Happy Fall, y’all! 🍁☀️🍂🌙🧡✨

Guess who’s been teaching herself (suuuuper basic, but I’ve never even glanced at it before, so basic is correct for me) animation this week? 😀✨ (Spoiler: it’s me.) I’m also definitely enjoying the onset of sweater weather.

On Tuesday, I had one of those neurodivergent wind-change moments, in which I felt the impulse and ability to do something new—but something SPECIFIC, not like getting energy and choosing how to spend it. This one was the sudden urge poke at my iPad and try to figure out how to learn one of the skills I need for a larger project I’m creating—some simple animation!

So I downloaded a free flipbook animation program called FlipaClip, watched their 2 minute tutorial (tutorials are normally really hard for me to follow these days, but I watched it several times and kept going back to it as I went,) and then started playing with it. Not really making anything coherent, just creating little things to teach myself how the process works:

The first thing I made was a trippy little loop of a mouth as it opens to reveal oddities. The next was a lil pastel goth doodle of a bunny welcoming in spooky season. Learning the program little by little with each new frame and each subsequent attempt.

[My participation in the existence of Wednesday was canceled due to medical and dental appointments.]

On Thursday, Autumn Equinox (still a holiday for me, even if I’m not around many of my pagan peeps in person to celebrate with right now,) I got up early, found I’d started my period, and took it as an excuse to spend the morning listening to music and doing seasonally appropriate witchy things out on the balcony.

When I came back in, I hopped on my iPad, intending to look up a program that would potentially help me with a project I want to create before starting my day, but instead, I ended up opening FlipaClip and not moving until it was dark outside. 😆 Oops?

The sum of the day’s teaching-myself-animation efforts: a 14 second looping story I saved as “Trainbow Guardian.” 💖 I think perhaps the easily-spooked giant is a Winter spirit, creeping in with a chill on the wind. Or maybe it’s somebody’s guardian angel? 🙃

So yeah! This is the start of me learning something completely new to me, and I know it’s simple and blocky and choppy as heck, just me messing around to learn the program, but still! Look at that! That’s 14 whole seconds of a looping visual story that I drew by hand on Day 2 of teaching myself a totally new program in a totally new medium with totally new tools! So I’m letting myself be pleased with my progress so far. ☺️