apd week and body progress

By Hattie Read

To start with, I really want to explore tattoos, body piercings and body modifications for this week's exercise. I started with some sketches of facial piercings, and in between lining some sketches of faces, I thought about how I might be able to connect multiple faces with piercings by drawing lines between them. This would connect the individual subjects at the vector points of their piercings using the Pen Tool

One thing I tried was animating frame-by-frame in Animate. I did this by exporting the illustration I needed as a lineart with the alpha channel generated, and had 2 copies in different colours. I layered these over eachother, and erased the top layer frame-by-frame to create the effect of the colour shift. This was a success, but I want to find a streamlined way to accomplish this effect in After Effects

My biggest struggle so far has been figuring out how to create a Mask Path with a Null Object Layer in After Effects, the same as I did for Play and Sound with the Particle Emitter. For some reason, even though I have a vectorised path of my illustration that I want to use as the mask path, the Mask Path in Null Object Layer doesn't recognise the vector path, but only the image bounding box. As a result, my current plan is not working and I will troubleshoot soon. So far, my efforts have all been unsuccessful, but not for lack of trying.

I did accidentally discover how to create a flickering neon light effect

With the vector illustration in After Effects, (with a 5pt stroke thickness and red stroke colour), I duplicated the layer

The original layer, I lowered the opacity to about half its value. Then, I used a Glow Effect on the other layer

Finally, I duplicated the Glowing layer several times, and trimmed/arranged the layers so that they would turn off and on at different times, creating the neon light effect. This has been a success, and I don't know yet if I will use it in my final object for this week, but I am satisfied with it.