@crab2selout:  Yes, your 2nd edit looks much better.  The first one looked too rubbery, too much springy action and deformation of parts that should be rigid.  Mechanical animations are supposed to look perfect; its not organic motion, so squash/stretch doesn't really apply.  That being said, I like how the motion in your edit "pops" better and is more linear instead of everything sliding into place at once like my first one.  Thanks!

EDIT: To be fair, you should keep your first one on here as well so others can see what the hell I'm talking about!

Sorry. I overwrote hte original file and since I didn't log into imageshack when I uploaded I can't see my history of image uploads. I agree there was some weird stuff happening there.

I think the animation is mostly the same, except for that little black thing at the back. It was really floppy in my original edit, although I don't know why I did that... Amazing the difference it can make getting rid of something like that.

I think, in a piece like this, dither is a poor choice. Dithering suggests a rough texture(most of hte time), while a frog like you've chosen has a very smooth, wet texture. To emphaise this wetness, I kept my middle values and shadows close in value and kept their lightness as far away from 100 as I could. Then I placed a few choice specular whites.

Here's a couple of ideas that would help improve the piece followed by an edit.

Hue-shift. In your original, you made each one of your shades by darkening the original colour. You don't want to do this because it's monotonous-looking and not at all how things tend to work in real life. The topic on light a huge one that I've barely got a grip on myself, but a general rule is that your lighted area should shift their hues towards yellow and your shadows towards purple/blue. The reason for this is in real life the highlights tend towards yellow because of the sun's light and purple because of reflected blue from the atmosphere.

Saturation. Almsot all your colours have 100% saturation. I'm not a big fan of this, because it can kind of make your eyes bleed, and you don't need to use taht kind of saturation to make something appear bright. It's especially bad on shadows because the saturation makes your shadows pop out which flattens your image.

One thing to keep in mind, just because something you're drawing is coloured black or white doesn't mean you should go and use a super bright white or black to represent that. Our eyes can be very tricky when discerning the colour of something. A sheet of paper on your desk might appear to be white, but take a picture with a camera and it the picture shows it as an almost neon orange, a result of the a incandescent light nearby. Our perception of the colour of something is strongly influenced by the colours around that something.

Angle of the source image. I did a google search and found your reference and I noticed that the head on hte source was pointed more towards our right. The lightsource on the reference was knda hard to figure out so I fudged things a little. I think I could've tried to get the shape of the head better in my edit. It looks like there's a depressed ridge area between the eyes and nose, but I didn't show this well. I'm not sure why I made the black part of hte eyes so big. It ended up like that by accident and I just liked it. Blame anime, I guess.

Hope this helps.



Also, do remember to post a link to any reference images in your future posts. It's helpful to us when critiquing to see the reference for comparison. More importantly, though, it's essential to credit your source(s). The last thing you want to do is accidentally violate rule 2

EDIT: As a further note, just in case that was put too bluntly, it's very obvious that this is all your own work and I don't mean to imply anything. It's pretty common thing on art boards to post your references in small part due to a tiny, tiny minority of people trying to pass off others work as their own, but mostly because it's helpful when critiquing to be working with the same tools as the artist.

...

Would those images with AA still be viewed at a multiple zoom?

What you're looking for are the 'Principles of animation.'
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENCA332&q=principles+of++animation&aq=f&aqi=g4g-c1g1g-c2g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

There are a few websites taht try to cover them, but I think the best reference for these are still to be found in books like the animators survival kit. It's written by a guy who worked for Disney. It's been named dropped by just about every respectable and excellent animator I've seen on this forum and plenty of other people recommend it as well.