What do I plan to work on in this module?
 

Improve my workflow

​To understand my creative process, it is important to first reflect on how my workflow has evolved throughout this course. Earlier in the course, I relied exclusively on a step-by-step animation process. I attempted to draw in a freer, more instinctive style, but I couldn't make it work at the time.

As my experiments later revealed, the issue was not a lack of ability — I simply needed to change my approach. Being autistic fundamentally shapes how I engage with creative work: animating without a precise understanding of where and how a character or object is moving felt disorienting and counterproductive, making it nearly impossible to work with any sense of freedom.
My brain requires clear structure and a defined sequence of actions before I can engage confidently with a task, which is precisely why step-by-step animation felt so natural to me for three years. However, I also recognise that rigidity has its limits. I strongly believe that pushing beyond my comfort zone and developing new skills will make me a stronger artist and a more adaptable professional. With that conviction, I set out to find a way to work with my neurodivergence rather than against it — to "trick" my brain into embracing creative freedom without sacrificing the structure it needs.
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Drawing on this self-knowledge, I developed a hybrid approach: I still created keyframes first, but with significantly more time between them. Crucially, I did not allow myself to fill in the in-between frames in advance — instead, I moved the character freeform from pose A to pose B, extending the timeline organically as needed. This gave me the structural anchor my brain required, while opening up genuine space for spontaneity in between. The result genuinely surprised me. This approach gave me the freedom to observe and respond to characters as I animated them, rather than simply executing a plan. Small, unplanned details began to emerge naturally — unsynchronised blinking to convey genuine surprise and momentary confusion, a subtle sway in the hips as the character turned, adding real weight to his movements. These were not decisions I had planned in advance; they arose from being present in the process. That sense of discovery is what makes animation feel alive, and finding a method that allows me to experience it has been one of the most meaningful breakthroughs of this course.

I intend to continue developing and refining this method. There is still much to explore — how it might adapt to different types of movement, more complex scenes, or entirely different animation styles. In the future, I want to experiment with combining this hybrid approach with other animation workflows to see how far it can be pushed. What matters most, however, is what this process has already proven: that with the right framework, I am capable of animating with spontaneity, creativity, and genuine artistic instinct. That might be a small thing, but it is the foundation I will build my future approach to animation on.​

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Program of Choice for This Semester.

For eight years, Photoshop was my sole creative tool — a deliberate choice made early in school, rooted in the knowledge that Adobe software dominates the professional art and animation industry. Alongside it, I invested in a Wacom graphics tablet, again the industry standard. The logic was simple: arrive at university already fluent in the tools most studios rely on, with years of experience that peers encountering them for the first time would not yet have.
 

During my studies, however, I noticed that many of my peers were working on iPads using Procreate — a program I had never encountered before and had not considered relevant to a professional pipeline.

My initial reaction was scepticism. Procreate seemed unlikely to find a place in professional animation pipelines, and I continued working within what I considered a more industry-aligned workflow — one anchored by ToonBoom Harmony, a program widely used in professional studios and one I had been building familiarity with. Over time, however, as my understanding of the industry matured and the technology around Procreate evolved, I decided to give it a genuine try.
 

It took a full six months to feel genuinely comfortable with Procreate’s interface and workflow. The results, however, were far beyond what I had expected — not just in the quality of work produced, but in what the process revealed about how I create. The clearest measure of this is not any single piece of artwork, but how fundamentally my approach to drawing has changed.

In Photoshop, I followed a rigid sequence: body sketch, clothing sketch, precise line art, and finally colouring and rendering. Every layer and folder was meticulously organised, allowing me to isolate and revise any element at any point. It was a system built entirely around control.

This process had been refined over the years — and as I eventually came to realise, it was holding me back far more than it was helping me.
 

