Sketch Fridays #83, pt. 2 – Frog (from Chrono Trigger) & Cyan Garamonde (from Final Fantasy VI). Click the image for a larger version.
While drawing Frog last week, it got me thinking of his archetype in many video role-playing games––especially Japanese role-playing games; the tragic, down-trodden hero of honor who, despite having their world crash around them, never sacrifices their poise or principles.
Cyan Garamonde by Final Fantasy series artist, Yoshitaka Amano.
This naturally got me thinking of my favorite video game character from my youth, Cyan Garamonde, a knight of the Doma kingdom. He’s a very proud and noble knight, dedicated to his king and kingdom above all else. However, everything changes when the water supply to Doma castle is poisoned during a siege and everyone except Cyan––including the king as well as Cyan’s wife and son––lay dead by the morning.
Left without a purpose, he becomes a character with some interesting and powerful character development through the rest of the game and it really made an impact on a 14 year old Dan Bethel.
So, with my nostalgia fully engaged, I added Cyan next to Frog and it seems like a natural pairing.
Chrono Trigger is a Japanese role-playing game that was released on the Super NES gaming system back in 1995. As an avid JRPG player at that time, I eagerly anticipated its release. I was already a big fan of the Final Fantasy series of games, and since the same company––Squaresoft (now Square Enix)––was releasing Chrono Trigger, I had unreasonably high expectations. The weird thing is that it easily surpassed those expectations.
Frog by Chrono Trigger artist, Akira Toriyama Source: Square Enix
The previous Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy VI, captured my imagination with its incredibly developed and nuanced characters, its complicated, thoughtful, and powerful story, and––at the time––breathtaking graphics. Chrono Trigger upped the ante by promising that––and time travel!––while also bringing in famous manga artist, Akira Toriyama (most famous for creating the Dragonball series), to design the characters.
A scene from Chrono Trigger on the Super NES. Source: Square Enix
While a bit more “cutesy” at times, Chrono Trigger matched the metric established by Final Fantasy VI and integrated things like more interesting combat systems and time travel mechanics.
But, for me, it’s the characters that stand out. Always drawn to the tragic, I became a big fan of the character Frog. He was a human knight who was transformed into an anthropomorphized frog after failing to save commander from dying at the hands of the villain and barely fought back when his fate was cast upon him. Come to think of it, he shares a lot of similarities with Cyan Garamonde, my favorite character from Final Fantasy VI.
All that being said, it’s sometimes also just fun to draw frogs doing silly things like holding a sword.
A long time ago, I dreamed of being an animator. I took classes and even got hired as an animation intern for a startup video game company (that never ended up releasing anything).
I learned quickly that hand-drawn animation is hard. It takes a lot of drawings to make something animate smoothly. To be a good animator, you had to be able to draw fast––a skill I lack even today. At the company I interned for, I was moved from animation to character design and storyboarding before the company shifted its focus entirely.
Despite never being a good animator, its philosophiesandprocesses created the foundation for not only my aesthetic but how I create characters and pages. While I call may call myself a comicker, in my head I am a failed animator.
I’ve talked a lot about using theartprogramProcreateontheiPad lately, and how I’m using it as a way to speed up some processes while also being a tool to jump-starting my creativity.
Procreate is a really impressive art program; I’m finding it more user-friendly and reliable than the Photoshop I use on my desktop computer at this point. It also has a built-in animation feature––not the playback function that I’ve used to make process videos of previous Sketch Fridays. After seeing impressive examples of animation people have posted online, I decided to try and figure out how it worked and, within about an hour and a half, I had a pretty good pencil test of Long John turning around:
The first bit I animated.
I created it in as traditional a manner as possible, drawing rough key frame poses––the main poses for the sequence––and then, based on how fast or slow I wanted him to move between each pose, I drew a reasonable amount of drawings between them (literally called “inbetweening“). All of these drawings were very rough––basic shapes and forms––drawn with the equivalent of a crayon or marker in Procreate. Once I was happy with the basic movement, I went back through and drew a more detailed drawing of each frame, doing my best to make sure essential elements and details were as consistent as possible between them.
Later that day––energized by the results––I added in some rough animation that had Long John run off the screen.
The first bit with rough running animation added to the end.
By the end of that rough running animation, I put the iPad down and thought, “Okay, I got that out of my system.” It was at least three hours of work for this very short and very flawed bit of animation. A few days later, I realized that I probably wouldn’t add any more to the animation, so I owed it to the sequence to go in and tighten up those rough frames.
While fun, this experiment confirmed that while I have the heart and head of an animator, I still don’t have the patience for it. This three-second bit contains over thirty drawings and a lot of critical thinking and happy accidents. If anything, it’s good drawing practice, a way to push myself when it comes to finding poses and angles to have ready for when I may have to draw something similar––for a single panel––in the comic. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll feel the itch again.
This nightmare is actually a composite of all 30+ frames of the above animation seen at once. Click image to see a larger version.
