Thanks for your answer, I'll have a look at it, i think i'll reduce the delay. It does help giving more punch to the stride to have that long frame when the character is in air, might be a bit too much tho.

i've decreased the delay on the "in air" frame, it's now 0,1 instead of 0,12 sec.
 
I started to sketch frames for the jump animation. I don't like it much tho, I think it should be the other leg landing on the ground, I'll probably remake it based on some references (i didn't use any)

Hi guys,
So this year I decided to build myself a solid portfolio with a lot of different things including animation, I've never been much of an animator and the generic runcycle animation is, I think, a good place to start. It's pretty hard tho.

I've tried several times using different approaches.
2 years ago I started working on a quite "technical approach"



It didn't quite work since I'm not a patient person and there are better ways to achieve this kind of works (like puppet animation).

This year I used a different approach, drawing directly each frame of a very simple character at a smaller resolution, with less frames. I felt it was much easier that way and errors are more forgiving.



I think it works, it was a bit faster before I convert it to gif format for some reason. I din't bother much about timing tho, might lack a bit of punch.

from that base, i tried to animated a bigger character. I simply doubled the resolution to draw over each frame.



Actually I think it sucks. The movement is wonky, messy. I think the cause of this, now that I look closer, is that she doesn't step up from the ground. There should be 1 frame or 2 where the character jumps off the ground and her feet doesn't touch the ground.

Yesterday I started a new one using the same process (took the small guy as a base) and I came to something way more satisfying.



Well, so I corrected most of the errors I found in the knight one and the movement is way more punchy and clear (also clean pixelling and bright colors does help readability). I played a bit around timing, it might not be 100% accurate with my original psd file but I think It looks alright.

There might be a few anatomical issues, like legs being shorter/longer on certain frames or weird poses but once animated it doesn't seem to matter much. Tell me if you spot anything obvious

I think I'm on the right track with that one, I will continue working on it. Maybe give him a proper head someday and play around other animations like idle, jump, shoot, attack, run with gun in hands, etc.

Any feedback / head design proposition is highly appreciated, thanks for reading 

I liked that chest animation you made. It's not realistic, and so what ? The style isn't realistic so I don't see why animation should be. Plus, at such small resolution, some exaggeration in movement helps readability.

I really like it, great job on that sprite. The only critique I can bring is that the shading on the legs doesn't seem to fit the very simplistic style of the sprite. Try some plain beige, or maybe 2 pixels under the dress as an underline, as you did under the hair.
Oh, and the lightened part of a cigarette gets lighter during inhale, not darker

I really like that sprite