🦊 Breathe
#87 — A breath of fresh air, a new podcast interview, and the rewards of routine.
Hey friends,
The heat wave in California has finally broken. I went out for a walk in the afternoon, and halfway through I stopped to take a deep breath of fresh air. I closed my eyes and basked in the simple joy of a cool breeze.
In the spirit of taking a breath, I animated our friendly neighborhood Quick Brown Fox:
I made this in an afternoon while hanging out at a coffee shop. Initially, I had intended to write. But when I sat at the table with my iced mocha, the urge to draw showed up. So I listened to its call and pulled out my iPad. When it comes to creativity, I try to respect whatever shows up. What appears unexpectedly often leads to more interesting places than what I have planned.
I realized it had been quite a while since I animated anything. I’ve been wanting to get back into making playful animated GIFs, but a big reason I’ve avoided them is that animation always takes a lot of effort. I compromised by giving myself the duration of my coffee session (a couple of hours) to start and finish the animation. I tried to keep things simple. Constraints are always a helpful tool to boost creativity. I wanted to draw the fox walking along and stopping to smell the flower, but all I had time for was his (comically powerful) sniff.
I began by opening Procreate, my tried-and-true drawing tool on the iPad. I tried to animate a complex scene, got overwhelmed, and gave up. I think because I draw intricate illustrations in Procreate, it’s tricky for me to get into the “do something quick” mindset with it. I tend to imagine animations in Procreate with the same level of complexity as the illustrations I do with it. Procreate looks simple, but behind its simple interface lies infinite possibilities. These days, when I want to do a quick sketch or doodle, I reach for my Blackwing pencil and sketchbook instead of my iPad.
In hopes of loosening my creative expectations, I re-opened an old favorite animation app, Looom. What I love most about the app is its simplicity. Every aspect of its features encourages you do think less and play more. There are only a few layers to work with, a single brush, and each layer just has a solid color. (Since the last time I used it, it has added more features, but I am intentionally staying a bit blind to them.)
Looom did the trick. I used its simple brush to draw each frame by hand, only doing rough outlines of the fox’s body. The ground, the sky, the flower and its stem took the remaining four layers.
There are so many things about the animation I’d love to improve, but given a time constraint and limited layers, I was allowed to stop. Tight constraints forced me to stop, breathe, and call it done.
I’m reminded of another animation I did back in QBF #21, which happens to be my all-time favorite:
This animation took many hours over multiple days to finish. The toughest part was getting the in-between scenes right. It’s inspired by Road Runner, and one of the funny things about cartoon animation is how strange/unrealistic a single frame needs to look in order to get the desired effect. (In one frame, his legs expand almost half the width of the scene.)
Afterward, I remember telling myself that I’d never do such a complex animation with Looom again. Its simplicity made some of the details quite arduous. I was sure I’d do all my future animations in Procreate. But looking back, I think Looom’s simplicity is what helped me keep going and actually finish the thing. Like the one I did today, there was much I wanted to improve. But the mode of the tool helped me let it go.
The effectiveness of tools is influenced by how we use them. When I look at an app, I can’t just focus on its feature-set. I have a history with each tool, and it affects how I use them.
With every tool, what I make with it today influences what I imagine with it tomorrow.
P.S. Today’s animation of the fox taking a breath was inspired by an old sketch I did of the fox and the flower:
You can find more of my illustrations and animations on my Instagram art account, @salmanscribbles.
Podcast: Out of the Clouds
Recently, I joined my friend Anne Muhlethaler for a fun, insightful and wide-ranging podcast interview. When Anne sent me her list of thoughtful and highly specific questions beforehand, I knew it’d be a great conversation, and it didn’t disappoint. We touched on topics ranging from my love of animation, working on my book, my experience with burnout, embracing a polymathic life, and much more.
You can listen to the interview, “On integration, self-reflection and the polymath playbook,” on Anne’s website, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
Rewards of Routine
I published a new essay expanding on some ideas I shared in the past on the power of routines. When I left my full-time job to pursue a life of creative independence, the thing I valued most was my freedom. I wanted to stay loose with my schedule and embrace serendipity.
But, to my surprise, I discovered that too much freedom is draining. Chaos is alluring, but routine is rewarding.
You can read the full essay on my blog.