(art posted on 1/8/2023)

Swingset for Two is my second animated scene, this time with the goal of conveying a sad, melancholic, and lonely feel. While this sounds like the kind of thing inspired by the tragic passing of a loved one or a bad breakup, I got the idea after a particularly long League of Legends loss streak (-300lp in 2 days). There were a lot of challenging parts to this one, so let’s analyze it.

Unlike the previous self critique posts, this is the first one without some major structural constraint that makes the entire project a pain to work on. It started with wanting to draw something with a sad and/or empty theme. Rain is a bit cliche in this case, but I figured it’d still be a strong choice.

When figuring out how to draw and animate rain, the first thing that came to mind was to look over the movie Weathering with You. Rain is an integral part of its story, so there were plenty of places to reference. The movie was also the main inspiration behind the parking lot being flooded. While I think I did a pretty good job, there are a lot of things with the rain that could’ve been better:

• Lack of reflections and lighting. A key element that made Weathering with You so pretty was how everything was reflected in the flooded ground. Even the splashes in the water cast shadows from the surface of the water to the ground. In fact, the main visual indicator for telling that something is wet is by reflections (for example, imagine a spill on the counter). I skipped out on it this time, but figuring out how to do lighting properly would be huge.
  
• Doesn’t shift the hue of submerged objects enough. If this were real heavy rainfall, the thick layer of water would not be anywhere near clear, as it would pick up lots of dirt, rocks, or other types of debris scattered across a parking lot. Even if it being clear was an artistic liberty (since dirt water isn’t very aesthetic), it would still shift the hue a bit towards blue.
  
• Splash circles should linger longer. If you look at how my rain is animated, each drop is given 7 frames. 2 for falling, 3 for the splash, and 2 for settling. Rain falling quickly makes sense, and the splash also happening quickly is good, but only having 2 frames for the circle left in the water after the splash is very strange. Since water is very fluid, it would make much more sense if the water took longer to fully settle.
  
• Poorly defined surface. An interesting result of the way I drew the flooded ground is that it’s very hard to tell where the surface of the water is. The only things that really define where the surface is are the rain splashes and the lower ends of the submerged objects. What’s interesting is that addressing any of the previous 3 problems would solve this one. Reflections, shadows, and longer splash circles would more clearly define the surface, and a hue shift would make the difference between in/out of water clearer.
  
• Water moves too much in the distance. The waviness of the water is cool, but I didn’t realize how inconsistent the movement was. If you look at the last horizontal line in the distance where the parking lot ends, you’ll notice that it moves way too much for how far away it is. There are a few lines like this, and it stems from poor pen control. While it really is just a skill issue, it could’ve been solved in the short term by drawing the line in segments instead of all at once or just retrying until I get it right.

With only rain decided, I wanted a main focus of the scene; something that I could build everything else around. The subject I chose was a person on a swing. I really have no idea how to draw people, let alone animate them, so this was a kinda bold choice. You can tell that I erased and redrew many parts of them several times, leading to the lines having weird seams, rough edges, double lines, and other messy things. The reason I didn’t clean it up is because I like the rough and imperfect look (it also hides a lot of the more glaring mistakes. more on those in a bit).

One of the major issues is the choppiness of it. To be more specific, there are 3 states that the person can be in. Forwards, Neutral, and Backwards. These refer to the position of the person’s head and torso as they swing. Notice how their head pushes in when swung forwards and vice versa where their body swings back. The problem is that these states change too suddenly, making the animation look choppy. There’s only 1 frame transitioning the states between eachother where it would’ve been much better at 3 or 4.

Contrary to what you might think, the short transitions were intentional, but I misread the movement as a kind of recoil. I figured that since the swing is coming to an almost abrupt stop as it reaches its apex, the body would react by pushing a bit past the stopping point. This isn’t wrong, in fact it’s mostly correct, but what I got wrong is how the body reacts to it. If you watch a video of somebody swinging, you’ll notice that the body actually moves in anticipation of the stop, making the change between states more gradual.

Something you also might notice is that I had no idea what I was doing perspective-wise. I actually didn’t think of perspective at all when drawing this, which becomes most noticeable in the right arm, swing, and right leg.

• For the right arm, it looks too far away to be attached to their body. It should be foreshortened more, with the part closest to the body being a lot bigger and the hand being about the same size as it is now.
  
• The swing might be the worst offender of perspective crimes. There isn’t any consistency to it, where sometimes just the side is visible, sometimes the full backside is visible, and even the underside of the swing can be seen on some frames (which should never happen). This is the result of countless redraws over multiple days without much care for perspective.
  
• For the right leg, I don’t actually know what’s wrong with it, but something is. My best guess would be that it needs to be smaller and look further away, but that’s only a guess. If anyone has any idea what’s wrong with it (or if it’s even wrong at all), let me know in the comments.

Now let’s talk about the rest of the scene. The first idea when thinking of where a swingset would be is obviously a playground. It would even play into the melancholic feel, since it’d represent something like clinging to the past or remembering better days. The reason I didn’t go with this is because I found it a little too normal (also because I didn’t want to draw wood chips but mostly the former). I ended up going with a parking lot because of how blatantly out of place a swingset would be there. There’s a lot of different ways you can interpret the setting, but my interpretation as I was drawing is that the person both blends in and is out of place in the city at the same time.

There are many flaws with how the environment is drawn. Here are the ones that I noticed:

• Messy Perspective. My approach to perspective was to completely eyeball it, and I didn’t even draw a specific vanishing point either. However, this wasn’t done without reason. Since I wanted to match the messy style of the person on the swing, I thought that having the perspective be inaccurate would tie the look together. Maybe this would be fine if I were more experienced, but right now it just looks wrong if you stare at it for long enough.
  
• Lack of Plant Knowledge. The bushes in the back do not look like bushes at all. This is because I don’t actually know what bushes look like. Obviously I could just look up reference photos, but what I mean is that I don’t have a very good understanding of bushes or plants in general. Basically I need to go outside.
  
• Color Picking. For the most part, I’d say my color picking is fine. Most things are of a similar hue and value, but this was done on purpose to make the person look like they’re blending in. There’s 2 issues with this. The first being that I still should’ve varied the values more in order to add depth, since it ended up looking very flat. The second is that I completely forgot about the similar color rule when I made the car, so both the color and the values (specifically in the windows and tires) stand out way too much. This is the exact same problem I had with the vending machine from last time.
  
• Lack of Detail. This is one of the lesser flaws since you could argue that the simplicity makes it work, but I’d personally like to see more detail in the background buildings and the cars (there is only 1 type of vehicle, which is a simple truck). Adding more detail could emphasize the vastness of the city, making the person on the swing seem more alone by comparison.

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That’s it for this self-critique. I wrote a lot this time, but I still don’t feel like my art critiques are cutting to the root of the problems (at least not as much as my video ones have). Either way, this is still my second one so they’ll likely get better as I keep making them. Thanks for reading!