Watercolor Newtons Cradle

Animating digitally is a great time-saver, but traditional animation has organic qualities that have always mesmerized me. I spent a few evenings over the holidays drawing and hand-painting this animation with pencil, watercolor, and a branch.

Frames: 28, looping

Framerate: 12fps

It was a nice change of pace working with my hands, and even though I am no watercolor artist, I’m happy with the result. The texture of the watercolor paper came through exactly as I hoped. I even worked in a ‘found object,’ using a branch above the Newton’s-Cradle-inspired spheres.

One detail I didn’t anticipate with hand-painted animation: you must let the paint dry periodically. Since there were 28 frames to create, I did a pass with one color at a time.

To get the timing, easing, and “stretch” dialed in, I prepped the rough animation first in After Effects, and used Dragonframe to overlay that animation with my camera’s live view of the paper. So effectively, I could ’trace’ the animation with my hands while watching the screen. This wasn’t ideal, but it worked. A projector would be a better tool for tracing.

Here’s the first test frame, showing some eraser marks, stray scribbles, and no color on the center spheres yet.

And here’s a frame from the finished animation. The slight sepia tint and vignette are from post-processing.

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