Wildlife Art – Animations

Little birds 1 – Three-cheeked tchagra
Digital

Little Birds 2 – Red-cheeked cordon bleu
Digital


Super cool bee-eater
Digital

Very simple animation practise based on a photo of Little bee-eaters. I wanted to see how hand-drawn motion blur looked.


Pacific white-sided dolphin swim cycle
Digital

An attempt at capturing the odd swimming pattern of dolphins. They don’t swim in the way you would instinctively ‘want’ to animate them; by following a sort of S-curve. In real life, however, most dolphins don’t do that. Instead they flick their tail and head up at the same time and bring them down at the same time as well. It’s a little strange and counter intuitive when you’re animating. Hence the wish to make a proper dolphin swim cycle, to work on exactly that and figure out how they swim.

I looked at several videos of different species swimming. Interestingly, the longer and thinner the species (e.g. spinners), the more their swimming pattern followed the S-curve. The smaller and stouter the species (e.g. common dolphins), the more they had an up-down swimming pattern. Since I wanted to focus on the latter motion, I decided on a Pacific white-sided dolphin for my animation. 


Bottlenose dolphin jump
Digital