The Blue Chair

Every day I nest in my blue chair in the living room. The chair is over a decade older than me, well-loved and a little sad looking, and very comfy. I have a habit of sitting down in it and wrapping myself in my heart-covered blanket, so that I look kind of like I’m wearing a Snuggie. It’s super easy to zone out and chill in the chair for a few hours. For this project, I wanted to explore how to turn a fairly static habit into an animated GIF. 

I started with a sketch, scanned it into Adobe Illustrator, and then used the pen tool to trace over my lines and create the base for my GIF. The heart pattern was easy to randomize, so I created and animated the pattern on the blanket. I added the tongue animation because I have a habit of sticking my tongue out sometimes like a cat. My Nintendo Switch has been a significant part of my life since last summer, and I had previously created a vector image of one, so I placed that on the side table. And finally, I added the window with the cloud in the background to add more interest to the wall.

Before this project, I had never made an illustrated, animated GIF. I chose to use Adobe Illustrator because I thought working with vector graphics would be easier than drawing in Adobe Photoshop. In some ways it was and in others it wasn't. To make the cloud loop, I needed to erase parts of the shape that escaped the window frame using the pathfinder tool. I also learned how many frames were necessary to make the animation smooth. I started off with too few frames and had to add and duplicate some to clean up the loop.