jessetheanarchist

[jessetheanarchist]

Unimaginable Flax

Watercolor On Cotton Paper

2025, 41"x 30"

Blue Flax Flowers, Linum

Blue Apatite

[jessetheanarchist]

Farmer’s Market Pumpkins

Watercolor On Black Paper

2022, 14"x 10"

Heirloom Pumpkins

[jessetheanarchist]

Fancy Free

Watercolor On Black Cotton Paper

2025, 22"x 30"

Pink Hairy Flax, Linum

[jessetheanarchist]

thought i’d make a post showing/teaching my animation process for my most recent finished project!!! animation is really fun, it’s my absolute favorite form of art in the world and i love sharing how i approach it! without further ado, let’s get into it!

1. roughs

the goal here is to establish the big things in the animation. what are the main movements? what is the timing? what’s the general layout of the space the animation is occurring in? in my roughs, i like to use multiple colors to keep things separate and clear. you should also not be focusing on the details either!!! you are trying to get the most basic, fundamental forms down and moving before adding ANY detail. trust me, no artist on earth can crank out a finished animation without first taking this messy, less-than-pretty step.

2. tie downs

at this point, once the movement is down, you can start adding more details and clarifying things. in the tie down stage, you’re refining things— medium details, faces, character clothing, etc. you’re not trying to make it super clean. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT DO NOT TRY TO MAKE A CLEAN ANIMATION STRAIGHT OFF OF THE ROUGHS YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES THAT ARE INSANELY ANNOYING TO FIX THAT LATE IN THE PROCESS!!! worry about perfect cleanliness in the next step!

3. final lines/cleanup

NOW i start worrying about how clean i want it to be. this stage sucks i am not going to lie. it is tedious and slow and agonizing because every single line has to move in a way that makes sense. DO NOT JUST INK OVER THE TIE DOWNS. if you do that it will look terrible and wobbly. you have to make sure everything is on model, that forms and lines move in a way that makes sense, and that there is no jitter or “sticking” (happens when lines are drawn over lines from the previous frame, which makes the line appear to “stick” in place). additionally, you’ll notice the red lines— these are color separation lines that will not be visible in the final animation. i use these for sappha’s stripes and hair highlights, as well as her two-tone irises. while not visible here, there is also a separate animation layer for final shadows.

4. coloring

and then comes color!! I do my cleanup and coloring in clip studio paint. If you’ve done everything correctly and there’s no gaps between lines, CSP’s fill tool will allow you to pretty quickly and easily fill your cleaned up animation. for this animation, i also threw together a shitty messy background in about 20 minutes and then gaussian blurred it (im not good at painting lol).

5. compositing

once the coloring is done, i move into my fully legal copy of After Effects, and begin compositing. this entails taking the animation elements (cels, backgrounds, etc) and combining them, color grading them, and adding effects like blurs, gradients, and light bleed. your two most important effects in AE are fast box blur and gradient ramp— honestly, you don’t need much more than those two to make a well-composited animation (besides some color stuff like gamma/pedestal/gain). once that’s done, i export it as an MP4 and a PNG sequence, import the sequence into CSP or Toonsquid (my favorite animation app for the ipad), and then use that to export a gif of my final animation!

and that concludes the most basic rundown i can give without writing wayyy too much. if you’ve got any specific questions, please hit up my inbox, i love talking about art and animation with people interested in learning!

[jessetheanarchist]

Halcyone's Aquatic Incarnation

Watercolor On Black Paper

2024, 22"x 30"

Nymphaea, White Waterlilies

[jessetheanarchist]

Living For Summer

Watercolor on Black Cotton Paper

2024, 40"x 30"

Gold Sunflowers

[jessetheanarchist]

Blue Through

Watercolor On Artboard

2022, 12"x 16"

Blue Flax, Linum

Lapis lazuli and Sodalite

[jessetheanarchist]

The Most Poplar Tree In The Forest

Watercolor on Black Paper

2023, 22"x 30"

Aspen Trees

[jessetheanarchist]

Just Give Me the Flax

Watercolor On Wood Panel

2025, 11"x 14"

Prairie Flax, Yellow Linum

[jessetheanarchist]

Wistful Dreaming

Watercolor On Black Cotton Paper

2025, 9"x 12"

Wisteria, Glycine

[jessetheanarchist]

Wild For Autumn

Watercolor on Black Paper

2022, 22"x 30"

Gold Spider Mums

[jessetheanarchist]

it’s so fucked up that Our Troops™️ are being used for something so stupid like picking up trash. we should have the SLAVES do that so we can get our boys back to where they belong: raping female enlistees and hunting brown people for sport domestically and internationally. the average liberal brain is just so tuned into reality, isn’t it?

[jessetheanarchist]

Anti-nazi, anti-MAGA stickers seen in Mesa, Arizona

[jessetheanarchist]

walkable cities also means sittable cities send tweet

[jessetheanarchist]

Jolly Holiday

Watercolor On Wood Panel

2025, 11"x 14"

Wild Daisies

[jessetheanarchist]

Some of my personal vampiric highlights from this year lol. I LOVE LOOKING LIKE A CREATURE OF THE NIGHT🖤

[jessetheanarchist]

Warmer

Watercolor on Black Paper

2023, 22"x 30"

Apricot Blossoms