I am an animator with a background in illustration. My artwork is primarily digital and celebrates the limitations of digital media.
Born in 2000, I began using computers just before the concept of “user interface” was being developed and standardized. For the first few years of my conscious life, the look of digital spaces still reflected their true nature: an assortment of pixels. Intentionally or not, the limits of the screen added texture to digital images that made the virtual world feel like an alternate dimension. In my artwork, I channel the excitement towards computer graphics of that era to create images that proudly display what they are at the elemental level.

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Lorraine and the Ladybugs is a cartoon about a neat girl who suddenly, inexplicably, begins spewing ladybugs from her mouth each time she opens it.
Lorraine is based on early versions of the program MS Paint, which severely limited how good a drawing can look. The inescapability of the horrible image quality seems like an obstacle at first, but MS Paint has become my favorite tool as an artist because of it. Being forced to let go of the need for a clean line allows me to draw more expressively.

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When I started storyboarding this project, I thought it would be hilarious to animate somebody throwing up a bunch of ladybugs. I just wanted to make a light-hearted, unserious cartoon with MS Paint-inspired visuals.

As I was working on it, I realized that I had accidentally expressed a lot of my feelings about living with ADHD. It's sometimes frustrating and isolating to feel like I just can't function like everybody else, but life with ADHD is also sometimes really funny! And eventually I learned how to live with it :) ⋆⭒˚.⋆​

It has been 2 months since my last update. Since then, I've completed the animation and soundscape of my film. Here is how I did it:

February 17-23

• BG 20 camera move
• BG 8-9 lineart
• BG 1 layout, color key, lineart, color
• rough animation: shots 6.3, 5.7
• sound effects from metadigger
• Foley recording

February 24-March 2

• rough animation: shots 5.6, 5.7, 5.1, 5.2, 6.2, 4.3
• background layouts, colorkeys: 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21

March 3-9

• refine animation: shots 1.3, 1.6, 3.1, 3.2
• transition from shot 5.3 to 5.4
• backgrounds layouts: 13, 14, 15, 16, 22
• backgrounds line art: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21

March 10-16

• animation: shot 1.4
• bugs rough animation: shots 4.3, 6.3, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 5.4, 5.7
• backgrounds line art: 15, 16, 22
• backgrounds colored: 13, 14

March 17-23​​

• backgrounds colored: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
• animation: shots 4.3, 1.5 bugs, 3.1 bugs
• lining most of Lorraine animation (like, really, all except 8 shots)

March 24-30

• bug animation: scene 1, 2, 3, 5 swarms​
• redoing BG 12, and 13-14 camera move
• updating SFX
• shading backgrounds: 6, 12, 17

March 31-April 6

• shading backgrounds: 7, 12, 13, 14
• coloring in Lorraine animations
• animating so many bugs: shots 1.2, 1.3, 1.5
• spending a full day each on animating the bugs in shots 3.1, 3.2, 4.3, 5.4, and 6.3

April 7-13

• adding the dots, heads, legs/wings on the bugs in shots 3.1, 3.2, and 5.4
• finishing coloring in Lorraine
• drawing title card and credits
• redoing BG 20 camera move
• re-coloring and shading final scene
• finalizing sound effects.

In all, I spent approximately 245 hours in the WACOM lab in EV5 this semester. Sometimes I also worked from home. Once I worked in FB 325.