After a few long hours of tracing, I've made additional progress on the hawk. The last steps are to finish the red tail and add some feather outlines.
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Yesterday I drew the outline for this animation of a Red-Tailed Hawk in flight. It's 5 seconds (though I might make it longer) with 12 frames per second, so 60 drawings in total.
The next step is to add color. You can see the first frame has one option, but I will probably explore others before painting the other 59.
Hawks have white and brown feathers, but against a blue sky, their bodies look closer to dark green. I realized while making these that it will be important to have high contrast since birds are recognizable by their shadowy silhouette, even if their true color is lighter.
There's nothing like it! I wanted the beginning of this short video to feature a view from the George Washington Bridge. To make things more efficient (and keep to a simple style) I broke the image down into two layers: purple shadows and orange highlights.
The bridge is composed of a few more layers, and they will pass from right to left very quickly, to the point that those people might only be on screen for a frame or two.
The bridge pillars present an interesting challenge. In order to make them look realistic, their diagonal lines should slowly flip horizontally as they appear to move from one side to the other. I plan to resolve this in After Effects by connecting the two you see here to one null and then splitting the layers in the middle. That's probably too complicated to describe here, so I'll make another post on it later, but it's an interesting problem to face since it will likely come up again.
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