I recently read Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison. It was a really fun book; I recommend reading it if you’re into fairy tales. I actually had this book for a few years, but the first time I read it, the book seemed boring. But when I finally decided to read it again, it ended up being an exceptionally exciting book. Today I am going to draw a character from the book (Glyph) and animate her a little bit.
(This post won’t include any spoilers for the book unless you count knowing Glyph’s existence and her appearances a spoiler.)
Glyph is a fairy who has a broken wing (for reasons I won’t disclose; it’s not very important to the book and it’s revealed very early in the book, but I won’t tell anyway). Here is her description:
The fairies parted in front of her, revealing a red marble dais on which a fairy wearing a pale blue sheath rested in what appeared to be a large cupped hand made of soft red clay. Her hair was the color of a cloudless sky, and so was one of her wings. The other wing hung, dull gray and broken, down to the ground beside the hand. (Morrison 59)
So, here’s what we know:
- Pale blue sheath (which is a sort of dress)
- Sky blue hair
- One sky blue wing
- One dull gray wing that hangs to the ground
I began by sketching out Glyph. I originally had her in a dress, but I changed it to a tunic with pants because I thought that would be more interesting to look at.
On the left, I have my unedited sketch. I prefer sketching without erasing at all until I am finished. If I erase my previous lines whenever I want to fix them, it takes too long and ends up not looking as good. On I right, I have my edited sketch. After I’m satisfied with my sketch, I’ll erase all the excess lines and make the ones that I like darker and bolder.
I put my sketch into Illustrator and used the pen tool to outline all the shapes.
Then I added the face and changed the head shape. The old head shape was not right.
I added color after (keeping to the blue theme that Glyph’s description clearly showed) and then textures. I used a variety of pictures from Unsplash, but the rock photo on the wing is mine. To add the photos on, I created a clipping mask and lowered the opacity down to around ten to twenty percent. Every piece beside her facial features has a texture. Her skin even has a texture; I overlaid a papery photo, though you can’t see it very well.
I honestly don’t know what to think about her; the style is kind of weird. All the textures make a very childish art style, though I suppose that is fine.
I created a background for Glyph next. It looks quite odd, but I think Glyph looks really cool on top of it (I won’t reveal that just yet because I want it to be a surprise). Again, I used lots of textures. Though Glyph isn’t always on top of a red marble dais, the description mentioned her on one, so I used rocky textures and deep, earthy reds.
Then I made a stop motion set of scenes. Usually, I use the “Video Timeline” option in Photoshop, where you drag different objects around, but this time I decided to create separate frames for the “Frame Animation” option. It ends up being choppier, of course, but I think the choppiness will lend itself nicely to the style of Glyph.
I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how long I wanted the animation to last, but I settled on 0.3 seconds for each slide. Glyph moves around a little bit in each frame because of the way I pasted in my pieces into Photoshop, but I find it kind of cute.
I made her healthy wing flutter, her head tilt, and her smile move a little.
Before I close the post, here are all the images I used for the textures, minus the one I took myself: ocean for wing, hair for hair, textile for tunic, textile for belt, leather for pants, paper for skin, sand for background, rock for background, and painting for background.
I hope you like my iteration of Glyph! Have you ever read Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel? If so, what did you think of the book? Thank you for reading and happy animating!
PS: I spent a lot of time figuring out how to quote and cite the book, but I’m almost as happy about the citation as the animation haha.
Works Cited
Morrison, Megan (2015). Grounded: The Adventure of Rapunzel. New York, NY: Scholastic Inc..
Whimsical Watercolor 