#Ive improved myself and im far from perfect or optimal but ive grown and im still evolving. Learning to accept myself and others love for

[mrfoox]

People's inpact on me are too great but here I am

[iridescentides]

rules: to show appreciation of gifmakers and how much they grow and what they do, post one of your first gifs and one of your most recent gifs, then tag some gifmakers to see how much they’ve grown and improved.

i was tagged by @smilecapsules! thank you so much sarah!

okay i couldnt decide on just two gifs to post, so this is really just gonna be a giant journey through all my gifmaking progress up to this point. for your sake, i have hid it under the read more.

if you want the tl;dr version, it can basically be summed up in that i went from this:

to this:

in just one year!

here is one of the first gifs i ever made:

back in 2016-2017 i used an app called gif toaster on my ipad to make super simple basic gifs from videos that i downloaded from youtube, with another ipad app that is not available anymore. this gif is important bc girl meets world (and specifically rilaya) is what made me want to gif in the first place! i was so inspired by all the beautiful, deep, creative edits made by the gmw fandom and wanted to make cool stuff of my own. i definitely had a phase where i edited the lyrics to girls like girls onto every wlw pairing i ever shipped.

next theres this one:

which is a sample from probably the worst gifset i have ever created. i dont delete anything ever, so if you go far enough back in my tag, its still there. i used to edit gifs frame by frame, with like 4 different apps/websites. that clover? i painstakingly added it in the same spot over and over to each individual frame!

and here’s the last pre-photoshop example i will include:

when i learned how to use overlays on lunapic and had a very prolific text post meme phase, which i mostly put to work on my andi mack sideblog. despite the absolutely awful quality, this gifset has more notes than most of the sets ive posted. descendants 2 was so fun to post about.

i pretty much took a year off from tumblr in 2018, stopped creating stuff for the most part, became disconnected from lots of my old online friends. BUT THEN a bitch came back better than ever and finally took the steps to start learning photoshop in the summer of 2019! here are some samples of things i made when i had just barely learned to use photoshop:

i started off with a gifset of my favorite band, bc ultimately my motiviation for making gifs always has and always will be to preserve the things i love the most. a few things to note here: i think i pretty much only added a brightness layer to this (bc i didnt know how to color yet), i hadnt heard of optimal dimensions so i didnt bother resizing this, and the image is vertically squished, which i didnt know how to fix at the time. i remember that it was a huge accomplishment for me to learn how to add text.

next we have this one:

where i started learning how to use brushes. i was very focused on the umbrella academy when i first started using photoshop, and i was determined to teach myself to add pretty colors to things!

but THIS is where i changed the game:

THIS is where it really started, folks! i had seen enough coloring tutorials to learn how to use selective color layers. and the first thing i did with them was oversaturate my cyans into oblivion. this was the best gif in the set, and everyone’s skin was super yellow toned in all the others.

from there i became more adventurous:

this sally gif marks a point in time where i started getting comfortable with my position as a gifmaker. i started to develop my coloring own style. but funnily enough, at this point, i still didnt know how to sharpen yet! i was still editing in frames instead of timeline, and i couldnt figure out what the people in tutorials were talking about when they mentioned timeline stuff.

in december i posted a hairspray gifset that i would define as the moment i learned and started mastering the vibrant coloring that i still do to this day:

after this i arrived at what i consider to be my current style in terms of coloring and creativity.

[warning, coming next is a massive dump of recent (since march) gifs that im very proud of]

so there you have it! i went from struggling and being very hard on myself for not having edits that i thought were as good as other people’s, to really finding my style and voice as a gifmaker. im so proud of how far ive come and everything im able to make and do now! if you are someone who is just starting out as a gifmaker, my advice to you is to not worry if what youre making isnt perfect! it takes a lot of work and practice to get to the place you wanna be, but definitely enjoy the journey, read lots of tutorials, and always try to keep learning!

im tagging: @ewangmcgregor​ @dancingwithourshandstied​ @colewald​ @asterflor​ @zu-ko​ @queenrojpag​ @stanzier​ @vangoghs​ @crayonstoperfume​ @tmhnks​ @diegohargreves​ @timeslord​ @gabriellabolton​