When I transitioned to Procreate, I quickly discovered that many of my established workflows were simply not replicable within the app's more constrained feature set. Attempts to carry over my Photoshop process produced unsatisfying results, and for a time, I felt genuinely stuck. Rather than forcing a familiar system onto an unfamiliar tool, I had no choice but to rebuild my approach entirely.
The method I turned to was one I had never seriously attempted before: drawing from a spot — building a composition loosely and organically from a single starting point, rather than constructing it layer by layer from a predetermined structure. A close artist friend became my guide through this, and we spent hours drawing together over Discord, sharing our screens and watching each other's processes unfold in real time.
 

I began introducing looser, smoother lines into my sketching, blending them with my naturally angular style. The focus shifted away from precision and towards composition and form — learning to let the overall image breathe before committing to detail.

Colour came next — not carefully placed, but dabbed loosely over the sketch to mark the rough location of objects. This freed me to focus on palette relationships and contrast, using colour to direct attention to what mattered most within the composition. I then roughed in shadows and light direction before finally lifting the sketch to a higher layer and gradually introducing detail, distributing my attention across the whole painting rather than fixating on individual sections.
 

For a long time, the inability to simply erase and redo felt deeply uncomfortable — a direct challenge to the control I had always relied on. But gradually, something shifted. I began to see those imperfections not as failures, but as invitations: unexpected marks that could be developed into something more interesting than what I had originally planned.
 

This approach unlocked a level of creative freedom I had never experienced before. What is most striking in hindsight is that it was Procreate's limitations — not its features — that drove this growth. By removing the safety net I had relied on in Photoshop, the program forced me to develop a more intuitive, responsive way of working that I now apply almost constantly.
 

To this day, I use Procreate exclusively for my art.
 

When Procreate Dreams was released, I had high hopes. ToonBoom Harmony, while powerful, has a steep learning curve and a workflow that can feel rigid. Dreams seemed to promise something different — a more fluid, intuitive approach to animation that would extend naturally from the creative freedom I had already found in Procreate.
 

Those hopes were quickly tempered. At launch, Procreate Dreams had a significantly limited feature set compared to what I was used to in ToonBoom Harmony, and I found it genuinely frustrating. Even after a couple of years of updates, the program had not evolved as much as I had anticipated. Despite this — and, in some ways, because of it — I deliberately chose to use Dreams for this module. My experience with Procreate had already shown me that working within constraints can force growth that comfort never would.

Part of my reasoning was also deliberate professional preparation. Having worked with ToonBoom Harmony and knowing it reasonably well, choosing an entirely unfamiliar program was a way of simulating the experience of joining a studio and being handed tools I had never used before.
No graduate can be fully prepared for every pipeline they will encounter — but the ability to adapt quickly, rebuild a workflow under pressure, and remain functional in an unfamiliar environment is a skill in itself. This was my attempt to practise exactly that.
 

Working in Procreate Dreams was immediately challenging. Despite sharing a developer with Procreate, the internal structure, controls, and logic of Dreams felt entirely foreign — there was very little that carried over intuitively from my existing experience with Procreate.

The most significant constraints were the absence of transformation tools and the inability to isolate or reposition specific elements within a layer. In ToonBoom Harmony, these are foundational features — tools that allow animators to reuse, adjust, and reposition elements across frames with precision and speed. Without them, I worked more in the traditional hand-drawn animation style: redrawing almost every frame from scratch, with no shortcuts and no safety net.
 

I made a conscious choice to reframe this not as a problem, but as a constraint with creative potential. Working within these conditions gave me direct insight into how animation was produced before modern software transformed the craft. It demanded more from me as a draughtsman, sharpened my drawing consistency across frames, and ultimately made me more adaptable — better equipped to work across different tools and workflows.
 

The process was undeniably more labour-intensive than anything I had done in ToonBoom Harmony, and it demanded far more time and effort per second of animation.
But it was also among the most formative experiences of the course. Drawing every frame by hand, with no transformation tools and no ability to reuse movement, forced me to develop a level of draftsmanship and consistency I had never needed before.
Crucially, it was also within these constrained conditions that I began developing the hybrid animation method described in the previous section. That method — arguably the most significant creative breakthrough of this course — might never have emerged had I been working within the comfort of a more fully-featured program.