Pocketlight is a streamer on Twitch, and a friend of mine. With the username “Pocketlight,” of course his theme centers around flashlights! He wanted a custom follower/donation alert for his stream of him lifting up a flashlight that had a heart in the beam of light.

I learned a lot making this animation. Playing with the shading during the frames when the light was on was surprisingly fun! I also haven’t had a lot of practice with animating, and the last time I made an animation of this type I made some mistakes with the workflow that really slowed me down (don’t shade before you animate, guys!), but I was able to use those mistakes to really speed up the process this time. My basic process this time was:

1. Draw the first frame of just him smiling. Solid colors only!
2. Create a wireframe/skeleton on top of that, and animate it in the general motion wanted.
3. Create the rough animation with solid colors.
4. Shade all the frames.

The process this time cut down on a lot of extra time and really cut down on the tedium. All in all, this was a fun project!