One night a few weeks ago, I had a slight dilemma: what creative endeavor should I pursue? I have been playing guitar regularly, but often bemoaning the lack of drawing I’ve been doing in favor of my musical attempts. My solution was to do both!
I’ve often wanted to draw a girl with a guitar, but never came across the inspiration that I knew would make my attempt worthwhile. A guitar can’t just be a prop, it needs to be integral into the attitude of the character. It is also technically challenging to draw in proportion and correctness. On a similar note, I have wanted to record my guitar playing for some time. The idea of drawing a character playing my guitar could satisfy these challenges and instantly intrigued me. Six (long) hours later, I finally had an animation.
From an animation perspective, she is a bit too static. I had plans to have her tap her foot to the beat and blink her eyes as well as add color. Since it has been so long since I touched the piece, I am going to hold off on that. The guitar part is a simple 4 barre-chord progression making it easy to record (only three takes) and likewise easy to animate without creating an unmanageable amount of unique frames for finger positions. The entire animation is 25 frames for 20 seconds.
Overall, it was a fun little project and I’m happy with how it turned out. Using an animated character provides a good outlet for my guitar compositions. It would be fun in the future to animate more characters with various instruments, creating a whole band… With randomized camera paths, it could even take equalizer input and make a great iTunes visualizer!
Of course, There’s still a long way to go before my primitive attempts are at the point of something like this (from “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”):
I can’t even imagine how many people must have worked on a scene of this magnitude. I am guessing they used captured video as reference for accuracy. The first step is to learn to play guitar like that 
.