Self-promotion is always a bit of a tricky undertaking. No one is more critical about your designs than you. And I've always been loathe to create bios and "About Me" pages, but it is a necessary evil in the freelance illustration/design world. I decided to aim higher than in previous attempts and create something that I would actually enjoy viewing and possibly reusing.

The concept is pretty simple: an alien cyborg pretending and failing to be a human illustrator. I've never tried my hand at rotoscoping, but wanted to give it a shot - and then blend it with my current illustration style.

First, I needed to capture the reference imagery for the rotoscoping elements. Photoshop then has a nice function that imports videos to layers. These would become the background images to base my illustrations. Because the iPhone shoots at 30 fps, I thought I'd half that and make my illustration 15 fps. I had no idea how much of an ambiious

Then, it was a lot of layers and learning animation in Clip Studio Paint. As I said, this was an ambitious undertaking. A simple 2 second animation would have been a better starting point for learning this new process. But the final, repeating .gif ended up being a little over 30 seconds (and a 0.7 Gb file)!

Here are some stills from the animation. LOTS of work but it turned into something I'm happy to put on my "About" page (finally).

Here is the final video. Please enter full-screen to view!