as polished.

So what’s so great about Toon Boom? Well my interest was in Toon Boom Animate Pro and the thing I really liked about it and seemed interesting to me was the Automated Lip Sync Detection and the 3D Stage. The lip sync function helps with, of course, syncing audio to your animation. To me, syncing lips isn’t all that difficult but it doesn’t hurt to try to make things easier! haha  And the 3D stage allows you to work more with perspective and actually create a world inside the program – even if you want to create a 2D animation. Now this program is for 2D animation or at least I didn’t see anything for 3D animation.

You can check out the program by watching this video which does an overview of the program:

If you want to take a look at the program similar to this one, but free, you can find that here.

The Illusion of Animation

So lately I’ve been working a lot on the first episode of the animation show I’m trying to start. So far it’s just been a pretty simple stuff – it’s more like a motion comic. Motion comics are still images that sort of pan rather then actually move. Sometimes in motion comics, if someone walks, the image of the person just glides across the screen but other times the animators will actually have the legs move and take steps.

The first episode so far is more like a motion comic. There is a short part where you actually see my character talk and something I’ve discovered with setting up audio to the mouth to sync it up is that talking in cartoons is an illusion, just like most things in art. What I mean by that is when you draw a two point perspective, for example, it looks like the image is going back into space but it’s still just on a flat surface. The depth is just an illusion.

Lip syncing is also an illusion.When you watch a cartoon, the character don’t form everything they’re saying like people. There’s no need. All you really need are the major sounds that you hear. When I first started syncing in my animation, I drew out the process of the mouth forming “hi”. I drew the mouth closed, then a litte bit open, then more open, an so on until the mouth was at the max width when pronouncing the “h” in “hi”. I realized that this all was very unnecessary.  Instead, all you really need are the basic sounds. Here’s a mouth chart I used to help me figure out what how to draw the mouth.

(I just used this image as a reference – I feel that these images may over anunicate words and you may just want to watch yourself in a mirror or video tape yourself saying the lines you want your animation to say to see how you should draw the mouths. Like when I say the sound “K” my teeth don’t show like in the above image lol)

All you have to do for the illusion of talking to work is to set your audio with your animation then place the mouth where you hear the sounds. You have to listen carefully!  This mean where ever you hear the M sound, for example, you place the mouth you drew that imitates that sound.

So if you want your character to say “Hello, my name is Lauren” You would place the “E”, “L”, “O” (kind of like saying ” ‘ello” haha) “M”, “E”, “Y”, (the transition from “E” to “Y” will have to be pretty quick”) “N”,  ”A”, “M”, “I”, “S”, “L”, “A”, “R”, “N”. Not all the letters are necessary   – in my name, you have have to put the “U” or “E” mouths in because you won’t notice the mouth skipping them and they’ll probably cause a lag in your animation and you’ll lose sync with your audio most likely.

When I tried to add in all the sounds, it looked like the character was putting in more effort then needed to speak and it didn’t seem to flow. In my experience, less is more when it comes to lip syncing your animation. Now that I took out some mouth movements, the talking seems to flow much smoother and seems to match up better with the audio. Also, it’s important to remember that if in your audio, the person talking holds their “m” sound, for example, you should add in frames so that the “m’ image will last just as long. I also read that setting your audio a couple of frames after your animation will make it look more natural because our mouths make the movements of sounds before the sounds come out. I haven’t tested this theory yet personally but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re stuck with your animation. =)

Hope this post was informative and I hope that my animation will be done soon! I almost finished it the other day but then I realized something….it sucked! lol

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