Emotiviews 10 - Interview with *Ridley126

The programs I use for emoting are Fireworks and Photoshop. Photoshop to make the emote shading, then I copy those shaded bodies into Fireworks where I draw the rest of the details and animate them.

Mmm... Probably a tie between , and , but I like a lot of them, its hard to choose!

Well I think unless you're doing a piece with a particular colour scheme, then I think you can use any colours you like really, the more variety the better! Personally, I've only worked with the standard 15 x 15 size emotes myself, but again I think emotes are just so flexible that you can make them work regardless of size. Shading I would say is the most important of the three, as it really helps bring an emoticon to life and simply look more visually appealing. 

A few real life friends have seen my emotes, but now one else really.

Well a lot of people in the community, such as Krissi001, SparklyDest, DryBones44 and many others have always been very supportive and friendly right from the beginning, and that really made the idea of being an Emoticonist even more appealing! Also, my best-friend wolfmaskman has always been very encouraging of the work I've done and helped convince me to keep it up!

For my strengths, I'd say that I'm getting pretty good at animation, and can often do anything I have in mind after a bit of trail and error. As for weaknesses, I'd say drawing for me in general is still quite a challenge, so I'm going to try and push myself to do more static work in future, with greater detail, which will hopefully help me improve dithering, shading and so on. Also I would like to branch out the different expressions I use on my emotes, as I feel I'm beginning to use the same ones a bit too much.

Not at all, I don't think I'm that mean to any of my emotes...

I really enjoy the process of animation, and love building one up from scratch, pausing every 20 or so frames to let it run through, seeing how its coming along, and checking that its all flowing nicely!

Often my animations are within the range of about 100 - 200 frames, so that normally takes a few hours, about 3 - 5, if I'm quick. Depending on how many unique pieces are in the animation though, like objects and background elements, that can take even longer as it takes me a while to decide whether or not I'm happy with a drawings I've done. Shorter looped animations and things like that can be done in minutes, but they can take several hours too if there is a lot going on in them. 

I think I'd tell them about how friendly and supportive the Emoticon Community is, and then tell them how fun it is to make emotes, get involved in Community projects and competitions, things like that.

I haven't personally come across anything negative in the Community, so I don't really have anything to change!

I think it's a bit of both, though leaning a little more towards the idea. How visually appealing the emote looks is going make it look better, and help it get attention, but I think the concept behind an emote will always be the most important factor.

I would choose Krissi001! I love her style of drawing and shading, and not just the emotes, the backgrounds and other elements too! I hope I can become as good as her someday!

It perhaps isn't in the same vain as traditional mediums of art, but I'd say as much care and passion goes into them as any other artistic work people do.

I think :thumb259318138: is the best work I've done thus far. It's easily the longest animation I've ever made, and I'm also quite happy with the way the extra things like the pencils, books, tables and chairs came out. I wasn't expecting to do a very good job on them, but they seem to work... just about. 

Apart from college work, nothing keeps me from making emotes, and I don't think I'll ever go on hiatus. It's much more fun here!

I enjoy how much interaction we all have, like taking part in projects and collaborations, and how quickly I have become friends with people here!

I tend not to post to specific groups, but I suppose the one a frequent most is EmoticonOpus.

I would love to see some Augmented Reality emoticons bouncing around my desk while I'm trying to working.