My new Spacehopper avatar. I’m so proud!

Creating avatars and finding forums to go on and show them off is fun. I was in a 70s frame of mind this morning so I created a space hopper animation in about twenty minutes and went looking for a forum that interested me to show it off in. After finding and rejecting forums for laser boats, (a type of sailing boat) and marijuana growing, both of no interest to me I found tamatalk a forum for people who like tamagotchi and in my nostalgic mood immediately joined. The avatar I had created turned out to be too big at 37 kb as the site has a limit of 20 kb so I slimmed it down by just reducing the coulurs from 245 to 16. Diddnt effect how the avatar looked at all but it was half the size at 17kb.

Loading up Avatars can be quite difficult

I went on a tutorial site that google trawled out of the internet for me and in about two minutes found out how to make elements in my animations transparent. And it is quite easy, just click on the layer or eben as my German version of image ready calls it and alter the Dekkraft. I’m not entirely sure what theat might be called in an English language version of the program.  I celebrated my new make things transparent knowledge by adding a fade to the credits on the end of the DinoBite animation …Wow watch those credits fade in and out…. 

and designing a nice little 128 by 128 pixel avatar for my profile on technorati. Here it is look at all those transparent layers in the bottle. I love it.

 

But heck Technorati refused to load it and wordpress turned it into a jpeg and froze it. I will persevere however because I am enjoying animation and I think it is something I can offer on my animation bay website http://animationbay.googlepages.com that people will find interesting and enjoyable.

Just shrink the image size by half and it looks better and loads up.

I am really starting to feel like a professional animator. There are still a few things I need to learn, for example, how do you change the transparency of a layer in image ready but the animations are becoming, in my opinion, better and better. I am going to offer my services on gumtree as an Avatar designer. I can draw colour and animate an avatar in one night if it isn’t too complex but I wonder if anyone would be prepared to pay for an avatar to be designed. I am still trying to upload the new avatars to deviant art but their system is still horribly slow and keeps spitting them out. I managed to upload a test avatar which was just a jpeg green square, perhaps that is some kind of progress.

Problems Uploading Avatars to deviantart

In the last couple of days I have created a very nice avatar for my girlfriend babsi to use on her photography gallery. The problem is that deviantart is having problems and avatars are not loading up. It’s very frustrating.

Life is very complex for an animator. Especially if like me your brain quickly moves from project to project. I am often in a situation where I thought an idea was great and I have set up all the elements to create the animation in photoshop but when I move the image to imageready I sometimes begin to feel less enthusiastic. And I still have hours of work to do. I guess I just have to push on through until the thing is finished. This is the animation I am working on at the moment. A monster wanders past a picnic in a  suburban garden and takes a bite out of the house in the background. It seemed like such a great idea at the time but now I’m not so sure. I hope the animation makes me change my mind. This is the first post that I am going to attempt to add adsense to as well. I want to do this full time and adsense seems like a great way to fund that lifestyle if I can hit on a few characters or ideas that will resonate with people and generate interest and traffic.

Hello world!

This is my first blog entry and should include an animated gif.

  

         

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