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If you were just starting as a child with this...

topic posted Tue, April 8, 2008 - 7:17 PM by 
I had a friend write to ask me for advice. A very talented young girl of 11 wants to go into animation. She's been taking illustration and I recommended that she keep up her pursuit of learning the basics before it moves into the digital world. We've all seen some horrible drawing rendered with realistic textures and lighting created by digital programs.

She'd like to get a head start into computer graphics as well. I mentioned Illustrator and described how some people take their sketches into Photoshop to enhance them. Obviously, Pshop is too expensive to buy for a child who could one day decide "POOF! I want to be a lawyer!"

Keeping in mind the end goal of animation, what would any of you suggest as inexpensive baby-steps programs in that direction? You may also send me packing with another suggestion of a more appropriate tribe for this question, but I'm not in those tribes because animation and digital illustration don't have that much interest to me personally right now.

Thanks.
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  • Re: If you were just starting as a child with this...

    Thu, April 10, 2008 - 9:49 PM
    I started my daughter at around that age with PaintShopPro, version 5 I think it was. It came with an animator tool for creating animated GIF files.

    They got bought out by Corel between version 9 and 10 and I stuck with 10 until I simply had to have the CMYK information photoshop provides that they didn't have. So far almost everything I've done in photoshop I could do in PSP10.

    I believe version 7 or 8 was the last version that came with the animator program, and you might be able to find someone with one of these older versions for sale. The animator by itself doesn't edit pictures, well very minimally, you pretty much need to create each cell in something else and then animate them.

    Someone told me about a public domain flash maker, but I'd have to search to find it.

    I'd also recommend your friend join Deviantart.com and look for the animators there, quite a few that age. But there's also a lot of nude or violent art on there too, so using the provided filters is probably a good idea. browse.deviantart.com/flash/animations/
    however, there is certainly a lot of traditional drawing work put up there. Though I don't understand this fixation with anime.

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  • Liz
    Liz
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    Re: If you were just starting as a child with this...

    Fri, April 11, 2008 - 7:37 PM
    If she really gets addicted (probably like we all are!), there are companies that sell the adobe educational edition products for much lower prices than we regular people have to pay. You must qualify for the prices with id's or whatever. Even though the lead in page reads 'educational' edition, the software is the whole real deal. One I know of is... www.discount-educational-software.net . You can buy the individual products or any of the suite packages. Of course, these are still more expensive than free programs like gimp, but it's still a great deal.
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    • Re: If you were just starting as a child with this...

      Sat, April 12, 2008 - 1:37 PM
      I wanted to thank everyone for the responses. I'm just going to pass these on to the friend of a friend that asked me about this.

      One question: Someone at work told me that Elements was pretty much just something to manipulate photos with and wouldn't quite do for someone generating art beyond using a photo. That's why I sort of skipped it. But I'd like to hear more just for the savvy. I'm a long-time Photoshop user and wouldn't need it.
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